ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAM PA1GN PRODUCTION NOTE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Brittle Books Project, 2014.COPYRIGHT NOTIFICATION In Public Domain. Published prior to 1923. This digital copy was made from the printed version held by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was made in compliance with copyright law. Prepared for the Brittle Books Project, Main Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by Northern Micrographics Brookhaven Bindery La Crosse, Wisconsin 2014THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY ^\\\ REMOTE STORAGECANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURYBY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA. Being the Story of the Conquest of Canada. SECOND EDITION. Extra Crown 8vo, S/6 net. With Illustrations and Maps. Times.—" There are references to modern conditions in the America and Canada of to-day which Mr. Bradley handles with great delicacy. . . . The most casual reader will meet with a series of character-sketches in these pages which stand out with cameo-like distinctness." • Spectator.—" Mr. Bradley, who has an easy command of the materials he has mastered, writes as enthusiastic and almost as eloquent English as Macaulay." Athencvum.—"Mr. Bradley has an interesting and important subject, one for the discussion of which he is well fitted. . . . It is a good book and well worth a careful reading." Westminster Gazette.—" It is always a pleasure to hail the second edition of a good book. . . . Such I can but regard as the well-deserved honour of Mr. A. G. Bradley's spirited narrative." Daily Telegraph.—"Mr. Bradley is the master of a vigorous style. ... his judgments are well balanced and convincing ... his Book proves that he possesses all the qualities of an impartial historian." Daily News.—"As a truthful, intelligent, and picturesque historian, Mr. Bradley's volume deserves to be cordially recommended to all who desire to know how the British Empire has grown." ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO., Ltd., LONDON. WOLFE. WITH A PORTRAIT. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. "English Men of Action" Series. Also an edition in "The Prize Library." Illustrated. Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. Cloth elegant, gilt edges, 3s. 6d. Daily Telegraph.—"Mr. A. G. Bradley, the author of this admirable memoir, has "only done justice to its subject by executing a faithful and elaborate word- picture of a man whose disposition and conduct were not only faultless, but supremely noble." Morning Post.—" In entrusting this volume to Mr. Bradley the editors have done wisely, and their wisdom has been rewarded by a charming biography. . Mr. Bradley's style is especially engaging. His descriptions are graphic without being in the least extravagant. This book is in every sense worthy of its place in an admirable series." Times.—" . . . very well done. The narrative is easy, the facts have been mastered and well marshalled, and Mr. Bradley is excellent both in his biographical and his geographical details." Army and Navy Gazette.—"Mr. A. G. Bradley's 'Wolfe' will rank among the best volumes in the ' Men of Action' Series. . . . There could be no better literary portrait of him in brief form. It is at once careful and accurate and well balanced, filled with the evidence of sound judgment, and conveyed in a terse and clear literary style." Daily Chronicle.—" A military biography is apt to be full of wearisome detail and technicalities which bore the reader. This work is absolutely devoid of any such defect, and yet with all its beauty it is not sketchy, but very thorough, the history of Wolfe s times being well set forth, and withal style has not been sacrificed." * MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd., LONDON.KING STREET, TORONTO. [.Frontispiece.CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY By A. G. BRADLEY Author of " The Fight they seem to forget that this undeniable discomfort occurs at the beginning not at the end of a voyage, and that the normal man and woman thus afflicted has recovered sufficiently by the fourth or fifth day to count the ship's bells before each meal quite anxiously, and to do more than justice to the ship's good things when the welcome peal strikes. Indeed, for that matter, the chronic sufferers, of which there are two or three among the ladies on every ship, who never acquire any sea-legs to speak of, will find themselves in sheltered waters on the Canadian route in as brief a time as the New York liners reach their goal. And it may be further remarked that nearly everyone who has neither anxious friends nor urgent business awaiting him enjoys the last part at any rate of an Atlantic voyage prodigiously, and the type of traveller, who I am now in fancy addressing with, I hope, not undue warmth, is of the very sort who most enjoy it. I am not sure, too, that "tonnage" does not sometimes weigh upon the minds of the uninitiated and unduly impress them. In old days, when steamers of two thousand tons were on the Canadian list, and ships of five or six were running to New York, there was something in it. But in these times, when scarcely anything under five or six thousand tons and several steamersAMERICAN AND CANADIAN LINERS. of much greater size go up the St. Lawrence, the question of capacity can have no possible significance whatever for any passenger possessed of an elementary knowledge of such matters. With a considerable experience too, let me also say a word for the advantages that belong to travel on a ship carrying eighty saloon passengers over one carrying five hundred, and that makes a speed of thirteen to fifteen knots over one making twenty. The smaller number in the saloon makes an eminently sociable company, and in the longer voyage men and women of congenial tastes have much opportunity for drawing together, and often make acquaintances that are not only pleasant at the time but are continued afterwards. The majority of saloon passengers on a Canadian liner, too, are usually Canadians or English residents in Canada, and an Englishman going out, whether as a tourist or a settler, will very often indeed make friends that prove extremely helpful to him later on. Finally, when intending voyagers are carried away by stories of the phenomenal speed of the New York greyhounds, it will be well for them to remember that the faster a ship goes the colder and wetter it is on deck, and that even on a summer day in a calm sea a speed of twenty knots provides you with much the same sensations as would a seat on the roof of a railway carriage on several local lines that I could mention, if the selection were not invidious. Food and accommodation are other items about which the intending traveller, and very rightly, agitates his mind. This subject is one of undying interest to the professional ocean voyager, a class of whom the drummer1 forms the most con- spicuous and perhaps the most humorous type. Indeed, the culinary qualities of the respective ocean steamers fill his con- versation at sea just as his tours through Europe suggest a running comment on hotels, their tables and their tariffs, though let me say at once some of the most entertaining persons I have ever met on the Atlantic belong to this fraternity. I cannot say what elaborate efforts are made at this moment to tickle the palates of the passengers by the crack New York liners, but it will be enough to remark that the food served on 1 Commercial traveller. B 24 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the Canadian route both in quality and variety should satisfy any reasonable being. The individual who would cavil at it has in truth a miserable time before him on his travels in the further west, while the intending settler who proves thus exacting has beyond any doubt mistaken his vocation, as he will probably in due course discover. In the matter of state- room accommodation, the average Canadian liner at ten to fifteen guineas gives about the same value as the New York ships at eighteen to twenty-one. Finally, the trip to Montreal on a New York liner, calculating higher fare, expenses in New York, railway ticket, sleeping car and meals, will come to just about ten pounds more than the all-sea route by the St. Lawrence; and, after all, ten pounds to most travellers, and certainly to even the most substantial emigrants, is ten pounds. What either gain by the extra expenditure I have often and vainly tried to discover. What they lose besides the money is obvious enough to the initiated, and I hope by the time we get to Quebec it will be so to those of my readers who in this particular have no experience. The natural route for a pleasure trip would of course be out by Quebec and home by New York, for the Gotham of America can be approached from the landward side with nearly as much profit as from the sea. Now there are two entries to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, one to the north, the other to the south of Newfoundland. The former is not usually attempted till the summer is well advanced on account of the ice; but by the time the traveller with suffi- cient discrimination to make Canada the scene of his autumn holiday is ready to start, the northern or Belle Isle route is in regular use. And this I consider fortunate, for there is a fasci- nation about this shortest and most northerly course to Canada entirely its own. You are away beyond all the regular thorough- fares of traffic. Regarded as a merely common-place Atlantic passenger with a twelve or fifteen guinea berth, you may con- sider yourself fortunate above the ordinary run ; for you fringe upon the mysterious seas of the north that are furrowed by no vulgar keels carrying goods and passengers. You are on the outer edge of sea-going civilisation, and look beyond it over a watery waste traversed only by whalers and mariners whoFIRST GLIMPSE OF LAND. 5 belong to the world of adventure and romance. Your fancy is stirred, or should be, when at a certain point you know that a day's run due north would land you on the coast of Greenland, and you begin to think already, at least I always do, that you are getting a good deal of extra value for your money. You may see icebergs, to be sure, on the New York route, but when they drift into sight here, glittering in the sunshine, or shadowy and ghost-like in the twilight, or under the summer moon, you feel they are more truly in their element, and have only but lately broken away from the ice-fields of Labrador, whose gloomy cliffs will in a few hours begin to rise above the western sea. And when the most northerly and most desolate and loftiest- uplands of Newfoundland actually thrust their rugged crests like pale shadows above the horizon, it is a strangely different greeting that the New World gives you from that offered by the low, populous, common-place shores and much-sailed waters which guard the entrance to New York. Yet these awe-striking and inhospitable coasts were the first to make glad the heart of Sebastian Cabot when, four centuries ago, the City of Bristol sent out the adventurous Genoese with eighteen English sailors to discover the North America that we take count of now. The straits of Belle Isle, whose guardian island breaks the horizon simultaneously with the opposite heights of Newfoundland, and that even to us twentieth century travellers seems so strangely close to the Polar seas, was the path to Canada of all those sixteenth century heroes whose statues adorn the streets of Quebec and Montreal. There is almost irony in the notion that these savage regions, infinitely remote from any sign of human life worth mentioning, should be even yet the first out- posts to welcome such thousands of human beings to a land of plenty and prosperity. One looks down on to the deck of the steerage, where three or four hundred unkempt mortals, clad very likely in the strange garbs of South-Eastern Europe, docile, meek and dirty, lie stretched upon the boards, and wonders what they think of all this appalling desolation on which we are entering. Probably they are philosophers : possibly their untrained senses cannot realise that the hundred miles or so of coast line, now growing distinct, is no more land in the sense they understand6 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. it than so many miles of congealed ocean. There will be some slight stir among them, for even the most illiterate specimen of humanity can hardly look for the first time upon the shores of the country in which he expects to spend his life and lay his bones, without some show of interest, and a row of stolid faces lines the bulwarks, till a spouting whale in the foreground absorbs attention and awakes an interest such as no mere sublimity of land or sea could hope to. I have entered the straits of Belle Isle on a quiet autumn night, when the whole sky was scintillating in wondrous fashion with the glare and electricity of the Northern lights—a scene not readily to be forgotten. I have approached them also on a breathless summer afternoon, when the icebergs drifted over a sea of glass, and the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador laid bare their mile upon mile of imposing desolation with wonderful minuteness to the naked eye, and to the closer scrutiny of a powerful field-glass yielded up every detail of their barrenness, from pine-clad or barren mountain to sea-beaten cove. The entrance to the strait is guarded by the island from which it takes its name, a bare hump of grass-clad down above granite cliffs, achieving a height of some seven hundred feet and a length of eight or nine miles. A lighthouse perched high upon its southern point, with a small garden patch attached, to which the soil has I believe been carried from elsewhere, performs a vital office for the quite considerable fleet of steamers that now- adays bring grain and general freight from Canada by way of this northerly passage. It is nearly a thousand miles from here to Quebec, so the chances are against our passing any outward-bound ships in the straits, and this lighthouse settle- ment is as suggestive of complete isolation from all other things human as the ordinary traveller will be likely to see in the course of his life. Over against Belle Isle, some ten miles at the nearest point to the southward, the rugged peaks and lofty headlands around Cape Bauld rise majestically out of the sea. This is the furthest northern extremity of Newfoundland, the Ultima Thule of an island much larger than Ireland, the land of promise four centuries ago to the first western adventurers, and yet to this day in greaterBELLE ISLE. 7 part an unpeopled solitude. What we see here is the peninsula of the Petit Nord, over a hundred miles in length, and but for a few fish-drying stages and a lobster cannery or two, tucked away at the back of fiords, a complete wilderness of rock and forest, lake and stream, and barren mountains ranging to an altitude of about two thousand feet. This, with the neighbouring islet on which Cape Bauld is situated, was known in the primitive periods of discovery, and even marked upon the map, as the " Isle of Demons/' Its weirdness seemed to touch the fancy of even the fearless souls of the sixteenth century, who faced the terrors of these regions in boats of twenty or thirty tons. It is supposed that the infernal noises heard by the superstitious mariners was the grinding of the ice-floes and bergs in rough weather. One of the early French-Canadian Governors, when on his way home, is said to have found out his niece's guilty attachment to a young officer on board, and in his rage to have landed the pair at Belle Isle with a nurse and left them to their fate. After passing the island, the coast line of Labrador breaks more plainly into view upon our right, and forges away to the northward, cape beyond cape, to the remotest range of vision. It is a wonderful panorama of curving bays and rounded hills. A hundred miles of shore in this clear northern atmosphere seems to unfold to one's eager gaze the very inner secrets of its naked- ness, its barren valleys, its appalling sterility. But as the sun begins to droop towards those rugged barriers a tender, lustrous glow steals over the naked headlands and shaggy hills. The distant cliffs light up and shine all colours across the sea, which, answering to the same influence, reflects the blue of the summer sky: the struggling pine woods on the hills take on rich shades of green, suggestive at this distance of verdant pastures, while dark shadows hover over and conceal the naked valleys and barren ridges. Indeed, for an hour or two before the sun goes down you might almost delude yourself into the fancy that flocks and herds were browsing on succulent uplands, and that thriving villages nestled in the hollows. I will not bore the reader with statistics of Labrador. Its bounds stretch far away towards the North Pole, and its population is insignificant. There are neither roads nor communications. A8 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. stray lumber camp or a cluster of fishermen's huts alone break the solitude at long intervals. Missionaries, headed by the devoted and indefatigable Mr. Grenfell, visit its fiords, and fishing fleets occasionally muster in its natural harbours, even to the far extremities of its north-east coast, and the regions of the Esquimaux. The straits of Belle Isle are nearly forty miles in length and some ten to fifteen in width, but we steam for the most part within a mile or so of the southern shore, which soon loses all the majesty with which it greeted us, and sinks into long sweeps of lonely bog land by the level of the sea, spreading inland to the base of lofty ridges crowned with spruce or pine, and as sad a looking country as the light of day ever shone upon. The land is so close that we can see the bushes, and with a glass note the very texture of the coarse growth that covers the spongy barrens, and mark the little streams that from time to time come pouring into the sea. An occasional drying-shed standing alone by the shore reminds one that there are human beings somewhere even in this wide wilderness. Now and again, though at long intervals, two or three fishermen's huts bring the facts still more home to one, but the business of these solitary beings is solely on great waters. They have made no impression whatever on the hundred miles of shaggy wilderness that lies behind them, and there were sheds and shanties here before the Puritan fathers landed in Massachusetts Bay or Captain Smith founded Virginia. This is the famous French shore—famous, that is, by reason of the pother it has caused between nations in Europe and the sore it has been in the side of Newfoundland since 1762, when the Treaty of Paris left France that ill-defined footing in these latitudes which Chatham denounced with all the energy his failing health was capable of, but denounced in vain. We have nothing to do here with this most ancient colony of Great Britain. But the transient voyager, kept for so long at such close quarters with its inhospitable shores, may like to be reminded that, though neither Henry VII. and Cabot nor any of their successors could make anything of Newfoundland as a plantation, the fishing industry that made the island its headquarters became one of the greatest trading factors in the world's history, and, above all, in EnglishNEWFOUNDLAND FISHERIES. history. Volumes are written on the great Elizabethan Bucca- neers, and beyond a doubt they deserve their fame. At every festive gathering of Devonians the shades of Drake and Raleigh and Hawkins are invoked with pardonable local pride, but little is said of the Newfoundland fisheries which first gave these Devon- shire men their seamanship. In the reign of Henry VIII. English fishermen, from the West mostly, were swarming over to the new fishing grounds, where cod abounded in inexhaustible quantities. Spaniards, French and Portuguese followed close upon their heels in equal numbers, and long before the English settlement of America, many hundreds of vessels and thousands of men spent the whole open season upon these very seas that even now seem to us so lonely and remote. The story of Newfoundland, though not one of corn and cattle, or the taming of virgin soils, is at the same time a most entertaining one, and I am quite sure that virtually all of us have forgotten, if we ever knew, the conspicuous part its name once played in the life of Europe. The consumption of dried cod in Southern Europe was once enormous, and when the Catholic religion was universal there was a great demand even in the northern countries. The British ships that carried New- foundland fish to Southern Europe took goods to England in exchange, and made a second profit with the English merchants. In the seventeenth century and later, thousands of Devonshire men spent half of every year on the Newfoundland coast; their coming and going was a leading event on the West Country calendar, and even so they were far outnumbered by the foreign ships that flocked thither. These were for the most part Spanish and French, and, as a rule, all worked amicably together. There were local customs which all observed in normal times, and it is instructive to find that the " Fishing Admiral," a popularly-elected official, was obliged to be an Englishman, so frankly was the discovery of Cabot and its claim recognised. It is significant, too, of the pugnacity of the old-time Britisher that when the others now and again undertook to dispute this privilege with the minority who exercised it, the west country- men took off their coats and fought for it wi th shot and shell and cutlass, and invariably got their own way in the end. Over and over again, notable persons, philanthropists and speculators10 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. tried to force an agricultural colony on Newfoundland. Some of them began, all of them ended in failure. Lord Baltimore, among others, was here before he founded Maryland, building a great mansion whose ruins long survived in the peninsula of Avalon. Sir William Vaughan, of Golden Grove, with a party of Welshmen, had only then just abandoned a feeble attempt to create a second Vale of Towy on the same spot. All the fantastic schemes which seventeenth century colonisers in Eng- land drew up for transatlantic constitutions, with their Counts, Margraves, Barons, and clumsy feudal paraphernalia, were pro- pounded for Newfoundland, and some were actually tried upon the southern shore. Even if Nature had been kinder, the fishing interests, English and foreign, were strongly hostile to landed charters being acquired by men outside their ring. So practically all the development the island ever experienced was in connection with the fishing industry, and as the home and trading mart of those whose business was upon the sea. For forty persons in Ireland there is one in Newfoundland upon the same space, and most of even this scant population is con- centrated upon the southern portion of the island—the City of St. John's containing something like a quarter of the whole. The remainder is gathered in villages seated on the banks of the deep bays and winding fiords, with which the entire coast is indented. The long story of the colony, however, teems with stirring incident, as may well be understood from its singular develop- ment and outstanding situation, The long dynasty of the " Fishing Admirals/' rough, illiterate men, chosen from the rude democracy of the only element who for centuries counted for anything on the Newfoundland shore; the savage fights, not only in times of actual war, but often in times of peace, between the French and English, whose fishing fleets and settlers alone remained of all those who in former days had shared with them the treasures of the deep; and lastly, the humours of politics and politicians when the island emerged from the primitive despotism of the " Fishing Admirals." The ancient colony has had no share whatever in the vast flood of emigration that within the last century hasTHE FRENCH SHORE. ii poured into North America, and this in spite of the fact that it is very much the nearest as well as the oldest of our dependencies. Plaintive protests have appeared from time to time in the Press and elsewhere against this neglect. Stories of monster potatoes and respectable crops of oats and hay, true enough in themselves no doubt, are flung reproachfully at the heads of the emigrating classes and those who move them, but they have fallen on deaf ears. Thirty years ago, before the west was opened and after the best lands of Canada were occupied, was the only chance for such a country getting agricultural settlers. But nowadays, when the better but still cheap lands of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are passed by without notice, the most sanguine Newfoundlander must have given up the dream, and consoled himself with the prospects which his native island holds out to the miner, the lumberman, and the manufacturer. Newfoundland still remains outside the Dominion Federation, and its whole history has been distinct from that of Canada. It is itself such an old country, and so full of the individuality that an occupation of three centuries gives to people for better or worse, that one can understand its natural dislike to even the slight measure of effacement federation implies, apart from the more practical reasons, which I confess I have not studied. But union with Canada seems inevitable, and before very long the island will doubtless cease to occupy its somewhat unnatural position of political exclusion from the body politic of the Dominion. But as hour after hour the russet barrens and rocky coves of the Petit Nord slip by you, with their almost fascinating dreari- ness, it will be well to remember that there is another cause besides those of demand and supply, and a more effective one, retarding civilisation in these regions. For this is the French shore, and takes in all the north of the island, running round it for some three hundred miles. Perhaps it would not be such a wilderness, and would certainly be nothing like so bereft of human life, if it were not the victim of high politics, an ancient and perennial cause of dispute between France and England, and of soreness in the breast of the Newfoundlander. In the days of the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, the British people12 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. and Government, as we have already seen, regarded the New- foundland fishery as the great training ground for seamanship and naval science. Public opinion, however, was hostile to any permanent settlements on the island, though by that period several had grown up in the extreme south, and considered that the more often the fishermen had to cross the ocean, so much the better for the British Navy. These views were zealously fostered by the West Country squires and their representatives at Court, into whose pockets a continuous stream of wealth poured from the Newfoundland fisheries. So that when the French, who sent two or three hundred vessels there yearly, asked the right to land and dry their fish it seemed a small matter, particularly as liberty to share the fishing with the British had never been disputed. Still the freehold of the island was expressly reserved by repeated treaties to the British. The French were distinctly prohibited from erecting any other buildings upon the coast than drying sheds, and the limits of the shore over which the concession was given were confined to the northern portion of the island, while they retained, and unfortunately, as one cannot help thinking, still retain, the freehold of the small islands of Pierre and Miquelon away in the south. The treaties specified only cod, but the French have continued to dry every kind of fish upon the north shore. Furthermore, they have erected lobster canneries and salmon weirs in flagrant defiance of their licence, and, still worse, have interpreted this last as giving the British no rights whatever over the whole northern and western portion of their own island. The British are not per- mitted to erect any kind of building, nor yet to mine nor to build railroads over a territory included by some three to four hundred miles of coastline, and even the fishermen in these waters are driven off by the vigilant and zealous French officials. So that which is said by experts to be the best half of Newfoundland is kept a howling wilderness, in deference to the feelings of a power whose entire interests a few years ago were repre- sented here by seven fishing boats and two or three lobster canneries, and have not, I believe, materially increased. There are complications of course. George III., that nightmare ofIN THE GULF. 13 colonial Britain, gave airy assurances, on his own account, to the French, which were more or less endorsed by his Parliament, and have caused a world of trouble ever since. There surely must be something agog when, as recently happened, the Newfoundlanders were prohibited from building a railroad across their own country by the British Government, lest they should hurt the feelings of the French; and when mining capital is warned off by the same authority lest the rights of half a dozen foreign fishing smacks should be outraged! Turning again for a moment to the opposite coast of Labrador before it fades from sight, the whole eastern portion of the region belongs to Newfoundland, and is therefore not included in the Dominion of Canada. Every spring four or five thousand men, women and children from Newfoundland land on its desolate coasts for the cod-fishing. They suffer intense hard- ships and are the objects of some practical help from missions and much distant sympathy during the five or six months they remain there. The schooners that convey them thither have not space enough to carry much more than the people them- selves, who, without any comforts and not too many clothes, have to face the inclement seasons of that northern clime with no shelter but that of rude temporary shanties. There are few or no domestic animals to furnish either milk, butter, or meat. The women and children spend all the hours of light in the noisome occupation of cleaning and cutting up fish, always on the watch for the sudden storms that force a hasty removal of the products of their daily labour into a place of shelter, added to a constant suspense as to the safety of their sons and husbands on the sea. If night falls upon the desolate shores of Newfoundland, the morning sun, should it happen to be shining, will illuminate the no less dreary coast of Anticosti. For if the prospect of fine weather be good the captains on this route will take the shorter , but more difficult course that hugs the northern bounds of this somewhat notorious isle so close, and for several hours you may see a great deal of it upon very intimate terms. Anticosti is about a hundred and twenty miles long by thirty broad, and is almost an exact reproduction of what one has seen, of Newfoundland.14 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. In some parts low shores stretch inland in scrubby barrens and rise gradually to wooded ridges. In others the cliffs are high and the country covered with dense woods of pine and spruce. There are a few hundred souls sparsely scattered over some three hundred miles of coast line. At long intervals a group of fishermen's huts rather emphasise than break the appalling solitude. Anticosti, however, has a possible future. M. Menier, the French chocolate maker, millionaire and sportsman, bought the island at one fell swoop a few years ago, and caused quite a tremor among patriotic Canadians at the thought of a citizen of old France owning such a formidable slice of Canada. The enterprising Frenchman, however, though he turned off many of the squatters, had no designs upon the British Empire, nor did he intend it for a summer residence, mosquitoes being one of its chief products. Nor did he buy it for the purpose of hunting bears, as its name in the Indian language might suggest, nor yet of catching sea-trout, which are said to be so plentiful that they fight for your fly in their anxiety to show you sport. Anticosti is, I believe, to be commercially developed upon the lines followed in countries containing some good timber, abundant fish, and, doubtless, minerals. Indeed, some begin- ning has actually been made to this desirable and, let us hope, profitable work, though the coast is said to be almost destitute of harbours. In doubtful weather the line of traffic runs south of the island and hugs the feet of the great headlands of Gaspe and New Brunswick, which for a long distance rise sheer out of the water to a height of from one to two thousand feet, and for a time seem almost to overhang the vessel as it beats its way swiftly and silently through the dark deep water, where the white porpoises of the Gulf are sporting and little fishing boats with brown sails rock in the swell. This is the most interesting of the two routes, particularly if it should be autumn, when the scrub oaks, maples, and birch make brown and gold splashes among the green pine woods that cling to the face of these mountain walls, and here and there, where the giant slopes are furrowed deep, or cleft apart by the course of a stream, a snug village, with church and white-painted houses, nestles by the shore, or climbs a short way up the steep.IN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 15 They are far enough apart, these fishing villages, and appear quite isolated from one another by land, and from the world behind are absolutely sundered by great tracts of rocky moun- tainous upland, uninhabited and unprofitable in all things but spruce timber. It will be well, however, to remember that though an Atlantic steamer gives one most of the pleasures of a yachting trip with a minimum of motion, it nevertheless has for its main object a maximum of speed, and there is always the possibility of passing some of the most striking scenery in the dark hours. For those going straight through to the west without a chance of breaking their journey it is particularly unfortunate when the last hundred miles or so leading up to Quebec are traversed in the night. Under many conceivable circumstances a stay in Quebec would be a matter of difficulty. But the mere visitor to the country can scarcely be hampered by any such restrictions: while if he has come mainly with the view of seeing it, as is the case with a rapidly increasing number of English men and women, the old French capital will of course be one of the chief points of interest. As I shall have a good deal to say about this reach of the St. Lawrence in the next chapter, I will merely remark here that those whose only chance of seeing the approach to the city is from the deck of a liner will have nothing to complain of should the hour and the weather be propitious. For as the great river shrinks to a width of ten or fifteen miles, both shores draw near enough to plainly show their widely different characteristics ; those of the north consisting of an almost continuous wall of mountains from the gloomy portals which let out into the St. Lawrence the strong tides of the Saguenay, most awesome of rivers, well nigh to the basin of Quebec ; those of the south, green, fertile, low-lying, and sprinkled thick with the bright-coloured homesteads, villages, and small towns of the French-Canadian habitants, and backed by low ranges of gently swelling hills. Then comes the last twenty miles in the narrow channel between the mainland and that fair island of Orleans, which even a hundred and fifty years ago delighted the British invader with its mellow fertility and pleasant homesteads ; and, last of all, the final stretch which16 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. brings us with slight warning into the presence of the noble, high-perched city, that in many ways contrasts so strangely with the vast dominion of material progress stretching westward for three thousand miles behind it. Passengers to Montreal have, as a rule, the opportunity of landing for a few hours before the vessel continues its journey up the river. But even should this not be the case, the sight of Quebec as you first round the point of Orleans and steam slowly over the four miles of open water which spreads beneath its walls is worth the whole journey. Above the masts and wharves that shut out the lower town, sharp gabled houses and the towers and spires of churches, monasteries, and public buildings, in a style for the most part quite alien to modern American civilisa- tion, and deeply suggestive of another age and another land, rise tier above tier up the steep slopes of the mighty rock to the batteries of the citadel which so fittingly crown its summit. Ranges of lofty but retiring hills surround the noble harbour, where ships of war and great liners lie side by side amid a swarm of smaller craft; while a continuous chain of leafy villages encircles the shores, and the falls of Montmorency, leap- ing from their wooded heights upon the extreme right, make a fitting background to one of the most inspiring tableaux in the world. Those proceeding to Montreal will have some consolation should only a portion even of the fourteen hours or so occupied in ascending the river be in the daylight. The scenery is less striking than it is below and of a different class, while the river, except in its passage through Lake St Peter, is only a mile or so in width, though the banks are luxuriant and thickly studded with the characteristic features of French-Canadian peasant life. The Canadian custom-house, whether at Quebec or Montreal, contains few terrors for the stranger. The list of goods liable to duty looks formidable on paper, but common-sense is brought to bear in interpreting the law as regards passengers' luggage. The emigrant and the traveller are both welcome visitors to Canada, and it would be ludicrous to expect either to defer supplying themselves with clothes and personal necessities till they had reached a strange country where the conditions were lessQUEBEC FROM LEVIS. [To face p. 16.LANDING AT QUEBEC. favourable to them in this particular; so the new comer can take out virtually what he pleases, provided it is evidently for his own use. What vigilance is shown in this particular is reserved for returning Canadians, who might justly be suspected of laying in stores of clothing in London to the detriment of their own tradesmen in Canada. As a matter of fact, however, there is much sweet reasonableness all round at the Canadian customs, and the encounters between ladies ot fashion and the Government servants that sometimes enliven the landing stages at New York has no counterpart at Quebec or Montreal. On your return to Liverpool, however, one or more of your boxes will be probed to its uttermost depths for im- possible consignments of whisky and tobacco, both of which are dearer in Canada than they are in England ! Most visitors to Quebec go, as a matter of course, to the Chateau Frontenac, the magnificent hotel erected by the Canadian Pacific Railway on the. terrace below the citadel. This is naturally more expensive than the older hotels, of which the Clarendon, at from two to three dollars a day inclusive, is at present as good as any, and is in the pleasantest position. And perhaps this moment will not be premature for making certain remarks on Canadian hotels, which seem unavoidable in a book designed, in part at least, for readers who are likely to make much use of them. There are some people who always drive straight to the best hotel in a strange town and take the best rooms to be had, whatever the price asked. People to whom financial matters are of little or no consideration would be fools if they took any other course. Others, again, to whom money is a matter of moment, follow this course because they think upon the whole it is the most satisfactory, or occasionally because they are inexperienced and shirk the unknown. Now, outside the great cities of Canada the only thing to do is to proceed direct to the best hotel. It is almost sure not to be expensive, though it may not always be good. Numbers of people, however, though they are travelling, will be anxious to make their money go as far as possible, con- sistently with reasonable comfort. Virtually all the hotels in Canada are on the American system. You pay so much a day for three meals and a bed, and no reduction whatever is made C. C18 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. for absence from either, so long as you retain your room. The terms in nearly all hotels vary according to the situation of the room, and to many travellers this matters next to nothing. In the leading hotels of the great cities the tariff on this account varies from about three to five dollars a day ; in the less notable hotels of the cities and the best hotels in the country towns from two to three dollars. It is always well, therefore, before entering your name on the register, to mention this matter, and if you think the second or third floor will answer your purpose as well as the first to inquire into the respective prices. Furthermore, if you are likely to stay a week or two, or again if you are a party, nearly all hotels will " make a rate." But if a guest shows no interest in the matter, his landlord, who after all is human, will consider that money is of no object to him, and very naturally show no anxiety to cut down prices and save his customer's pocket to the detriment of his own. The American system and the inclusive charge is, generally speaking, an extremely convenient one. But there are some situations in which it is very much the reverse, as, for instance, when you expect to have many of your meals out, and even the most affluent person dislikes paying for these twice over. It seems reasonable that there should be one good hotel at least run on the European system in every considerable place. It is an old story, too, the absence of the friendly cab, that, for a shilling or two, will convey the wearied passenger from an English station with all his effects and with the utmost despatch to any portion of the city that may be his destination. There are conveyances to be had at Caneidian stations, but their prices are not, often, of a popular description, and of heavy baggage they will, as a rule, have none. In any case, this last must be consigned to express agents, and you will get it in due course, and pay twenty-five cents for each piece. This uncomfortable method and dispropor- tionate cost of carriage from train to destination is somewhat modified in the case of going direct to a hotel, as omnibuses ply in connection with them, though they do not take baggage. The hours allowed for meals by the hotels cover a liberal space, but the intending traveller had better make up his mind X;HOTELS. *9 that once the doors are closed nothing remains for him but to seek refreshment in some outside restaurant. It is no use " kicking " and calling for an immediate reform of the American hotel system. The latter has its advantages and its drawbacks ; but its customs are immutable, and to the famished traveller arriving at ten in the morning or nine at night, the drawbacks, if he is a foreigner, may seem for the moment to be in the ascendant. But as a matter of fact a little experience will teach him that such contretemps are provided against both by rail- roads and steamers, and that he will not very often have to wander about hunting up a restaurant at advanced hours in the evening.( 20 ) CHAPTER II. Quebec was actually founded by Champlain in the year 1608, and it is interesting to remember that this date approximately coincides with those of the settlement of Virginia by his famous contemporary John Smith, and the landing of the Pilgrim fathers in New England. It so fell out, therefore, that the three groups into which North American settlement may fairly be divided— those of Canada, and of the Northern and the Southern States of the Union respectively—were planted in the germ at about the same moment. Jacques Cartier, it is true, had been at Quebec some seventy years before Champlain permanently settled there; nor in this was there anything strange, for, as it was shown in the last chapter, the entrance to the Gulf of St Lawrence was fre- quented yearly by hundreds of craft of many nations. Cartier, however, must have been lacking in the colonising instinct which distinguished Smith and Champlain, for he replied to the civility of the natives, whose friendship was of such vital moment, by carrying off some of their leading men to France and exhibiting them as curiosities in proof of his adventures. When he returned to the neighbourhood of Quebec four years later his reception was the reverse of cordial, due no doubt to the justifiable suspicions ot his uncivilised hosts that others of their number might at any moment be spirited away to the land of the pale faces for exhibition purposes. Cartier, however, built a fort near Cap Rouge and remained there throughout the winter of 1541—42, whether from choice or from necessity does not appear. At any rate, he left as soon as the ice allowed him ; but off the Newfoundland coast, and apparently by accident, he ran against De Roberval, who had been commissioned by Francis I. to take command of this new country, and had his pockets full of authoritative documents. Cartier had, in fact, on this second occasion, come out as De Roberval's repre- sentative; but he had no mind to ascend the St. Lawrence, we mayIN OLD QUEBEC. [To face p. 20..CHAMPLAIN FOUNDER OF QUEBEC. 21 suppose, as his underling, or else he had made the neighbourhood of Quebec too hot for him, for he gave his superior the slip and sailed for France. Roberval, however, persevered, patched up Carder's fort, and, like the latter, remained a winter, either to test the climate or the temper of the natives or because he, too, had no choice. One experimentwas enough for the new Viceroy, who went back to France as fast as he could in the springy per- petrating on the way no doubt that grim practical joke on his erring niece in the Straits of Belle Isle that we have already referred to. Nothing more was attempted in the way of colonising New France till Champlain, as before narrated, planted an enduring settlement on the narrow tongue where the St. Charles meets the St. Lawrence at the foot of the rock of Quebec. Champlain was a practical man, like his great contemporary, who at this very time was struggling with fever, Indians, and broken-down gentle- men on the banks of the James. He made one initial move, how- ever, which most historians condemn, though it is easy enough to criticise men's actions from the calm standpoint of modern times with the experience of the two or three succeeding centuries to assist their judgment. For he either would not, or could not, rightly estimate the power of the Iroquois, that unrivalled com- bination of warriors who later on, as the five nations, held the balance of power in the great struggle between England and France. Instead of observing a neutrality, which might after all have been difficult, he allied himself with the Algonquins and Hurons of Canada against their formidable foes, and exposed the struggling French colony to a hundred years of desperate conflict with these wily and merciless wolves. For three decades, however, a short interval excepted, when an English force seized Quebec to return it almost immediately by treaty, Champlain nursed the infant colony wisely and well. It was actually the outcome of fur trading stations previously planted far down the river by merchants from Rouen and St. Malo, and was, in fact, a combined forward movement of these adventurers on a firmer basis and under the aegis of the king, who at that time was Francis I. And on this account Huguenots came as well as Catholics, each bringing their own ministers, who wrangled so22 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. incessantly with one another on matters of ecclesiastical priority that this mixed establishment was abolished and Catholic priests only permitted on the ships. Champlain was in all respects a fine fellow, and rightly regarded as the founder of Canada. He left the fur trade to the traders and set himself with energy to extend and make good the footing of his country in North America. An indefatigable explorer, he traversed the wilder- ness, which is now Ontario, and even penetrated the far shores of Lake Superior. Under his inspiration, men from Quebec crossed the Red River of the North, and actually gazed upon the icy summits of the Rocky Mountains nearly a thousand miles beyond. Not only did Champlain do his duty in the New World, but he worked hard in the Old to interest influential people in the vast possibilities of New France. In 1641, prompted, it is said, by supernatural visions, a group of devotees and soldiers from France passed up the St. Lawrence and planted the cross and the fleur-de-lys at what is now Montreal. Henceforth Quebec had the benefit of a western outpost which broke the first force of Iroquois attacks. But the growth of the colony, composed mainly of missionaries and fur traders, was so slow that by 1661, when the charter of the North-West Trading Company was withdrawn and the colony formally taken over by the Crown, there were not three thousand souls in the whole of New France. Now, however, the young King Louis XIV., with all the ardour that marked his earlier days, became possessed of an immense enthusiasm for Canada, and was ably served in the work by three famous men, his minister Colbert, his Viceroy Count Frontenac, and his Intendant in the colony, Monsieur Talon. The regiment of Carignan, which had especially distinguished itself in European wars, was rewarded by grants of land in Canada, and nearly all the men and most of the officers embraced the opportunity and took ship for Quebec and were settled around it. The country was laid out on feudal lines in seigneuries, each several leagues in extent, with the narrow frontage on the river and the long strip behind, and the sub- divisions upon the same lines, which still gives such a distinct character to French-Canadian landscape. The officers became the seigneurs and their soldiers the tenants. Civilian emigrationA MARRIAGE MARKET. 2 3 was distributed in like fashion, and a noblesse created, partly from men of good birth and partly from those suitable for the purpose, or who had sufficient interest or means to acquire the some- what dubious privilege. Wives had now to be found, as Indian alliances would have been fatal to the dream of a New France. The young king proved equal to the occasion, and indeed took immense personal interest in the business. Batches of respect- able girls were shipped out in charge of nuns, and Quebec became the scene of regular matrimonial markets, conducted under the auspices of the Church and in the most decorous manner. The supply was so ample that there were wives enough to go round, and the bachelor who did not come forward soon found himself a mark for the royal displeasure, and persistent refusal was punished with vexatious exactions, while as a reward to the candidates for domesticity, bounties were bestowed for the production of large families. Religious orders full of enthusiasm settled in Quebec, and pious men and women in France founded institutions that at this moment are wealthy and powerful. Laval founded the college that to-day, as a great university owning miles of territory, bears his name. He was the first Bishop of Quebec and, like his successors, shared the govern- ment of the city and colony with the royal Governor and the Intendant. No little jealousy and discord reigned in the councils of the trio, but when once they had agreed upon a course nobody else disputed it for a moment But in spite of the king's ardour the colony did not prosper. Feudal customs and a landlord and tenant system do not bear transportation to a new country where land is cheap and plentiful, and, above all, when it is clothed with virgin forest that the tenant has first to clear at the cost of great personal labour. The seigneurial rents proved microscopic for the most part. The ragged, penniless noblesse in their small rude manor-houses fared no better than the peasantry. Small wonder then that they preferred the free life of the woods, and hunting, exploration, and illicit fur trading, for this last was now a Crown monopoly. If they were bad farmers, they made splendid partisan leaders when the Indians or the English had to be faced. Brave, reckless and hardy, intimately familiar with every art of forest warfare, they24 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. had the absolute confidence of their followers, who knew enough themselves to fully appreciate their leaders' qualities. The absence, from lack of stimulus, of any material ambitions, the hardy self-denying life of the peasant settlers, their habit of looking to the Government and the Church for direction and assistance, and lastly their familiarity with Indian warfare, made them fine material for such soldiering as was to be done in the North American woods. And the time was coming when a stronger foe than even the Iroquois would try their mettle. The English and Dutch had been supplying the enemies of Quebec with arms now this long time, and towards the close of the century the New England frontiers were being pushed nearer to Canada than its rulers liked, when Count Frontenac, that famous and fiery soldier, arrived as Governor. He decided to give the English a series of lessons that would teach them that all territory adjacent to Canada was perilous for habi- tation. With this in view he started " la petite guerre " raiding parties, led by the numerous partisans so ready to hand and so willing to go, and settlement after settlement on the New England frontiers went down in fire and slaughter. New England reta- liated by sending Sir William Phips up the St. Lawrence with a fleet and three thousand men and laying siege to Quebec. There was some smart fighting on the shore, and the attempt of these raw New England soldiers failed, but it frightened the Quebec people for a time very badly indeed, and they erected the church of " Le Bon Secours," still standing in the lower town, in token of gratitude for their deliverance. The fur trade as a royal monopoly flourished greatly, but agriculture made slow progress. Still the settlements along the river banks from Quebec up to Montreal, and downwards for a hundred miles on the south shore, were almost continuous. The descendants of the regiment of Carignan and the " king's girls," as they were called, were a sturdy lot, of Norman and Breton stock for the most part, and though great numbers vanished into the woods to its free life, enough stuck to the land to gradually clear a continuous front along the river bank, and to give the country some promise of achieving the thriving appearance it wears to-day.FRENCH RULE. 25 Quebec grew slowly without any rival to its supremacy. Montreal as a frontier town took much of the fur trade, but as the seat of an autocratic Government, the home of numerous strong religious corporations, and the head of navigation as then understood, this old foundation of Champlain, with its superb site, still remained the key of Canada, the symbol of French power in the New World, till it fell before the arms of England in 1759. The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed plenty of stirring incident at Quebec, though we must not linger over it here. Governors and churchmen came and went from old France, but unlike the men who were sent to look after the welfare of Church and State in the British colonies, they were often dis- tinguished, nearly always zealous ones. The Church expanded in power and influence. The militia and regulars of the colony became mobile and efficient. Raiding expeditions went out from Quebec year after year to accomplish feats of endurance that make beautiful stories for fireside reading at this day. But whether at the cost of the Hudson Bay Company's outposts to the north, or the struggling New England settler on the south, these ventures only laid up a stock of hatred towards the French of Quebec, which finally cost them their country and did the colony itself no good. The latter, indeed, was relatively a failure, save as a serviceable fighting machine, a good base for fur trading, and an extremely picturesque plantation. When in 1755 the war broke out which sealed the fate of Canada, its population was only about sixty thousand, as the result of a century and a half of French rule. And even this small com- munity, with illimitable and productive land, assisted by an abundance of fish and game, was frequently compelled to accept aid from France to avert positive starvation. All the virtues and vices flourished in Old Quebec except those favourable to progressive colonisation. The rural peasantry, who should have been the main instruments of progress, were neither freemen nor freeholders. They were by no means slaves, and were probably happy and lighthearted, but they were in leading- strings, the ends of which were held by men who had the art rather of empire-dreaming, than of empire-making. Corruption, too, had by that time honeycombed all the fountains of justice26 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. and honour in the Quebec Government. The large sums of money which even prior to the final war were sent out by the king for the use of the colony were perverted to private and sometimes infamous uses. The Church was at least pure, if arbitrary and arrogant, and the viceroys themselves were, perhaps, not implicated, but Canadian officialdom, from the Intendant downwards, was rotten to the core. Most conspicuous and flagrant an example of this was the last Intendant, Bigot, who flourished and battened on his country's misery through its long struggle for existence in the seven years' war. The doings of Bigot and his gang of confederates, who lived in riotous pro- fusion while the whole colony were on half rations, is a notable episode in Canadian history. The infamies of the Ring who for so long and in defiance of Church, viceroy and people openly plundered Canada in her years of need, are still deeply graven on the stones of Old Quebec. Quebec society in the days of the French rigime has been described by many writers who themselves saw it as visitors, and by others who were of it, in a faithful and entertaining manner. The historian Parkman has treated it in exhaustive and masterly fashion. Of late it has been growing in favour with novelists, but the novelists of this school, like those who write such charming stories about old Virginia, do not always take much account of contemporary evidence, and very often seem to lack the sense of historical pro- portion and perspective. The French-Canadian noble of the novelist attires himself in gorgeous apparel, and dines off golden plate in marble halls, whereas sober history and the people who were acquainted with him personally tell us that simplicity, even to physical distress at times, was the inevitable result of the restricted and unfruitful source from which his slender revenues were derived. They were, in fact, a wholly artificial creation, grafted on a soil not unresponsive to the labours of a free and hardy peasantry, but quite inadequate to providing a landlord class with the surplus requisite for the maintenance of even such moderate position as to give a meaning to the word. Still there was enough French money in the country to enable a small society at Quebec to enjoy themselves in comfort and even elegance, and to reflect upon a minute scale some, at anyFALL OF FRENCH DOMINION. 27 rate, of the fashions of Versailles, to which the higher officials of a thrifty and exacting Church contributed their quota of ornate ceremonial. The little society was perhaps more bureau- cratic than seigneurial. Those few of the landowners who were able to ruffle it in the society of the Chateau St. Louis and the Intendant's palace for the most part derived, with a few excep- tions, the means of doing so from some other source than their tenants' rents. The fur trade was a Crown monopoly, but some of the profits stuck in the colony. Much of the money, however, which provided Quebec society under the French with its little dinners and wines and luxuries probably came from the French king, and it is to be feared was in great part intended for very different purposes to those it was put to. For fifty years before the conquest several men of character and energy were sent to rule New France. Their soaring and not unworthy ambitions proved their country's ruin. They were not content to let well alone and encourage the development of the vast French territory which had been so little utilised ; but they laid schemes for throttling that British industrial enterprise, which they had much better have tried to emulate instead, and of annexing the whole of North America west of the Alleghanies. What trouble they took in the building of forts on the Ohio, and the planting of flags to let the British know their intentions, and what happened when their hitherto sluggish rivals realised it, and how war broke out in 1755 and closed in 1761, not with the triumph of the French claim to the west, but with the surrender of Canada itself to the British arms, is a familiar theme, or should be. The dramatic details of this seven years' war have no place here. People may forget the splendid fight that France made, the victories of Oswego, of Monongahela and Ticonderoga, but all remember the triumph of Wolfe's small army 011 the Plains of Abraham, the most distressing event that the old French city hitherto inviolate had till then ever witnessed. How from a shell-battered heap of ruins she arose again more beautiful than ever to a happier and infinitely more prosperous career is a longer but less stirring tale. The wisdom and clemency of the new British rule over the conquered French community was fully recognised by the latter, who were left their laws, their28 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. language and their religion. They tasted liberty for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it. Those who infer that the magnanimity of Great Britain at this moment was the outcome of timidity must be ignorant of the helpless condition to which France had been reduced. England could have treated the French-Canadians at the moment in the fashion in which we have documentary evidence that the French king earlier in the century would have treated the great colony of New York had he succeeded in his scheme of conquest there, namely, expelled them all without the faintest risk of retaliation. But the wise magnanimity exercised towards their new subjects by the British Government brought its own reward when the American Colonies rose in revolt. Though the privileges extended to the French-Canadians and their Church was actually one of the formal causes of complaint against the British Government by the leaders of the Revolution, the very same men, with surprising lack of humour, cajoled and implored the French to throw off the tyranny of a rule whose culpable mildness towards them they had with the same breath denounced on other platforms and to join a confederation whose bias against them was a loud-sounding note in the justification of their cause. So when the war came on and Quebec for the fourth time in its history stood a serious siege, the French, under a British com- mander, resisted the invader with the same spirit they had shown under Montcalm. After a winter's siege the invaders retired baffled to their own territory, leaving behind them the body of their General Montgomery, who was killed in an unsuccessful assault upon the city, and whose name is now enshrined upon the list of brave soldiers who fought and died beneath the walls of Quebec. In the war of 1812, Quebec was called upon to play but a small part, being remote from the main scenes of strife. But the only attempt of the Americans in that direction was frustrated at the battle of Chateauguay, where De Salaberry, a French seigneur at the head of a body of French volunteers, inflicted on the enemy a signal defeat In the short-lived rebellion of 1838, which was the expression of general rather than racial grievances and stirred all Canada, Quebec took a full share. The root of the trouble lay in the factTHE FAMILY COMPACT. 29 that the Government of the Canadian provinces with all its posts and perquisites had fallen into the hands of a group of families, mainly and naturally British. Such an oligarchy was almost inevitable in the beginnings of a colony where a close connection with the mother country and a constant display of loyalty to monarchical institutions were almost vital to its existence. With the failure of Mackenzie and Papineau, however, their bugbear, the " Family compact," came to an end also. The two provinces, Ontario, which had been settled by loyalist refugees from the United States, and Quebec, were united in 1841, and in 1867 finally took their place as the most important members of the Federation that now goes to form the Canadian Dominion. The present population of Quebec is somewhat over sixty thousand. It has dropped entirely out of the race with Montreal for the commercial capital and chief port of Canada, and has now been far outstripped both by that city and Toronto and even fallen behind Ottawa. Twenty years ago Quebec ceased to be the head of transatlantic navigation, and that moment marked the beginning of its relative decline. Nothing, however, can destroy its dignity and importance, which rest neither on dollars, population, steam engines, nor mills. Heaven forbid that Quebec should ever be in a position to enter the heated race for acreage in bricks and mortar, and for population ! There is no reason whatever why any other city in Canada should not revel to its heart's content in millions of people and tens of square miles of stone and brick, but there is not a civilised person in North America who would not make some slight personal sacrifice to avert what in the case of Quebec would be a deplorable calamity. There is not a place in the country that in tradition, appearance or situation resembles the old French city or can compare with it, and there are millions of people growing up in the States and Canada, and many more millions to arise in the future, to whom a sight of Quebec and its environs will always be a delight and a glimpse of another world and a monument of imperishable memories. Happily there are no signs of serious danger in this respect A huge and hideous cotton mill has, to be sure, greatly injured the noble prospect of the Montmorency Falls from the river and3o CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. somewhat affected the cataract itself. But there seems to be no particular ground available for " million dollar plants " and their accompanying suburbs of squalid houses. As a matter of fact, the lower town, with its wharves, docks and shut-in old-fashioned streets, quite fills the narrow strip which spreads along the base of the rock and fronts the water. The very flatness of this sea- board portion of the town hides its somewhat squalid details from view as you draw near it, and gives full expression to the bold upward sweep behind, on which are piled one above the other, to the embattled summits of Cape Diamond, the streets and buildings which give the city its character, and breathe so eloquently of its past for those who care to recall it. Other causes besides the opening of the river to Montreal contributed to the commercial decline of Quebec. Federation in 1867, with its central government at Ottawa and the final departure of the British garrisons, which had been a great feature in Old Quebec life, helped to arrest its prosperity. The large colony of British merchants who flourished there have practically disappeared, and it is now almost as much a French city as the province is virtually a French province. There are still, however, some three or four thousand British residents all told, and among them are quite a number of families of moderate means and good position, with local ties of property or occupation, who, mingling freely with a portion of the best French families, make a social element that helps to keep up the best traditions of Anglo-French Quebec. In Montreal, where both races are strong in numbers, they scarcely blend at all socially, as we shall see. In Quebec, however, the very smallness of the British community makes for a freer intercourse. Quebec society, too, is less vexed by ambitions and financial standards. People all know one another more or less, and are pretty well assured of their respective positions. Educated Quebeckers, moreover, usually speak two languages, which certainly gives a mental stimulus to society, and many residents seem to have achieved the habit of graceful but well-filled leisure, the secret of which their American neighbours as a people find it so difficult to acquire. It would be strange indeed if the environment of Quebec did not make for a placid life amongst those who were fortunateMODERN QUEBEC. 3i enough to be able to lead it. Quebec, then, has become virtually a French city. French is the language of the street, the fireside, and to a great extent of commerce, though English is usually spoken in the big shops and in the hotels, where most of the guests, being transient, are from other provinces or the States. The vernacular used by the mass of the people is the old French as spoken in Normandy before the Revolution, interlarded of course by many corruptions of English words, while the language of the higher classes is that of educated Frenchmen. \ Electric cars now rush up and down the steep streets leading a from the lower to the upper town, and strike perhaps an inhar- monious note. But you may ascend to the latter on foot, if you so prefer, by many quaint and tortuous by-ways, assisted here and there by long flights of steps. Or you may drive up in that unique production of Quebec and Lower Canada, the caleche— a chariot swung high on leather straps stretched on steel springs and mounted on two wheels. There is a small perch in front for the driver, who sends his tough Canadian pony along with all the dash and abandon of an Irish jarvey bound for a race- meeting. You fly up and down the steep cobbled streets when in his charge at a pace that if he thinks you are a stranger is probably intended to prove your mettle or to show you the little extra attention due from a native to a visitor. To judge from the facial expressions and strained attitudes of the summer tourists one sees being whirled about in such merry fashion, many of them would gladly dispense with the courtesy. Quebec, I need hardly say, js built without system or method. Its history and topography have been hostile to anything of the kind, and have offered no sort of encouragement to that deliberate extension of parallelograms which makes North American towns so convenient to live in and so monotonous to look at. Streets and buildings follow the lines and rest on the foundations of former ones when they are not themselves the original structures. And these lines were thrown into quaint curves by the ruggedness of the city's site, or thrust into sharp angles and dark corners by the great ecclesiastical buildings with their courtyards and gardens, founded long ago and generously endowed with space to grow in and the means to accomplish it.32 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Against these dignified old piles, secure in the knowledge that they still hold the confidence and the affection of all French Canada, the wholesale improver and the jerry-builder might knock their heads in vain. Laval's great University, the nunnery of the Ursulines, the Hotel Dieu and other less considerable foundations fill quite large spaces in the upper town. As you slant gradually up the face of the rock by Mountain Street, past solid-looking houses— in one of which Montcalm lived for a time—with steep gables and French windows, the great buildings of Laval, ancient and modern, tower above your head, and a venerable wall of whitewashed mud, capped with tiles of a kind so common in Normandy villages, shuts out from view its leafy precincts. On the left of the road the array of guns known as the Grand Battery brush your elbow, and thrusting their muzzles over the brink of the precipice look down over the roof trees of the lower town and out over the shipping of the river to the opposing heights of Levis. Though not quite so expansive as the outlook from the citadel, this peep of the harbour from among an atmo- sphere of old walls and monastic groves, and cannons and chiming bells, takes the fancy of every visitor to the old city as much perhaps as any spot within it. Laval has been rightly called the founder and father of the Canadian Church. He was of the illustrious house of Mont- morency and used this powerful social lever wholly in the cause of piety and morality as understood by men of his ultra- montane stamp. Though an aristocrat, he was an- unswerving ascetic and an uncompromising advocate of temperance. He came out to the colony in 1663 as vicar of the Pope and virtually its first bishop, though he was titularly Bishop of Petrea, and was altogether too much for the other two members of the governing trio, the Governor and the Intendant. As a strong Jesuit he held the doctrine of the supremacy of the Church in matters temporal as well as spiritual. Public ceremonies, to which Quebec in olden times was greatly addicted, frequently experienced unseemly interruptions from Laval's attempts to humble the Executive before the power of the Church at crucial moments. He happened to be personally strong enough toA LADIEg CU^LINQ RINR, [To face p. 32,A WEALTHY CHURCH. 33 carry out his theory, and before his long sojourn in Canada was over he had nominated his own Governor. His piety was unquestionable, for he had stripped himself of his estates in France, and the vast grants of Canadian soil his influence wrung from the French Crown were devoted wholly to religious purposes. Of these the seminary got the lion's share in the shape of an estate on the north shore of the St. Lawrence below Quebec, fifty miles in length by eighteen in depth, as well as several smaller endowments, and as most of this still belongs to the University further comment on the causes of its wealth would be superfluous. The Jesuit autocrat destined his founda- tion for the general education of the young and the training of adults for the priesthood, and furthermore for helping out the meagre tithes of the Canadian country parishes which were wholly inadequate to the maintenance of a resident clergy. By this stroke, too, he retained the parochial clergy as missioners or servants of the seminary, and prevented them from attaining a vested interest in their livings, as in old France—a state of things which exists more or less at the present day in French Canada. Laval University, which sprang half a century ago out of the old seminary, forms, with the latter, the educational and ecclesiastical heart of French Canada. Four or five hundred boys attend the schools, and nearly as many students read theology, arts, law, science and medicine at the University, to say nothing of a younger branch at Montreal. One of its many buildings is one hundred yards long and five stories high, and contains the finest collection of pictures in Canada, as well as libraries and museums. But much dallying over the details of a town so rich in interest as Quebec is unfortunately out of the question. The past is not so much our business here as the present, and the area to be dealt with so formidable that selection becomes a matter of infinite difficulty. A mass of interesting matter has been published about the city, but it is so often mixed up with much that is wholly parochial and utterly without interest to even the most sympathetic stranger that a well- written, systematic guide-book to a city so well worthy of one is badly needed. Quite possibly such a thing is in preparation, C. . D34 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. for the times are moving in Canada, intellectually as well as materially. Quebec is by no means all tortuous streets and quaint corners. In the centre of the upper town, on the broad breast of the slope, is the widest of open spaces, gay with well-kept turf and flower beds, and bordered on three sides with cheerful but not too crowded main arteries of lighter traffic. Caleches, private carriages, cabs, and habitants' two- wheeled carts dodge the electric cars that rush swiftly up and down the broad, well-paved roadway, conveying the impression to a stranger that every moment was of vital import to the Quebecker, which happily perhaps for him is not the case. It is a cheery scene this on a bright summer day. The rows of shops, hotels and offices that skirt on all sides this broad green slope look clean and bright with their steep roofs, French win- dows and outside shutters. The side-walks show a variety of type to be seen probably nowhere else in America—priests and friars, nuns and sisters, soldiers in red or blue, young lawyers or clerks profoundly French in physique though strictly English in dress, habitants with market baskets, mission Indians, Anglican parsons, and American or English tourists busy with guide-book and camera. Here too, with much civic dignity, rises the City Hall, new and assertive in grey stone dress ; while down in the corner, with the open market in front of it, is the Basilica, the French cathedral, which in the eighteenth century rose on the ashes of an old one. It is somewhat richly decorated inside, and contains many valuable paintings by Vandyke and others. In another corner, in a large enclosure of old elms and bass wood trees, stands the English cathedral. For some time after the conquest the British officials, garrison and citizens had no place of worship, and it is pleasant to remember that the iron bigotry of the old rigime had so moderated before the example of British liberal government that the Recollets granted the use of their church to the homeless congregation of their conquerors. By 1800 the scandal of such a situation grew so intolerable that George III. himself built the present edifice, which looks the period all over. The architect was a captain of artillery, and the resultTWO HISTORIC BUILDINGS. 35 is a replica of one of those oblong Georgian buildings, with a lofty, inconsequent spire and Ionic pilasters at either end that were the pride of the debased period of church architecture and are the horror of modern church people, but nevertheless are not devoid of sentiment for liberal minds from the flavour which they have of that picturesque and strenuous period when the British Empire was in the making. This substantial edifice, erected by the pious munificence of his Majesty George III., planted among the reminders of French power, looks eminently typical of the British Lion when that just but pugnacious beast knew his own mind and was not greatly troubled by anaemia or aestheticism. It is said to be a modest replica of St. Martin's- in-the-Fields; but, as the centre of official and Protestant cere- monial for over a century in Quebec, its story is probably even richer in colouring, as its situation is more inspiring, than the statelier model. At any rate, my friend Mr. Wurtele, of Quebec, has had no difficulty in filling a book of over one hundred pages with the men of note and things of interest with which it has been concerned. Close to it on one side stands the great convent of the Ursulines, founded in 1639, with its various buildings and shady grounds. Here under the floor of the chapel, lately restored, Montcalm was buried in a cavity made by the bursting of a British shell, and the nuns, of whom there is a large company, still cherish the skull of the brave but unfortunate general. I had the privilege quite recently of conversing with one of the older sisters, who in her young days in the convent knew well an ancient nun that as a girl actually witnessed the burial of Montcalm in this rude grave. East of the English cathedral is the Place d'Armes, stretching away to the brink of the great platform which is thence carried along the face of the cliff for a quarter of a mile, and with a breadth of fifty yards is one of the noblest promenades in the world. Here of old stood the Chateau St. Louis, the official seat of the Viceroys of Canada; and here, called after the greatest of them, towers in the fashion of a castellated French chateau, the largest and most superbly situated hotel in Canada. Whether so vast a modern pile attunes itself to the atmosphere of Quebec is a matter of opinion, but it must be confessed that D 236 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. nothing has been left undone by the builders of the Chateau Frontenac to give it such harmony as may be with a situation so painfully full of responsibility and so conspicuous. One need hardly say that the tourist who seeks its hospitality, whether for a day or a month, will find that in things material the inside lives up to the outside. The Canadian-Pacific is a guarantee in this respect for any house of entertainment it holds or handles, and the Frontenac is one of them. A large statue of Champlain, in brave array and posture, as is only fitting, adorns the northern end; and beautiful as is the outlook from any portion of this Dufferin Terrace, where the city and its visitors promenade while the band plays on summer evenings, there is perhaps no better point of vantage on it than this same corner. Beneath the precipice, and on the narrow strip by which the lower town at this southern edge draws into the rocky foot of Cape Diamond, is the spot where Montgomery fell while heading the American assault upon the city on the last day of 1775. Beyond it the stately river rolls through its narrow gate- way, some fifteen hundred yards only in width, to spread out immediately and right beneath one's eyes into the spacious harbour below. Across the river are the higher ridges of Levis, rich in the colouring of summer woods, dimpled with cottages and villas, that gradually merge into the town of that name, beneath whose streets, convents and gardens the batteries of Monckton, which laid Quebec in ruins a hundred and forty years ago, are quite obscured. Beyond Levis again, and forming the southern shore of the harbour, woods and fields, villages and country houses spread along the river bank; while away to the east and south lies a wide world of chequered landscape, backed by the forms of mountains—some, as the Adirondacks, shadowy and far off, others again near and isolated, and showing plainly their woodland drapery. Across the broad harbour, five miles away down stream, the nearer point of the fair island of Orleans with its farms and orchards seems from here to almost fill the channel of the mighty river that holds it in its embrace. Great ships lie at anchor—Atlantic liners, cruisers, gun-boats, and merchantFROM DUFFERIN TERRACE. 37 vessels, and smaller craft laden with timber from the upper lakes; while coasting steamers, launches and ferries thresh their way busily from point to point And on the left from opposite the island of Orleans and the dark cliffs down which the Montmorency hurls its snowy cataract, the green ridges of Beauport, dimpled with white cottages, recalls to-day with wonderful precision the lines of Montcalm's celebrated defence. Away down the river, too, and waving far inland from its north shore, their feet among the farming lands bright with grain and stubbles, hay-field and homestead, their rugged pine-clad ridges cutting the sky, the Laurentian mountains complete the half circle round which the eye wanders with rare delight, from the shadowy masses of Mount Tourmente to the woody slopes behind Lorette. Quebec itself stands on the point of a long lofty ridge, one side of which falls sheer into the St Lawrence, while the other slopes gradually to the St Charles, that, winding its sinuous course through fertile meadows from the north-west, joins the tidal waters of the greater river near the lower town. The city walls stretch across the ridge from the high-perched citadel above the St Lawrence to the flats by the St. Charles, and thus acted as a defence in olden days against all attack by land. Till quite recently the various gates were standing in their original condition. Two of them, those of St. Louis and St. John, widened and renovated to suit the stream of modern traffic, still form the principal pillar from the old city into the suburbs behind it From the Chateau Frontenac and the Place d'Armes most visitors will find themselves journeying on foot or on wheels up the long slope of St. Louis Street on their way to the ever- famous Plains of Abraham. This highway was in the old French regime an aristocratic quarter, and is even yet most eminently respectable in its solid stone houses, of fairly venerable aspect; their doors and windows flush with the walls and opening on the street. As you ascend the steep and narrow highway towards the St. Louis Gate, through which Montcalm rode bearing his mortal wound so bravely, you pass the small house where he was first laid to await the surgeon's verdict A step higher up on the left is still standing the roomy old mansion where dwelt De Pean,38 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the town major of evil repute in the dark days before the siege of 1759. De Pean was a leading member of the Ring that under Bigot robbed Canada in her hour of need. He owned a big stake in the great warehouse of La Frippone (the fraud). But Bigot did not give mere town majors so large a share in his plunder for nothing, and Madame De Pean, a notable Quebec beauty of strong ambitions and easy virtue, was credited with being the cause of the favours shown her lord. Among the list of French-Canadian women famous in olden days for heroism and piety and still cherished, that of the "Pompadour of Canada," as she is called, rings a strangely discordant note. Angelique des Meloises, though piously educated, like most of the well-born Canadian girls among the Ursulines, developed a remarkable facility for turning her good looks to profitable account, and during the years when Bigot was lavishing the funds of the impoverished colony on his own establishments the De Peans seem to have had a full share both of the plunder and the power which he enjoyed. The old house in question was given her, it is said, by her lover, and its massive walls must have witnessed an abundance of the revelry and dissipation in which the set of smart swindlers, who after the conquest paid the penalty of their misdeeds in the Bastille at Paris, indulged so freely. The De Peans, however, seem to have survived the crushing fine with which the town major was let ofif, and had sufficient left for the fair Angelique to continue her conquests as far into the English rigime as her charms allowed. So much romance and exaggeration is woven around the memory of this fair but brazen lady, it would not be easy, even if it were worth while, to fairly take her measure. Novelists and American essayists with their incurable idealism have seized upon her, and borrowed their backgrounds, perhaps unconsciously, from the Europe of that day or their notions of it. I fancy the little Quebec society of 1755—59 would hardly recognise itself in the gorgeous setting in which it sometimes struts, feasts, and revels in the pages of fiction. Still we have better evidence of Madame De Pean and her ill-used power than this, and as people will often go out of their way to see a spot that has been the subject of a second-rate modern novel, the De Pean mansion,{To face p. 38. BASILICA AND OLD MARKET, QUEBEC.THE CITADEL. 39 even if time has somewhat glorified its import, is at least much better worth a passing glance. The head of the street lands one amid associations of the drum and trumpet, and houses that in the palmy days before the British garrisons were withdrawn from Canada were mixed up with garrison life. Highest of all is the roomy building of the garrison club, a Quebec institution full of associations with famous regiments, and still probably one of the snuggest and pleasantest clubs in Canada. The civilian element now far exceeds the military, which is limited to the gunners and infantry of the Canadian regulars stationed in the citadel, and such officials of the permanent or militia forces of Canada as happen to be temporarily in the city, travelling east or west. The citadel itself is a point of undying interest to visitors. Not a day passes through the entire summer but parties of tourists, jjminly Americans, wander about the large parade ground under the charge of a sergeant, or stand by the guns whose muzzles point over the river some three or four hundred feet below. The quarters of the garrison line the cliffs, and few mess-rooms in the British Empire probably have so gorgeous an outlook from their windows. Here, too, are the somewhat modest headquarters of the Governor-General when he makes his periodical visits to the old capital of French Canada. In the centre of the parade ground a solitary cannon of insignificant dimensions proclaims the fact that it was captured at Bunker's Hill, and seems "positively to invite the pleasantry of wandering Yankees, who have not failed to make comments on it that have become almost as classic as the fight itself, and certainly shed lustre on the little gun. It is even possible the visitor may be conducted round by a French sergeant, in the familiar uniform of the Royal Artillery with quite a limited English vocabulary, and as he stands beside him on the battery and looks out over that vast panorama where English and French so often mingled in deadly strife, will be apt to ruminate on the strange mutability of human things. St. Louis Street here finds an outlet through the now much restored and rejuvenated city walls by way of the gate already alluded to as bearing its name, and becomes St. Louis Road or the Grand Allee. A broad and pleasant highway bordered by4o CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. cheerful-looking residences and fringed with trees, it runs in a straight line towards the famous battlefield. Just outside the city walls, along whose grassy summits by the way runs an almost continuous promenade, stand the Provincial Parliament buildings—a fine block of grey stone in the French Renais- sance style, erected five-and-twenty years ago. To the member of a European State, accustomed to one central government and capital, this double set of machinery entailed by a federal system will probably appear a trifle elaborate and involved. He will have contented himself with grasping the fact of Ottawa and its great public buildings in his mind, and will just for the moment be taken aback when he sees the immense and stately pile before him and realises it is the seatof a complete government; of a ministry and two chambers, presided over by a representative of the Crown. There is in Quebec an Upper House or Legislative Council appointed for life by the Governor in Council, and a Lower House or Chamber of Deputies of the usual type, elected under what is virtually manhood suffrage. Both languages are used in debate, but as about seven-eighths of the deputies are Frenchmen, the Gallic tongue is naturally in the ascendant. Both the chambers in which these French legislators so volubly discuss their local affairs beneath the aegis of the Royal arms are worthy of any assembly in size and fittings. Beneath the same roof are the offices of the Lieutenant-Governor, the heads of the departments, judicial, educational, agricultural; and a fine library. The usual portrait gallery of past and present nota- bilities, who have helped to guide the destinies of the Province of Quebec, fill up other corners of the building, while on finely panelled stairways the coats of arms of distinguished French- Canadian families remind you that a reasonable pride of birth still survives, though politics as a matter of fact are absolutely democratic. On the outer face of the building, too, the glories of Champlain and Cartier, Maisoneuve and Frontenac are con- spicuously commemorated. Here among the clerks, messengers, secretaries, lawyers and ministers moving about the corridors you will hear very little English. It will be quite evident that it is a French province being governed by Frenchmen. And itFEDERATION. 4i is surely better so than that there should be a strong minority of English-speaking people to be represented. As it is, there can be no serious racial friction within the province. Out of a population of a million and a half nearly five-sixths are French, while the greater part of the English-speaking minority live either in the city of Montreal or in a district known as the Eastern townships, of which more anon. Among these, moreover, there is a very strong element of Irish Roman Catholics, who always seem to me in Canada to occupy an anomalous sort of position, out of touch with their French co-religionists, and almost as much with the very North British Protestant and Ulster element that predominates in Upper Canada, and not strong enough in them- selves to venture on that attitude which makes them the joy of the machine politician and the bane of the educated and patriotic American. " We cannot understand your Irish," said a French-Canadian deputy to me as I sat in his office in a country town in Quebec. " We hear and read of them as hating England with an undying hatred. They come out here shaking the dust of the old country off their feet, but when they have settled down they don't mix with our people, though they are Roman Catholics, but seem to prefer altogether to be among the English, whom they have spent their lives in cursing. This is, of course, of no consequence," my friend continued, " but it puzzles our French people very much." When Federation was established in Canada in 1867, the Constitution of the United States was very naturally looked to for a model in many particulars. But unlike the American States, whose powers were left undefined, those of the Central Government only being tabulated, the reverse method was in this case wisely adopted. The powers of the Provincial Govern- ments were clearly defined and limited, so that cases of doubt such as raise frequent controversies between the defenders of " States rights" and the Washington Government can never occur in Canada, the Ottawa Government assuming all powers that have not been formally delegated to the provinces, Quebec, being practically homogeneous,enjoys its own laws under the old French code with modifications and its own Church, which is virtually an established one, though no burdens fall on the non-French42 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. minority. Education would seem to offer some graver obstacles in a society so constituted as is this one, but they seem to be sur- mounted without much difficulty. There is a general council of education subdivided into two boards, Catholic and Protestant, with a permanent secretary acting for each. Such funds as the Government contribute to education are divided pro rata between each creed. Taxes are levied by school boards in each township, but a minority of the opposite faith can always appeal and form a school of their own, diverting the school taxes of their co-religionists to such a purpose and appointing their own schoolmaster. Those who have the best of all reasons for knowing tell me that the machine works in perfect harmony, each secretary attending to the matters connected with those of his own language and faith. The Roman Church in a province where Church and State, unlike France herself, are in almost complete sympathy, it need hardly be said, controls education, for of French Protestants there are practically none. At the same time the results, from a temporal point of view, are very markedly below those achieved in the Protestant parts of Canada. This will be readily under- stood, and if illustrations are required, anyone engaged in the great lumber trade of Ontario and the North-West, where thou- sands of young men of both nationalities are employed in mixed camps, will declare them in favour of the British employees, so far as schooling is concerned, without hesitation. Now at the corner where the electric trams turn away from the St. Louis Road towards the St. Charles Valley and the suburb of St. Roche to complete their circuit of outer Quebec, is a cabstand which, for its detached situation, might perplex the casual traveller who did not know that a gate on the left led immediately to the spot where Wolfe's monument marks the place of his untimely death. I wonder if there is any other battlefield in the world except Waterloo that supports a cabstand or its equivalent ? I fancy not! I have been to Waterloo both in summer and winter, and I am inclined to think that more tourists visit the Plains of Abraham than even that other more accessible and more famous arena outside Brussels. It is not heresy, I presume to say, that the smallerAMERICAN TOURISTS. 43 victory at Quebec was more pregnant with results than even Waterloo. Half a million Russians and Austrians were on their way to support the Allies had Napoleon with his small army succeeded in repulsing them. If Wolfe, however, had failed on that grey September morning in 1759, Canada would almost certainly have remained to France. The American Colonies would never have dreamed, while such conditions lasted, of independence, and the course of history in North America would have been written on lines which one cannot venture even to speculate upon. It is probably, however, the dramatic nature of the fight and the romance of the situation that brings visitors in increasing thousands every summer to the Plains of Abraham. I do not mean that they are popularised in the sense of being a stamping- ground for excursionists or school feasts. The pilgrims that come here are independent travellers, and Americans mostly, for the simple reason that there are many times more Americans to move about in summer than there are Canadians. I was very often indeed on or about the battlefield in the past season, and on every occasion there was a numerous company of visitors, sometimes on foot with guide-books, like sensible people, but more often under the tutelage of the French-Canadian or Irish jarvey, whose accounts of that fateful day are more humorous than accurate. The volume of American holiday travel to Canada is increasing by leaps and bounds, and American travellers are growing yearly more alive to the scenes and incidents that made their history, and there is nothing on the Continent to captivate their fancy more strongly than this spot, even though it be British ground. It is morally certain that the attention lavished on the Plains of Abraham, particularly in view of their proximity to Quebec, will be prodigious, unless Quebec should mortgage the fortune its face, unlike the proverbial maiden, will always bring it in increasing volume, for some immediate material gain. The St. Louis Road bisects the battlefield longitudinally, and, as it were, splits the ridge. The whole ground between this and the St, Lawrence precipice up to the " Cove fields," which stretch out half a mile from the citadel fortification?, has beeii presented44 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. by the Federal Government to Quebec, and are safe from violation. The "Cove fields," an undulating stretch of partially fenced pasture land and unenclosed golf links, have had a con- vent and a jail erected on them, besides a couple of Martello towers, which are much less incongruous. So far as I know, there is no check to any amount of further vandalism. On the right of the St. Louis Road, which was probably the centre of each attacking line, there is a good deal of building, and just here the Franciscans have recently erected a very large convent. There is reason to think that the very centre of the shock of battle is occupied by this imposing edifice, possessed of a large * chapel gorgeous with decoration, colour and carving. I looked in there one afternoon last summer after an hour or two of sauntering on the battlefield, and found a great company of white-robed chanting nuns, kneeling before the High Altar, amid a blaze of electric light and the flicker of countless candles. It was an effective scene and stimulating to the imagination, when one remembered the significance of the spot on which this pageant was going forward. The plain obelisk which proclaims that " Here died Wolfe victorious," stands about midway between this, St. Louis Road and the St. Lawrence cliffs, and about three-quarters of a mile from the outworks of the citadel, which in the days of the French were further advanced. Now I do not propose to dwell for long here upon the stirring tale of the siege and capture of Quebec. I have told the story at some length in three different and more suitable places. In these pages history must at least be treated with brevity, though while we are on the subject of Quebec it is difficult to get wholly away from it. There is some excuse, however, for being in a reminiscent mood while in the atmosphere of Lower Canada, as there is little practical interest in the French Province for English readers or travellers. It is approached, and probably always will be, in an entirely different spirit and with different objects from those which attract the stranger to Ontario and the North-West. Still any account of Canada without giving Quebec the attention its important place in the Canadian FederationTHE FAMOUS SIEGE. 45 entitles it to, would be an unpardonable omission ; and one must take it from the point of view from which it appeals to nineteen visitors out of twenty. I shall venture once again then on the oft-told tale in as few words as are compatible with some lucid notion of it. Louisbourg, the great French fortress and harbour of Cape Breton, had fallen in the previous year, 1758. It had been the first notable success of the British in America after three years of war. Wolfe, as a young Brigadier, had so distinguished himself at the siege that the still more important expedition to Quebec in the following year was entrusted to his charge by Pitt, to the chagrin of a long list of seniors who had merited their neglect. His enthusiasm for the service caused some of them to grumble in the King's hearing that he was mad. George 11, was a good soldier, and occasionally astonished his courtiers by a good epigram or a witty retort. "Mad is he?" said His Majesty, "then I only hope he'll bite some of my generals." Amherst was Commander-in-Chief in America in 1759, but was wholly occupied with land expeditions and endeavours to penetrate from New York to the Canadian frontier. He hoped thus to support Wolfe, but was unable to, and may be left out of a story curtailed as this one must be. It was the end of June when Wolfe, accompanied by Admiral Saunders and the British fleet, arrived before Quebec. He had with him between eight and nine thousand men, mainly embarked at Louisbourg, and to a great extent veterans of former cam- paigns in North America. It was probably the best army, all things considered, that Great Britain had placed in the field since the days of Marlborough, and no small part of its efficiency was due to its young General's ability in matters of organisation and discipline. The difficult task of bringing a great fleet up the St. Lawrence, regarded hitherto as almost impracticable, had been skilfully accomplished by the naval commanders. On the day of their arrival they encountered a summer hurri- cane, and on the next night a fleet of fire ships sent down by the French, both of which were overcome by the gallantry and energy of the sailors. Montcalm had entrenched his army on what are known as the46 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Lines of. Beauport, occupying the six miles of curving shore which stretch from the mouth of the St. Charles River, by the lower town of Quebec to the Falls of Montmorency, whose wide chasm and deep river-bed sufficiently protected his left flank. In the city itself was a small garrison which could be reinforced at any moment. The French lines therefore reached from the Montmorency Falls to the city. From Montmorency to the village of Beauport they followed a clearly defined and elevated ridge. From Beauport to the St. Charles marshy grounds and shallow tide water, protected by floating and fixed batteries, showed a still more efficient defence. Behind these defences lay the French, some sixteen thousand strong, about three thousand of them veteran regulars, the rest militia, of whom a majority had seen some years of fighting. Point Levis was not seriously occupied, and here Wolfe, with little opposition, planted his main batteri'es under Monckton, one of his Brigadiers. All the lower and much of the upper town was well within range, and throughout the whole siege a formid- able and well-served artillery poured shot and shell into the devoted city. The main camp of the British was formed on the further edge of the Montmorency gorge, within musket shot of the extreme French left, the great cataract roaring between them. The Point of Orleans was a midway post used mainly for hospital purposes, while the fleet lay in the river. A harder task had seldom been entrusted to a general than the one which now faced Wolfe. Montcalm's position, so long as he maintained it, was apparently impregnable, and that cool, able soldier had no intention whatever of jeopardising it. Behind works his army was as good as any: but in the open, though warlike and experienced in their own fashion, they would be no match for Wolfe's trained and disciplined men. Above all, winter was an ally that on the St. Lawrence could fail no man, and whose advent could be timed to a week. A month passed away in scouting, foraging, scouring the open country, overawing or conciliating the peasantry, and in minor operations that cannot be noted here; but some forward movement had to be made, forlorn hope though it seemed, and on July 31st the famous attack on the Beauport Lines wasWOLFE'S REPULSE AT MONTMORENCY. 47 delivered. The spot chosen was about half a mile from the Montmorency Falls. Townshend, Wolfe's third Brigadier, was to ford the river below the cataract, and march along the shore with two thousand men. Wolfe himself, with about an equal number, was to land from vessels on the flat strip below the high ridge on which the French lay. The attempt ended in disaster. The Louisbourg Grenadiers, a picked corps, were the first to land, and without waiting for their companions or Townshend's sup- ports, flung themselves in a sort of impulse of heroic madness on the steep slope below the French rifle-pits and batteries. In a few minutes four hundred of them were killed or wounded, when a terrific thunder-shower literally silenced both attack and defence. Further effort was useless. The dead and wounded were with some difficulty recovered from the scalp-hunting Indians that swarmed out of the intrenchments, and the whole flotilla went back dejectedly to the camp. Wolfe's wretched health was, as every- one knows, a constant burden to the gallant spirit which struggled within. The next few weeks passed wearily. Twice he lay not far from death in the farmhouse, which is still standing near Montmorency, chafing at his situation and the impotency of the fine force under his command against defences which showed no single vulnerable point. Quebec was slowly crumbling before the batteries of Levis, but this advanced matters no further. Montcalm did not stir. He and his officers were full of con- fidence, and winter was approaching. The British nation was beginning to grumble, and even Pitt to have qualms about his young General. But none of them had a true notion what Quebec was like or what sort of task they had set Wolfe to perform. Montcalm, in the meantime, had been compelled to detach fifteen hundred men under Levis to Montreal. Fifteen hundred to two thousand more he had sent under De Bougainville to Cap Rouge, a break in the high shore seven miles up the river, where English ships and small expeditions were giving trouble. His lines, however, were too strong to be sensibly weakened by these departures. September arrived and with it the famous council of war by Wolfe's bedside, followed by the movement of some four thou- sand men by land and Water up the river, so skilfully contrived,48 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. that Montcalm neither guessed their numbers nor intentions. Of those remaining a thousand lay sick and wounded at the Isle of Orleans. Bougainville, however, at Cap Rouge, with his two thousand men anxiously watched the British ships drifting up and down the river, with troops on board, and was on the lookout for an attack only on his fortified cove or at some point higher up the river. In the meantime Wolfe had surveyed that five or six miles of cliff between the city and Cap Rouge, which Montcalm had declared a hundred men could hold against an entire army, and had selected the Anse du Foulon, about two miles above Quebec, as the point for his final desperate effort. On the 12th he issued his last orders, which concluded, " A vigorous blow struck by the army at this juncture may determine the fate of Canada." That same night, while the siege guns were bellowing, the troops destined for the attack dropped quietly into boats, and between midnight and daybreak were safely landed in relays on the beach of the Anse du Foulon, without exciting the suspicions of the outposts on the cliffs. The scaling of the precipice, the surprise of De Vergor and his small post at the summit, the march in the grey dawn towards the Plains of Abraham, and the dismay of Montcalm away at Beauport when he realised that Wolfe had placed four thousand men at the back of the city is all an oft-told tale, whose details are much too lengthy and intricate for narration here. Though more than four thousand of Wolfe's men were landed, only some three-fourths of their whole number formed in the line of battle which at ten o'clock in the morning fell upon the French army. The landing place had to be guarded and the rear protected against an attack from Bougainville, who as a matter of fact had been, like Montcalm, quite hoodwinked and outmanoeuvred by Wolfe. In round numbers some three thousand five hundred French regulars and militia, with fifteen hundred sharpshooters and Indians, who filled the bush on either flank, met the British. The troops had poured out of the city by the St. Louis and St Foy Roads, and after waiting for a time in order of battle, came on with loud shouts and a desultory galling fire. It wasDEATH OF WOLFE. 49 not till they were within forty yards that the British, who though greatly annoyed for a long time by sharpshooters, had main- tained an immovable front, delivered their fire, which both French and English who were there tell us sounded like a single cannon shot. The shock of the discharge so staggered the French columns that the British had time to reload, and after pouring in a second volley the advance was sounded, and Wolfe's line swept down with bayonet and broadsword—for the 78th Highlanders were there—on the already half-broken foe. Wolfe himself was with the Louisbourg Grenadiers, the picked corps which had forgotten themselves at Beauport on the extreme right towards the precipice and close to the 28th and the 35th. He had already been hit on the wrist, and now very soon after the advance he was hit twice in succession in the groin and the lungs, the latter shot bringing him to the ground, in spite of strenuous efforts to keep his feet. He was carried to the rear, and after hearing that the day was won, and by an effort giving a last order for cutting off the fugitives, he became insensible, and shortly afterwards on the spot now marked by his monument, " gave up his life at the very moment," to quote Pitt's stirring eulogy, "when his fame began."1 The point of impact of the opposing armies was probably somewhat in advance of Wolfe's monument, and the lines stretched from near the St. Lawrence Cliffs over the St. Louis Road, where the Franciscan Convent stands, and thence across the St. Foy Road on the St Charles slope of the ridge. The exact spot where Wolfe fell can only be guessed at from sur- rounding circumstances. The last time I was on the ground was with Mr. Doughty, who certainly knows more of these four months of 1759 at Quebec than anyone living, and he places it upon a rising knoll some three or four hundred yards in advance and to the right of the place of his death. Wolfe was shot very soon after the advance, but the issue of the battle was never 1 Certain attempts to depreciate Wolfe have been lately made, more particu- larly by assertions that the daring plan of the 13th was not his but his brigadiers'. They would seem to have been made in ignorance of the fact that a written protest was sent to Wolfe the day before by these same brigadiers complaining of their complete ignorance of his intentions, and that Wolfe replied, telling them, in effect, to mind their own business. C. E50 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. in doubt for a moment. It was all over in a period which eye-witnesses give variously at from ten to twenty minutes. How the French were driven pell-mell into the city and down to the St. Charles, how Montcalm was mortally wounded, to die the next morning, and how Monckton also being seriously injured the command devolved upon Townshend, who received the capitulation of the city five days later, is all a matter of common notoriety, or supposed to be. Nothing like so much however, in Great Britain at any rate, is remembered of the second siege of Quebec in the following winter, when Murray with a valiant but sickly garrison defended it against the reinvigorated French, and lost a battle to them, just outside the walls on the St. Charles slope of the ridge, which he had rashly ventured. A monument on the St. Foy Road, inscribed simply and significantly, " Aux braves, 1760," commemorates the fight in which Murray lost a third of the three thousand men with which in the slush of a melting winter he had, for no sufficient reason, thrown himself upon twice that number of French. I must wind up this too historical chapter by recalling the summer of 1760, when a British fleet relieved Quebec, when Amherst at length broke through the woods of Northern New York and captured the last remnant of the resisting French at Montreal, and received the formal capitulation of the whole of Canada. This long struggle for supremacy in North America, to which France six years before had challenged England, is probably the most dramatic and picturesque as it is the most pregnant of results of any war waged by Great Britain, and at the same time is the least familiar of all modern wars to British readers. It reflected equal honour on the victors and the vanquished, and of the latter, in the colony most concerned it can truly be said that they shared the benefits as they shared the honours, and began to taste for the first time in their history the sweets ot peace, freedom and prosperity.1 1 For the full story of this struggle see "The Fight with France for North America" : Constable & Co. (London), and Morang & Co. (Toronto).FRENCH-CANADIAN ARCHITECTURE. CHAPTER III. It is not only the charms of Quebec itself, in its matchless pride of place, that captivate the imagination, but scarcely less so perhaps those of its surroundings which so alluringly expand themselves to view over such great distances in nearly all direc- tions as one wanders about the upper town and its environs. For these wide sweeping landscapes of mountain, plain and water, are not only beautiful by nature, but, unlike many parts of North America, are positively enriched and mellowed by the presence of a people to whom the Almighty has denied the passion for material prosperity possessed by all their neighbours but compensated by a temperament that gets equal pleasure, perhaps more, out of life in other ways. Bright coloured villages sprinkle the waving landscape for miles around Quebec, and the lines of the country roads can be' traced far away into the dim distance over hill and dale by the bright glint of the small homesteads which are marshalled so thickly and so sociably along them. The benighted folks who dwell therein persist in throwing time and money away on paint and whitewash to an extent that excites the liveliest scorn of the smaller Ontario farmer to whom nature has denied, or his Scottish affinities crushed out, such elementary sense of harmony as is prevalent even among the peasantries of Europe. The French-Canadian, insensible to criticism, and indeed far removed from it, continues to erect one-storied houses with long curving roofs sweeping away beyond the eaves, and often forming the actual roof of quite a broad verandah. He revels, too, in dormer windows and all sorts of uneconomical picturesque arrangements that are heresy to the Anglo-Saxon settler, who knows well that a straight up-and-down two-storied house with a minimum of roof and a door in the middle is the only style that a practical man devoid of nonsense would sanction And E 252 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the latter very often in his passion for ugliness outrages his more worthy regard for thrift and leaves this aesthetic structure to take the weather without paint or whitewash. In some of the rougher districts of Eastern Ontario there are whole neighbour- hoods covered with these painful and depressing spectres which almost put the cruder snake fences around them to the blush, and make the less ambitious log-houses look veritable things of beauty. A Scotch settler once explained to me that he did not paint his house lest he should be taken for a d-d Frenchman. The French-Canadian may be ignorant and unprogressive, but he has, at any rate, better taste than this. Both in town, village and country, he lays his colours on with no unsparing hand, and upon the whole with excellent results. A trifle in itself, but one of the most suggestive things in Quebec, is the golden dog (le chien (Tor) who still gnaws his bone upon the front wall of a house in Mountain Street, in the heart of the upper town :— " Je suis un chien qui rouge l'os En le rougeant je prends mon repos Un temps viendra qui n'est pas veny Que je mordrai qui m'aura mordu." The dog and the inscription are said to have been first mounted above his door by a rich merchant named Philibert, as a hit at Bigot and La Frippone. Bigot, it is said, procured his assassina- tion at the hands of an officer quartered in his house, who years afterwards, strange to say, was himself slain by Philibert's son in India. The bone, of course, represented the condition of Canada at the period, and the dog, it is needless to add, typified Bigot and his rapacious crew. The house over which it originally hung was afterwards an inn, and it was with the landlord's daughter that Nelson, while ashore in Quebec, fell so violently in love that only the efforts of his friends prevented him from marrying her. Nor have I said anything of the shady walks and green lawns of "the Governor's gardens," a public promenade just above Dufferin Terrace, where stands the monument which so eloquently unites in a single shaft the glorious memories of both Wolfe and Montcalm ; nor yet of the Hotel Dieu, that immense pile,A QUEBEC CALfeCHE. [To face p. 53.ROUTES OUT OF QUEBEC. 53 product of various epochs, though founded in 1654 by the Duchess d'Aiguillon, niece of Cardinal Richelieu ; half-convent, half- hospital, where a numerous and devoted company of nuns minister to the wants of thousands of patients annually. Nor, again, have we been near the General Hospital, which sounds prosaic, but, as a matter of fact, is an imposing, stately, and ancient foundation erected on ground where the Recollets first received the Jesuit missionaries in 1625. It stands away beyond the lower town near the St. Charles, and played a great part in the Anglo-French wars, being filled with the sick and wounded of both nations after the capture of the city in 1759. The nuns of Quebec then earned the gratitude of the victors by the impartial manner in which they gave their services to friend and foe with like devotion. Now Quebec is well served by railroads, which are most helpful to the visitor who would see something of the surrounding dis- trict. Upon the north side of the river the Canadian-Pacific Railway comes in from Montreal, and has here its terminus. Then there is the Lake St. John road, which runs north-east from the city and penetrates the wild heart of the province, while a light railway follows the river to Montmorency and thence on to St. Anne, of pilgrimage fame, some miles beyond. On the south shore the Grand Trunk vies with the Canadian- Pacific from Montreal, though by a more winding course, having its terminus at Levis, whence the Intercolonial starts away for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, through striking and ever- changing scenery. A third line from Levis runs due south to Sherbrook and the eastern townships. The high roads issuing from the city are tolerable—good enough for driving purposes and quite rideable for a cyclist; but the English wheelman must be careful in accepting Canadian standards, for outside the city suburbs the roads almost every- where are of that description which are relatively worse for cycling than for driving, and compared to England there is very little of the former pastime for obvious reasons. A favourite outlet from Quebec is the St. Louis road, which, as we have seen, bisects the Plains of Abraham, for it leads to Sillery and Cap Rouge; and yet more, it is bordered for four or five miles54 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. beyond the Plains by a succession of delightful country seats, whose large and well-timbered grounds in almost every case fringe the steep shores of the St. Lawrence, and afford most beautiful prospects both up and down the river. There are numbers of pleasant country seats in all parts ot Canada, mostly modern, and in situations selected for natural beauty, and never, be it remembered, supported by the produce of surrounding acres. But these country houses on the St. Lawrence above Quebec, besides being so uniquely placed, have, as a group, a character all their own. Some of them date back into the eighteenth century, and have been the homes of men or families who have been the leaders of social and political life since the English con- quest. Spencer Wood, the most notable, is now the Lieutenant- Governor's official residence. It took its name from Spencer Perceval, the English Chancellor of the Exchequer, assassinated in 1812, whose relatives then owned it, and has been the abode of all sorts of illustrious people and the centre of much elegant hospitality. Lord Elgin, Sir Edmund Head, Lord Dufferin, among many others, have all lived there and all loved it; though long before their day, under private owners, its lawns and groves were the constant resort of all that was most distinguished in Canada. Its grounds overhang Wolfe's Cove, while just beyond it is another charming though smaller place, the property of the venerable Sir James Lemoine, who has been more industrious in the preservation of the lore and legends of old Quebec than probably any Canadian living. Further on towards Cap Rouge, beautifully poised upon the edge of the steep overhanging the river, is housed one of the best private collections of French- Canadian literature in the library of Mr. George Fairchild. The Grand Allee, into which the entrance gates of most of these places open at intervals, though they are themselves hidden in woods, soon develops into a country road after leaving the Plains of Abraham. A pleasant round of some sixteen miles can be made by driving along it to Cap Rouge and returning by the village of St. Foy and back to the city by the Kent Gate. Every mile of the way is full of charm, more particularly if it be in early autumn. The Canadian spruce,A COUNTRY ROA0. £5 which is perhaps too insistent in most Lower Canadian land- scapes, here more often yields place to a wealth of maple and witch-elm, of ash and oak, which shade the road when the open farms of the habitant give way for a space before the protected woodlands of some country seat. Glimpses of the great rivef show here and there down below on the left through vistas of park and woodland, one of them being the hollow of Cap Rouge, where Bougainville lay intrenched with his two thousand men, and where Roberville and Champlain each spent their first winters on Canadian soil. The long country drive takes you through the most anciently settled portion of Canada, and after a wet summer the pastures are as green as the Vale of Llangollen, and the homesteads always as white as those of Wales. Scarcely any wheat is grown here, but the oat stubbles glow brightly in the sunlight, and the ripening buckwheat has taken on its ruddy glow. And as you bend back over the ridge towards Quebec, you may look out over the winding St. Charles to the villages of Lorette and Charlesbourg clustering thickly amid the bright carpet of the vale with the wooded heights of the Laurentides rising behind and rolling northward towards a land of lakes and streams. Levis, which guards the opposite gateway of the narrows, is practically a new town, and with its suburbs has over ten thousand inhabitants. Immense ecclesiastical buildings, semi- naries, monasteries and churches, seem to dominate even this hive of modern industry which concerns itself mainly with lumber. Ferry-boats ply continually between the two towns, but the main object of going to Levis, unless it be to see the Chaudiere Falls, some six miles distant, is to enjoy the striking prospect of Quebec from there afforded. There are some large untenanted forts, built long ago, on higher ground two miles behind the town, which some guide-books tell the visitor cover the site of the English batteries that laid Quebec in ruins ! It is perhaps needless to remark that Monckton's guns would have been tolerably harmless at a three-mile range, and that, as a matter of fact, his batteries were placed as near the shore as the ground permitted.56 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. But, once again, the neighbourhood of Quebec is an exhaus- tive subject, either for visitor or writer, and the spirit in which it should be undertaken is not precisely in attune with the mam objects of this book. One's musings here, and indeed all over Lower Canada, are almost bound to be of the reflective and retrospective kind. At any rate, in making the six-mile journey to the Falls of Montmorency, whether by the light railway or by road through the village and seigneury of Beauport, it is impos- sible to be in an up-to-date frame of mind, or crave for an inspection of the huge cotton mills which I have already alluded to as standing at the junction of the river with the St Lawrence, much to the detriment of that classic spot. Now the whole north bank (though the river as a matter of fact runs north-east and south-west) of the basin of Quebec, from the mouth of the St. Charles and the lower town, is occupied by the old seigneury of Beauport, the village of that name standing at the mouth of its small stream about half way between the above-named points. Trains run frequently throughout the day, and you may alight at Beauport station, if historically in- clined, and visit the site of the old manor-house where Montcalm had his headquarters throughout the siege. It was burned down some twenty odd years ago, and was the home of Colonel Gugy, who came into possession of what represented the seigneury early in the last century, and his family still own such part of it as the commutation of the seigneurial rights and other changes have left intact. Among other relics they have from the cellars of the old house, which was built in 1660, is a bottle of white wine from Montcalm's private store. Here com- mences the famous ridge which was so strongly fortified by the French for its whole extent of three miles to the gorge of the Falls, and that was unsuccessfully assaulted in the manner already related by Wolfe on July 31st. You may travel beneath it by the railroad, or above it on the highway, the latter carrying you between a continuous row of habitants' houses with their narrow strips of meadow land running to the brink of the slope, where for so many weeks lay the greater part of the military force of Canada watching Wolfe's movements upon the water and on the further shores with such growingFALLS OF MONTMORENCY. [To face p. 57-MONTMORENCY FALLS. 57 confidence, till that bitter awakening came in the grey dawn of September 13th. If the Falls of Montmorency lay in the heart of the wilderness without any help from civilisation's mellowing hand, and dumb as regards any historic association, they would still be famous* A tumultuous river, as large as many an English stream whose name is a household word, falls -sheer over a cliff two hundred and sixty feet in height into a boiling pool. But all around the cliffs of the gorge are pleasant groves and gardens and pasture lands tributary to the Old Kent House, where her late Majesty's father resided when commanding the garrison of Quebec, and that has quite recently, after a chequered existence in private hands, become a hotel. Mr. Herbert Price, too, has a charming cottage near the brink of the Falls, full of historical curios and set amid pretty gardens, where a row of cannon collected from various centres of ancient strife, or fished up from the bottom of Canadian waters, strike a grim and reminiscent note amid a lovely Arcadian scene. From a platform about half-way down the cliff, built for the many visitors who annually come here, a superb view of the great cataract is had. The cliffs on the further shore sweep backward in lofty naked walls. Here from height to height, from the extreme left of the Beauport lines to the main camp of the British, Wolfe's and Montcalm's soldiers, says Major Knox, who was one of the former, used to practise their marksmanship on one another, while the great guns of their respective batteries hurled shot and shell in somewhat futile fashion as it proved across the yawning chasm. Down below yonder, where in glittering shallows the Montmorency river ripples over the flats into the St. Lawrence, is where Townshend forded across with his two thousand men, on the fated 31st of July, to support Wolfe's attack on the Beauport ridge, which hapless venture occurred some half-mile to the east of the Falls, where a roadway slants up the grassy steep behind a cluster of houses. When Quebec was in the full heyday of its social glory, the Falls of Montmorency were a noted winter gathering place, and ice-cones formed by the spray rising to a great height were the joy of tobogganists. Enough water, however, is now abstracted58 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. from the river for the electrical purposes of the city to have reduced these cones to insignificance. Crossing the bridge above the Falls, which carries the high road to St. Anne's, you may turn in to the right and wander about the fields sloping down the long green ridge to the St. Lawrence, and pick out the traces of Wolfe's camp. Among many homesteads of later date the original farm-house is still standing in which the young General lay chafing in the fever of illness and despair for so many days before deciding to strike his camp here and move up the river to that final effort which reversed the situation in a stroke, and perhaps changed the history of the world. The long, low-raftered typical French-Canadian cottage which was Wolfe's headquarters is not, I think, generally familiar nor mentioned in guide-books, but it is easily identified in the old military plans of the siege, as the only old house in the locality, and its age is indisputable. The family who occupy it now have been on the spot ever since, and though quite uneducated peasants, have sufficient traditions of the affair to point out the spot where the General's bed stood in a loft of prodigious length under an open roof of fine old timbers and picturesquely littered with spinning-wheels and the various lumber of past and present generations of peasant life. For many miles above the bridge the Montmorency is a tumbling, rocky, broad stream, bordered with woods, and abounding in even more than such share of beauty as naturally belongs to such kind of scenery. From Montmorency the little railway runs down the shores of the St. Lawrence to St. Anne de Beaupre, some fifteen miles beyond—a spot luminous in the annals of the French-Canadian Church and familiar by name to everyone in North America from the thousands of pilgrims who flock there. St. Anne itself is a village of some thousand inhabitants, lying just opposite the lower point of the island of Orleans. The church, whither in round numbers one hundred and fifty thousand pilgrims annually turn their steps, is itself a modern though a very fine one, and was created by the Pope a shrine of the first order and a Basilica in 1887. The avowed object of the pilgrims is the cure of their disorders. The church is full of crutches andST, ANNE DE BEAUPRE. [To face p. 59.ST. ANNE DE BEAUPRE. 59 votive offerings, and the medical faculty no doubt have suffered considerably from the reputation acquired by this celebrated shrine. The motives of the large crowds that, to the great benefit of the railway companies, though thousands come afoot, now foregather there, is doubtless mixed, and it is happily not my business to analyse them. On July 26th, the feast-day of the saint, there are great doings in the village, in which tourists from every part of North America take a hand. On such occasions the pious and the impious, the devout and the scoffers, the simple superstitious peasant and the people who regard him as they would a grandfather's clock or a Dutch tile, all mix together in a surging crowd. Of course there was an original church of St. Anne. It was built in 1658, but for safety's sake was demolished and rebuilt out of the same material not long ago, and now stands near the imposing struc- ture which contains the relic of the saint that works such wondrous cures. All around St. Anne, too, is a pleasant country, of bright, dancing streams plunging out of the always neigh- bouring Laurentians; of hay-fields, orchards, pastures and home- steads, occupied for generations by the same unambitious but contented owners, and wearing the look which all French Canada wears, of harbouring a people who belong to the soil, and whose thoughts are not coquetting with some old-world past or some new-world future. Strenuous Canada—British Canada, that is to say—complains that the French assume to themselves alone, in ordinary speech, the name of Canadians, which is true, nor could you perhaps expect such a people to reconsider these ancient terms after so long a monopoly of them. The vision of the Anglo-Canadian soars over forests, mountains and prairies. His patriotism has kept pace with federation. The village church is nothing to him, or very rarely so, while the soil or the water power of British Columbia is very much the same as the soil or water power of Ontario, if it serve his purpose better. Local attachment is not wholly wanting in the man of Ontario, but it bears no comparison to the point of view of the French- Canadian, who is individually as much cut off from his European antecedents as if he were a Chinaman. To the most illiterate Anglo-Canadian the "old country" of his grandfather6o CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY* whence he sprang are tangible facts. The habitant, in this sense, has no " old country." Artificial, but ineffectual methods are resorted to by faddists or politicians to persuade him that he has an interest in the doings of modern Paris and modern France* But only think of it! Recall for a moment his long isolated past. Consider when and how and by whom French Canada was settled, and how old France treated her. Remember the early crystallisation of the first batches of emigrants and the absence of any serious influx after the seventeenth century; then the conquest of the country by England, and finally the French Revolution! There is absolutely no parallel between the links which bind the most representative classes in Ontario to Great Britain and the utter lack of connection between French Canada and France. When an unadaptable type of Englishman arrives in Canada his attitude is often the subject of local jest, but on those rare occasions when a native of old France, and particularly a native of Paris, descends upon the rural districts of Quebec, the mutual criticism which is aroused far transcends, I believe, anything that is ever witnessed among Anglo-Saxons of similar situation. To describe with any attempt at detail a province which is about the size of England and France combined, is manifestly out of the question in three chapters. Its rural life, however, has everywhere a sufficient uniformity for our purposes here. So I would suggest that the reader accompany me on one of the Richelieu and Ontario Company's steamers for some ninety miles down the river to Murray Bay, this last being as good a point as the ordinary tourist could make for, who wishes to form acquaintance with some of the best accessible scenery and a typical rural community in the French province. Any- thing, too, that one may have to say about Lower Canada in general, may just as well be said from such a vantage-point as upon the ramparts of Quebec. The most striking aspect under which the old city can be viewed is from the river below, when its towers, spires and battlements are standing out high to heaven against the red flush of a setting sun, and its less inspiring details are wrapped in kindly shadow. But it is fair enough on a summer morningDOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE. 61 as you glide away from it towards the point of Orleans on the deck of one of the comfortable steamers of the line that does most of the passenger traffic down the river. This last, too, is none the worse for being of the floating hotel type, and during the night will have come down from Montreal, bringing its complement of passengers bound either for Quebec or one of the numerous down-river summer resorts to which it plies. Rain and cold, though to be deplored on other grounds, offer no discomforts in these steamers. No shelter, however, can save the mortal man who is susceptible to the other and even worse kind of discomfort, though rough days in the summer months are in a very great minority. For twenty miles, for its entire length that is to say, the steamer hugs the shores of the fertile and long cultivated island of Orleans. Villages all aglow with bright-coloured houses, imposing churches and blooming woods fringe the water line. On the swelling ridges behind are mile after mile of neat farms and substantial farm-houses, almost all of which in one way or another contrive some picturesque touch, and here and there even suggest an old seigneurial manor-house. On the main- land, to the south, similar villages and like churches follow at regular intervals, while on the green slopes which divide them, and along the water line, the white houses of the habitants trace themselves in a continuous chain. Passing the marshy levels of the lower point of Orleans, the steamer draws under the northern shore of the river, and for some thirty miles the Laurentian Mountains, thickly clad with spruce, birch and cedar, rise sheer out of the water to quite imposing altitudes, Mount Tourmente and Cape Gribaune reaching some two thousand feet, and Les Eboulements further on considerably more than that. They are rugged and imposing these lofty walls of limestone, to which the evergreens cling so tenaciously as only to permit glimpses here and there of the naked rock and to partly hide the thin cataracts that now and again come leaping down their face like threads of silver. The further shore, by now some dozen miles away, grows indistinct as the Isle aux Coudres, a fertile island some six miles in length, shuts it out altogether for the moment. About a62 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. thousand people here work out their destinies, tenants of the Laval University who own the island and all the mainland to the isle of Orleans; and common report declares them to be reactionary even above their fellows. Wolfe speaks in one of his despondent letters of occupying the island for the winter, should he unhappily fail to take Quebec. At Baie St Paul the frowning sea-wall gapes wide open and makes room for a sheltered bay, giving at the same time a glimpse of a considerable town and rolling uplands well covered with homesteads spreading away behind it to a background of dim blue mountains. Another five-and-twenty miles of bold and lofty coast line, broken only by a couple of villages, or by snug coves, with a white glimmer of pebbly beach shining between the blue of the water and the black shade of cedars and spruces, and Malbaie, so called by Champlain, and now commonly known as Murray Bay, opens wide to view. Quite a generous gap is this in the stern, lofty coast line, a couple of miles perhaps from cape to cape ; and over the six-mile sweep of the bay, both by the shore and on the slopes behind it, stand summer cottages of every degree, from the two-roomed shanty to the imposing mansion of the rich American. In the centre of the bay, where the Murray river, clear and strenuous, comes rushing down into shallow flats, stands the French village, and away back into the country for miles the homesteads of the habitants cover the lower hills. Behind this quaint and ancient civilisation lies range upon range of the Laurentian Mountains, an infinity of glorious back country, a network of trout-haunted lakes and streams and untrodden forests, where the bear and cariboo are as numerous as these noble animals can reasonably be expected to be out of story-books. But the human aspect of Murray Bay would be perhaps more to the point here than the trout and game, as it includes the habitant in his pristine state as well as the Anglo-Canadian of the other extreme on his holiday. Now Murray Bay is not a bathing place to any appreciable extent, for the water is too cold. The summer climate, though sometimes providing a few days as hot or a trifle hotter than any we know in England, is on the whole cool, bracing, and atA SUMMER RESORT. ^3 times cloudy. The visitors are mostly Canadians and Americans of the well-to-do class, and they come here to lead an active life and to be braced up after the heats of Toronto or New York. There are golf links which should some day be good, and they are patronised by great numbers of both sexes, the average of play being about the same as in a similar concourse of Britishers, brought promiscuously together on some green other than those where the crack golfers foregather. All these St. Lawrence summer resorts fifteen or twenty years ago were almost exclusively the haunts of Canadians of taste and dis- cretion, whose object was to throw off the trammels of the city as well as its labours, and enjoy life in various degrees of sim- plicity. The recent American element has altered this a good deal, and, being for the most part wealthier, has succeeded in setting the fashion, and giving a more elaborate tone to social life. The residential quarter of Point-au-Pic runs along the western shore of Murray Bay, and climbs the slopes which trend gradually upward to lofty wooded steeps that shut out the interior and sufficiently proclaim its broken nature. Summer cottages of neat and varied shapes, often enclosed within shady lawns, line the highway and the wooden side-walks. Scattered about on the slopes above, are the larger and more elaborate residences of people whc^ make the place their regular holiday quarters, and of these a majority are Americans. For the most part these houses are of wood, and are designed in that happy blend of elegance and simplicity for which the work of the modern American architect is conspicuous, deep verandahs being naturally a prominent feature. The jerry-builder who has ruined the appearance of most places of resort upon the British coast, has no existence in such a spot as this. The plainest wooden cottage built by the most untutored native as a commercial investment, is at the worst unobjectionable in clean white paint and green shutters, while the more imposing style of mansion is generally the freehold of the visitor, who naturally does his utmost to show his taste in exteriors, as well as to make himself comfortable within doors. A liberal use of local wood in the matter of walls and ceilings gives the interior of these.delectable summer abodes a suggestion of the surrounding64 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. atmosphere. An acre or two of ground, usually sloping, gives scope for enterprise in tree-planting and landscape gardening, while the views from window or balcony over the waters of the bay, the bold upstanding promontories that guard it, the distant hills and villages of the southern shore, the great steamers ploughing their way to Liverpool or Quebec are wholly satisfying. Social life naturally flourishes where a permanent summer colony exists, and provides a focus of attraction to the transient visitors of like degree, while two large hotels contri- bute their quota to the exotic population of pleasure and health seekers. American fads and fashions so prevail in these Lower Canadian watering-places, that to linger in them would almost seem outside our business here. Still, the Canadians, though somewhat begrudging the vanishing simplicity of their old haunts, fall for the most part into line. When Americans get hold of a pose they drive it hard. At the present time men and women under fifty, when ruralising, put away their hats and caps for six days in the week, and not only walk the streets and hills bareheaded but scour the country on horseback or in caleches in the same extremely unbecoming fashion. For no one, I presume, maintains that the human head, when bare to the winds of heaven and resembling a last year's bird's nest, is a thing of beauty; and when surmounting a male or female figure attired by a New York artist looks ridiculously incongruous as well as deplorably untidy. All sorts of make-believes by way of explanation are tendered by the followers of what is, of course, only a transient fad. I have been assured that it makes the hair strong. I don't know whether this is seriously meant, but it must certainly make it very dirty. In any case, the spectacle of a couple of otherwise well-groomed matrons, driving hatless along a lonely dusty country road with grey locks flying in the wind, is not an edifying one, and I have seen it frequently. I wonder what Pierre thinks of such an apparition as he rakes up his Timothy on the other side of the fence ? Riding has become fashionable of late in American social circles. The weedy but hardy French-Canadian horses are inAMERICAN SUMMER FASHIONS. 65 great demand, and squads of gilded youths in tennis shirts, wild heads of hair and knickerbocker breeches, raise the dust in company with equestrians of the fairer sex who might have stepped straight from their chair at breakfast on to their saddles. These are not the artless sons and daughters of the prairie, but very much the opposite. Nor has it anything to do with climate* which at Murray Bay is much the same as the South of England in summer and early autumn. The whole thing is a pose, and will no doubt in time be reversed with equal exaggeration. Road riding will doubtless cease to be the thing, stove-pipe hats will be worn on the golf links, and blue veils on the side- walks. The old-time Scottish golfer who has a proper horror of cricket blazers or shirt sleeves on the links, would almost faint at the contempt with which these unwritten traditions are treated by his American disciple, who steps up to the tee coatless and cap- less and with his sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, as if about to engage in a boxing contest or a lawn tennis competition. A propos of the hatless ladies, I have been told that it is a matter of ambition to return to the haunts of fashion in the Eastern States burned to a brick red, and that even freckles are for the time being regarded as anything but a blemish. These things may seem frivolous in the narration, but then, the Americans are a feature of Canadian holiday life, even as they are becoming a power in Canada. Having fired these innocuous shafts, I must correct any false impressions therein conveyed and hasten to say that there is a great deal of charming society in the summer season at all these places. Americans of a good stamp and many of the nicest people from Quebec, Montreal and Toronto foregather there. Stars and stripes and the Union Jack flutter alternately from lawns and housetops. Canadians and Americans support the same churches, sing in the same choirs, play together on the links, join in the same picnics. The French-Canadian as a visitor is much less in evidence, certainly the French-Canadian of this class. The curious cleavage between the races is maintained even in vacation time; and they seem to haunt, if not always different places, certainly different quarters in the same place. There has been a considerable amount of sore feeling engendered in various C. F66 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. places of late years by the raising of tricolour flags in con- spicuous spots at inopportune moments. Even with a reasonable allowance for racial sympathies, it is not easy, with the remem- brance of the past attitude of Great Britain towards the French- Canadians, to do otherwise than resent this kind of thing. It is possible to imagine the flying of the tricolour as a perfectly harmless bit of domestic decoration, though the flag itself is, of course, ludicrous as an emblem, seeing that it represents every- thing that the French-Canadian is not; but if " flaunted " it is more than ludicrous, it is poor and petty, and might well make the philosopher wonder if conciliation and kindness were worth while in the case of a victorious nation. On the other hand, I have seen a waggon load of French school-children helping to celebrate some local jubilee by waving of a forest of miniature Union Jacks. Now Murray Bay, as regards the old village and neighbour- hood, has an exceedingly picturesque history. At the annexation of Canada to the British Empire, it was a scantily populated seigneury, which, through the departure or death of its former lord, had fallen into the gift of the British crown. No more property after this date was granted under the feudal system, and those of Mallbaie, with the exception of Gaspe, were the only seigneuries that ever escheated to the King of England. They were granted in this case by General Murray, then in command at Quebec, to two Highland officers of the garrison, Lieutenant Nairn and Major Fraser. The former had the west bank of the Murray River, the latter the east; each seigneury being of some three leagues frontage, and seven in depth. A manor house was built upon either side of the little harbour in 1761, or thereabouts, and direct descendants in the one case, and in the other representatives by inheritance of these Scottish seigneurs dwell there to this day and own what the changed laws have left of the ancient domains.1 The buildings have been added to or rebuilt in both instances, but the sites are the same, and the big trees remain to preserve some dignity and signifi- cance to these relics of transatlantic feudalism., But the curious part of the story remains to be told. 1 One of them has recently been sold.A RACIAL CURIOSITY. 67 Now there was but a scanty French population living in those days on the Murray River, and when Nairn and Fraser, like many other officers, left the service in the prospect of a long peace and entered into this novel kind of inheritance, many of their men went with them and were very readily allotted lands in the broad and thinly settled domains of their old chiefs. So these trusty sergeants and corporals, all bachelors probably and Scotchmen, settled down among the French habitants in this remote valley and of course lost no time in taking unto themselves wives from among them. Their children, certainly their grand- children, as was inevitable, lost both their language and their creed (though some of the Highlanders may have been Catholics) and became French-Canadians in both, and indeed all, respects. To-day, for instance, the Warrens are the leading and most numerous family in trade and agriculture in the valley, together with Blackburns, McNicholls, McLeans and others, all of them absolutely French and completely merged with their French neighbours. The chief notaire of Murray Bay, who also represents the district in the Lower House at Ottawa, kindly showed me the old maps of the two seigneuries, with the original surveys, regarding which the reader may be reminded that an elementary feature in all French-Canadian land- scape are the long narrow fields and holdings. The French system of survey measurement and land allotment was funda- mentally different from the British of the States and Upper Canada. The latter went in, speaking broadly, for squares, with farm-houses convenient to the fields, but in consequence isolated from one another. The French divided up the country after the fashion of town lots, with a narrow frontage on main road or river and a correspondingly narrow strip of great length in the rear, a plan conducive to sociability but inconvenient for field labour. The arpent, the pre-revolutionary unit measurement of French land remains so in Canada to this day. It is oblong, with a narrow front of about sixty yards. The original holding was usually three arpents front, or about a hundred and eighty yards (to use approximate figures), and of sufficient depth to make a farm of about a hundred and sixty acres, frequently, how- ever, divided longitudinally. These strips, along road or river, F 268 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. usually ran back into the original forest, which receded with the owner's industry further and further from the house, till fire and fence wood, as well as the most recently opened grain field, entailed quite a lengthy expedition. When in course of time these front lots were occupied a line was run and a fresh road opened at the back of them, and fresh surveys made. In many parts of French Canada the farming lands lie in narrow valleys or troughs, with very little space in which to expand, being shut in by hills or mountains, unprofitable to the farmer. The difficulty here has not been settled by emigration as would have been the case among Anglo-Canadians, but rather by sub- division, which, running still on the frontage and longitudinal system of the French gives a country road somewhat the appearance of an endless village street with attenuated strips of farming lands vanishing into the distance on each side of it. There is much to be said for the system as opposed to the loneliness which has often been a real horror to the pioneers in the newer Anglo-Canadian settlements. The seigneurial system which flourished, or rather languished, in its pristine incongruity till that date, was abolished in 1857 by law, with equitable compensation. I have looked through old books containing all the seigneuries into which French Canada was divided about the year 1800, and every particular connected with them. The complications were manifold, but the Canadian seigneurs had always been a very mixed and a very uneven body of men as regards origin and means and personnel. Only a few of them in the first half of the nineteenth century survived in the character their name would imply. Some of these were high-bred gentlemen of ample means, leaders in Quebec or Montreal society (for there never was any real country society in the province); some of them were country lawyers, millers or shopkeepers; others peasants or mechanics. Mr. Lambert, who lived for some time in Lower Canada and is one of the most observant authorities for the opening years of the nineteenth century, says :—"The Noblesse and Seigneurs have almost dwindled into the common mass of the vulgar; and their estates and seigneuries have been divided among their children or have fallen into the hands of opulent BritishMURRAY BAY. 69 merchants." The seigneury was a complicated organisation. Heaven forbid that I should enlarge here on the mysteries of franc-alleu and censive, of propres and lods et ventesy but roughly speaking the seigneur had his mill where his tenants ground their grain at a toll of one-fourteenth ; his unoccupied land that he could do what he liked with, clear and farm it, or leave it in forest; and his rented land, held by tenants on secure tenure subject to a very small rent in kind or cash and to fines on sale and other occasions familiar in feudal and manorial custom. When the British Government abolished what had become a tiresome and somewhat farcical situation, the tenants of seigneuries were allowed to commute their rents for a lump sum. As a direct illustration on values, it may be stated that an average eighty-acre farm on the Murray Bay seigneuries, which it must be remembered, howeyer, were of quite second-rate value, for reasons of remoteness, was commuted for twenty-five dollars, or five pounds. Some of the farmers, however, did not think it worth while to become freeholders even at this trifling expenditure, and preferred to continue paying a dollar a year for their whole farms to the seigneur, a tribute which the agent tells me is by no means easy to gather in ; and the difficulty certainly does not arise from poverty. The old village of Murray Bay, so furbished up with American and Canadian dollars, stands at the spot where the clear and turbulent waters of the Murray break out on to shallow flats, covered and exposed every turn of the clock by the tides of the St. Lawrence. An imposing church of wood, painted white, with a lofty spire and vast roof of# red shingles, stands open to the passer-by, who will find within the pictures, carving, gilding, candles and statuary that everywhere speak so eloquently of the undisputed sway of the Roman Church over its flock in this corner of the earth. A single street by the riverside represents the village, its stores, offices, and residences, picturesque enough in their varied colours, their gables, angles and galleries, and1 rustling maple leaves, and the air of animated leisure worn by the inhabitants, who regard the Anglo-Saxon tourists whisking through from the gay quarters towards Point-au-Pic with an70 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. unfathomable expression! Over the chemist's door the pestle and mortar still hangs as a sign, while the tailor's shop is marked by a pair of black scissors painted on a yellow board. The English language is a sore trial to some even of the nota- bilities of the little town, while the populace in general makes no pretence whatever to its mysteries. A French-Canadian judge told me a good story of a habitant neighbour of his, who, with difficulty, and spurred on only by necessity, had achieved a sufficient measure of English for some particular purpose. A laborious study of the English newspapers of Quebec formed part of his curriculum, and at this particular moment they were much exercised on the "Dual language" question in official life. One day the habitant came to the judge in evident perturbation of mind, and wanted to know what this thing meant. " I have no objection to English," he said, " and can get along with it pretty well now, but as for this Dual language, I'll have nothing to do with it whatever." The poor man thought he scented another alien tongue to be grappled with in the near future. The Canadian peasantry have the same admiration for stout- ness in the fair sex as the Parisian bourgeoisie. A middle-aged American lady of deserved popularity and comfortable pro- portions, but no pretensions to distinction of face or form, was surprised one day and, as she frankly admitted, not a little flattered to hear on good authority that a conspicuous native had declared that she and Mrs. A-were the two handsomest women in-. Now Mrs. A-weighs tv/o hundred pounds, but my American acquaintance, who tells the story with much gusto against herself, unfortunately followed the matter up in the expectation of further compliments ; but was disgusted to find it was wholly a question of avoirdupois with her unknown admirer. Across the river mouth, which is here spanned by a suspension bridge, the hills along whose base the coast road continues to run are clad with the beautiful foliage which surrounds the seigneurial buildings of Cap a l'Aigle. The village of that name three miles further on at the point of the bay is a repetition on a more modest scale of the Murray Bay, or rather Point-au-Pic, settlement. It is less fashionable, and therefore, as some claim,HOLIDAY LIFE ON THE ST. LAWRENCE. 71 more, enjoyable, and commands still bolder views of the northern shore, being perched so high up on the hill slopes. It is patronised more exclusively by Canadians, and the British flag flutters practically unchallenged from the roof of every summer cottage and abiding-place. It will have been gathered, perhaps, that flags are much in evidence across the Atlantic, and this probably arises from the close neighbourhood of two rival if friendly peoples, and is an excellent habit. With such an abundance of outdoor, al fresco life as the American climate permits, to the educated classes on both sides of the line in their summer vacations vocal music is a conspicuous item, and national anthems become continually a patriotic obligation. It is needless to relate that these are sung with the utmost impartiality. There is even an adapted stanza of" God Save the King" in request on festive occasions, which expresses in suitable and glowing terms a pious wish for the unity and friendship of the two great English-speaking peoples. Evening water picnics, with a return by moonlight, to distant coves on the shores of the St. Lawrence are a delightful form of entertainment, engaged in by the older and more knowing habitues of this coast. On these occasions immense bonfires are contrived from the abundant driftwood that is washed ashore. Ample supplies of good things are spread upon the narrow beach that lies between the moonlit water and the gloomy forests of cedar, spruce and birch that rise up like a wall in the background for a thousand feet or so. The lights of villages on the far shore of the great river fifteen miles away,twinkle from point to point—Kamouraska, St. Andre, Riviere du Loup. And when the great bonfire is lit and flares out on river and forest, and on the rows of canoes upon the shiny beach, there is sure to be someone with a great repertoire of French-Canadian songs,, and several more who, having spent half of the summers of their lives in these parts, can support a leader in the local ballad music with both accuracy and enthusiasm. Then comes the row or paddle home beneath the stars and under the shadow of the towering coast. Such, more or less, with many other varieties of enjoyment, is holiday life on the St. Lawrence in half a score of pleasant places sprinkled up and down its shores.72 CANADA IK THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. All this may seem to have little to do with the people of Lower Canada, which is true. But then the province of Quebec is playing such an important part as the playground of Canadians from all sections, and the business it does in enter- taining them, and still more Americans, is quite one of its greater industries. Its salmon rivers fetch rents equalling those of Norway or Scotland, though perhaps better salmon fishing can be had both here and in the maritime provinces from hotels or their equivalents than could be got by the casual angler in the older countries. Vast tracts of virgin forest full of streams and lakes teeming with trout in the great back country to the north of the St. Lawrence are leased by Canadian and American sporting clubs, who build lodges in them of various shades of capacity and comfort—sometimes accessible on wheels over backwood roads, sometimes only by trails through the woods, over which every necessary has to be carried for great distances on the backs of men or ponies. It is difficult to grasp the enormous extent of trout-holding waters that exists in Northern Quebec. An acquaintance who knows as much of this country from this point of view, probably, as any amateur in Canada, assures me that there are numberless lakes in his own club tract not only unfished as yet by mortal man, but that there are many unmarked on any map, and some that have not even been seen. I am not now alluding to the Hudson Bay or the North Pole, but to districts reasonably accessible to sportsmen, and indeed already appropriated by them so far as appropriation can apply in these immense wilds of mountain and forest. Nor is it only salmon and trout of every size and variety that are the objects of the sportsman in these regions, but moose, bear and deer are found in moderate abundance throughout the whole country. Of the former, only two in a season may be killed by any single sportsman. There is, of course, some duck-shooting everywhere, but its quality does not bear comparison with that of Ontario, and still less with that of the far West of Canada. Winged game in the Canadian forests is not a serious item. The so-called partridge, or ruffed grouse, takes to trees for one thing, and for another is nowhere thick enough to afford really good shooting, and there is virtuallyMURRAY BAY. [To face p. 73UP THE MURRAY. 73 nothing else but a few woodcock in their season in certain spots. But, with the reader's permission, we will take a caliche in fancy, leave the coast line with its exotic population, and face one of the rough and steep country roads that lead up the valley of the Murray River, and traverse the farming lands that spread inland for ten or fifteen miles from the St. Lawrence. It is atypical French-Canadian scene; the clear, mountain- born river sweeping from one side of the valley to the other, fretting in rapids, or swirling in deep brown pools between great flats of shingle and overhanging banks clad with alder, willow and spruce. It might be the Usk or the Dee, but for the stray saw logs or strips of bark that here and there go round in the eddies, and tell the inevitable Canadian tale of lumbering and sawmills somewhere. In the flat of the valley and up either slope stretch the long parallels of the habitants' farms. " Long fields of barley and of rye " very literally meet the sight here, though they do not, as in the poet's Lincolnshire, " clothe the wold and meet the sky," for the near distance is intercepted by wooded hills, in which these long parallelograms lose themselves. The homesteads front the road, in near and sociable proximity ; they vary slightly in type, but the picturesque storey and a half, with far projecting eaves, and dormer windows in the roof, is the prevailing one. Then there is a kind of mushroom roof, inde- scribable and unlike any other known to man. The colouring leans towards white paint or whitewash, with doors and windows prinked out in brighter hues ; but there is a happy mixture of other tints, pink as in Normandy and Wales being popular, while some affect blue or saffron, or even here and there a light shade of green. I have seen a white house with green roof and red chimneys, also a green-coloured house with red doors and brown roof. The latter is of cedar shingles, is often painted, and of a dark red for choice. Annual creepers twine about the verandahs. Little gardens of mixed vegetables, fruit and flowers, show much luxuriance and bright colouring in August, while the small patch of tobacco which every habitant raises for his own consumption is just ripening into what they call in Virginia the " rough leaf." A rank production is this " Catholic tobacco,'' as74 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the English lumbermen of the Ottawa call it. Nothing, I imagine, but a hardy constitution, combined with French thrift, would venture overmuch on it Grass after all is the main crop between the post and rail or snake fences that enclose these long fields, and excellent milk and butter it produces. Sometimes a horse mower will be clicking through the clover and timothy, though more often in these belated regions, the men of the household will be bending their backs to the old-fashioned scythe, and the women will be out in the meadow tying the hay into the small bundles in which the French-Canadian handles it, both in the field and in the market. I do not know whether the average barn or the outdoor baking ovens of the habitant is the more picturesque, but there is cer- tainly nothing to compare with either of them from this point of view in all North America. The barn is of logs, which sounds commonplace, but it is long and low, and possessed of much detail suggestive of the middle ages, and is, moreover, thatched with reeds which have much the appearance of straw. The oven, often erected on the opposite side of the road from the house, is an entirely uncanny-looking contrivance, and resembles some slumbering mammoth of stone that has crawled for shelter into an open shed in past ages and petrified there. The country is virtually open and clear of timber to the foot, and sometimes nearly to the summit, of the hills, where the pine forest begins its interminable sway, clothing every successive ridge with a garment of perennial green, and fading only into grays and blues where loftier and remoter mountains cut the bright blue of the Canadian sky. The foreground, however, has all the look, and indeed has mostly the habit, of quite an old civilisation. It is the peaceful meadows, shorn this many generations of the crudeness of early settlement; the quaint little homesteads, where self-respecting neatness goes hand in hand with primitive notions ; the fixed habits of the people who dwell in them, that gives the mysterious mountain wilderness behind the greater significance. The roads are tolerable in dry weather, but after rain are sticky, and the pitches are frightfully steep. As in English Canada, no farmer rides on horseback. The habitant and hisRURAL SCENES. 75 wife will be freely encountered in caleche or buggy, coming townwards, while the draught work on farm or road is done wholly in small two-wheeled carts. In August, rows of these conveyances loaded with " blueberries" packed in boxes, driven by their small, wiry, darked-haired owners in straw hats and flannel shirts, will be met coming in from remote country districts to the watering places. Politeness is in the habitant's blood, and the manner in which he often accompanies his " bon jour? by raising his hat to the stranger, might well take away the breath of the American or Upper Canadian accustomed to the off-hand manner of the Western highway. Along by the roadside fences wild flowers blaze at this"lush season of the year. Golden rods, everlastings, blue asters, ox-eyed daisies, and hawberries riot amid the more sombre hues of the bracken, the cedar saplings and the spruce, while the red berries of the mountain ash swing overhead. The glint of water, too, fresh and sparkling, is in every dip of the road as some tributary stream of mountain birth goes burrowing its way through meadowy courses, fringed with alder and willow, towards the Murray. Here, too, you may yet see men and women reaping grain with the old-fashioned hooks. Nay, more than this, I have seen a pedlar staggering from house to house beneath a load of spinning-wheels, and, indeed, the homespun cloth of the habitants finds quite a market among the visitors to the coast. And here, perhaps, a few miles back from the shore, is the most artless provincialism to be found in North America. I do not know precisely where the habitant hailed from who is said to have received the news that His Majesty had succeeded to the throne of Britain with the retort, " Mon Dieu, he must have a big pull with Laurier," but whether true or not it is eminently typical. The quality of land varies in all this north shore country, being mainly of the second and third rate order, and not equal, as a general thing, to that of the south shore or of the Upper St. Lawrence valley. It is mainly grass, as before mentioned, which, with the bright tinted homesteads and the surrounding mountains, gives an almost Welsh-like touch to the atmosphere. It will be of no direct interest to English readers to learn that76 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. these farms are worth from twenty to forty dollars an acre, for though English emigrants of means do all sorts of strange things they have never been foolish enough, to settle in the heart of the French country. It will be of more interest, however, to those curious about the economic conditions of Canada, to learn that estates are mortgaged with extreme frequency, the holder being very often a thriftier neighbour of the mortgagor. It would not be fair, perhaps, to take particular neighbourhoods as samples of all, but it would be less invidious here than in most countries. The French-Canadians as a whole are indifferent farmers. The stock in the fields are too often of the scrub variety, though cattle and sheep in these parts are not very numerous at all, the long hard winters hitting the small owner with merciless force if he be short of keep. The habitant is very far from lazy. Indeed, he is quite a reasonably industrious person; but he works after his own fashion, and does not set manual labour on a pedestal and make a fetish of it, and account every moment of leisure a sin, such as has been in the past so characteristic of Ontario's rural development, both to its gain and loss. From April to October, so long, that is to say, as the season allows him, he works upon his farm early and late, though not so quickly nor so intelli- gently as the Ontario Scotchman. But in the winter the severity of the weather makes outdoor farm work impossible. He has comparatively little stock in the yards to attend to, nor does he leave home and hunt for outside work in the lumber camps with his team, nor, again, take contracts for cord wood so often as his English neighbour. There are thousands of French-Canadians in the lumber trade, and thousands more seek regular employ- ment in New England mills and factories, but the particular Pierre or Jean who owns the paternal farm, so long as he stays in it, regards the winter as a season of rest and merry-making. No people in North America probably enjoy life so much as the French-Canadians. For one thing, they are contented with what they have, a grievous failing, of course, in the eyes of the normal American, and their assets do not include much educa- tion. It is said they keep their houses too hot in winter, with their small rooms and big stoves, and absolute indifference to ventilation. Upper Canadians who go there in the springTHE PARISH CHURCH. 77 tell me that the children look pale and peeky on this account after the winter, while small-pox, though generally of a mild type, is extremely common. They read practically nothing, but sing and dance through the long winter evenings, and the habitant repertoire, though not very exhaustive, and experts say not very good music, never wearies the snow-bound villager. " La claire fontaine " still holds its own, and even " Malbrouck sa va t'en guerre," brought over doubtless by Louis XV.'s soldiers, may be heard in the hay fields by the Murray or the Richelieu. The parish church is almost as large and as decorative in these back districts as in the towns along the St. Lawrence. No matter how poor the land or how remote the markets, provided there are souls to be looked after, an imposing edifice, with gilded spire and vast roof, neatly painted walls and spacious interior replete with pictures and oak carvings, will stand conspicuous and significant. The clergy have their " dime" or tithe, whose collection is legalised by Government. But in a country where virtually the whole rural population are ardent Roman Catholics, there are means of collecting recognised dues, it need hardly be said, almost as efficient as the sheriff himself. The dime was in quite early days reduced to the twenty-sixth part of the grain. The peasants naturally sought refuge from this in hay crops, but the Church countered the move by getting the tax extended not only to hay but to live stock. The dime, however, is liable to voluntary compromise and modifications between a priest and his flock where the conditions are such that it does not work well, and there are, of course, the numerous dues which go to the maintenance of the clergy, besides the funded wealth of the Church. Moreover, there is a church tax of two dollars on all grown males who have no tithable property. It is a common saying among Anglo-Canadians that half the farms in Lower Canada have been mortgaged to build the churches. This is, of course, the hyperbolic interpretation of a plain fact. It will be enough to state here that there has been a considerable amount of money raised for Church purposes by loans of this kind, and the drain upon the resources of the people generally has been, and is,78 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. unquestionable. The Protestant often attributes the unenter- prising condition of Lower Canada to this factor. But this is a favourite axiom of sturdy Protestants everywhere. It is riot our business if the French-Canadian regards his Church and his soul worth spending an eighth, or ninth, or a fifteenth of his income upon. Nor can we draw distinctions between the so-called exactions of the Church and the voluntary gifts of the peasantry.- Most people of enlightened views, and qualified by some sort of knowledge of the world, whether Anglo-Canadians, Americans or Britons, admit that a Roman Catholic peasantry lives under conditions not admirable from a Chicago point of view. In French Canada, the dominion of the Church, though very pronounced, seems fairly free from objectionable traits. As there is no real poverty, an abundance of the primitive neces- sities of life and extremely good wages for all surplus labour in the States or in the lumber camps of Canada, the habitant may or may not find it difficult sometimes to pay his Church dues, but his religion, its forms at any rate, like that of his antithesis, the Welsh Calvinist, is part of his life, though regarded with less enthusiasm. It is mainly the half-educated Protestant that, in his ignorance and lack of imagination, lavishes sympathy upon him, just as he very often thinks it waste of time to paint his own house. Any way, the French-Canadian clergy bear an extremely good character. Like their contemporaries in Ireland, they come almost wholly of peasant stock, though by the same token there are some districts in French Canada whose farmers could not fairly be described under such a designation. They are better educated, I fancy, than the Irish ; and, moreover, they lead their people as the Irish priests once did, and are not poisoned or embarrassed by an atmosphere of bitter party strife, at least not to the same degree, for they have the whole field to themselves. They have, of course, their prejudices and their bigotries. I heard some French priests one day on a river steamboat express- ing a unanimous opinion that the present religious troubles in Franee were due to the machinations of the Freemasons. A couple of young priests who had just returned from a four years' study in Paris told me they thanked God their lot was cast in Canada and not in France, and well they may. Whether they alwaysA FISHING LODGE—QUEBEC PROVINCE. [To face p. 78.CANADIAN PRIESTS. 79 lead their flocks with a due regard to the loyal sympathy that Great Britain's treatment of them has a right to expect belongs to the very wide question of the attitude of French-Canadians generally in these matters. And what little I feel qualified to say about so complicated a question I must reserve for another chapter.( 8o ) CHAPTER IV. The present possessors, whether by virtue ol inheritance or purchase, of the remnant of the old seigneuries still own in many cases the unsettled and wild lands on the estate. Sporting lessees of Government forests often run into the back districts of a seigneury and take a lease of them from the proprietor. The Church, again, owns something like a third of the accessible land in the province, an approximate estimate which will give the reader some notion of its wealth. Yet when a new church is contemplated it is the habitant who is resorted to for the greater part of the money. A plebiscite of the parish or district is taken, and if a majority decides on the undertaking, the rest have to conform, look cheerful, and pay up. The contributions, though equitably assessed, must be a serious drain, and the only way to avoid them is to turn Protestant, a method of escape which, to the credit doubtless of the people, is rarely resorted to. A ^notable instance, however, occurred not long ago of a seigneur voting in the minority on an occasion of this kind. But as he stood in the position, very rare nowadays, of owning all, or nearly all, the territory which the proposed church was to serve, it fell to him to find most of the money. Perhaps if a change of creed on such account could ever be justified it was in this case. At any rate, the gentleman in question changed his, became a Protestant, and left the clerics, with nothing but the memory of their majority to console themselves with. There are a considerable number of Catholic Irish in the province, and their attitude towards the French has been alluded to in the last chapter. They do not readily fuse with them, and for the most part have their own priests under the French bishop. And while speaking on the subject of the Irish Catholics, I was once told a most appalling tale of what befel an Ontario Irish bishop recently translated from the United States, andA ROUGHLY HANDLED BISHOP. 81 unused to the ways of Scottish Highlanders as the breed goes in Canada. For it seems that his Right Reverence, taking a keen interest in some coming election, sent a mandate to the priest of a remote Highland Catholic community to use his pulpit and authority in the interest of the particular man or party, of whom he himself approved. It was in vain that the backwoods vicar represented the futility and worse of such a course with Scottish Catholics, and finally refused point-blank to lend himself to the Irish prelate's mistaken methods. His lordship in high dudgeon then went down in person to berate the recalcitrant priest, and himself to give the parish instructions as to their course of voting. The reception of that infatuated bishop by the clans- men when he refused to take their polite hints and began to bluster makes altogether too painful a tale for telling in these sober pages. I used to think it likely that the highly intelligent drummer who gave it to me, though connected with the district, and insistent as to its veracity, might have been tempted to undue adornment of a really rich episode; but quite recently I have been assured by other good authorities that the tale of the bishop's rough handling was substantially correct, the fact of his having Fenian proclivities making it more readily credible. One leading feature of French-Canadian life I have not yet touched upon, and that is the continuous movement of the superfluous part of the population to the New England factories, and the families of this province are proverbially redundant. A man who frequently drove us last summer was the happy father of twenty-two children, but considered himself in no way a remarkable person. The admonitions of Louis XIV. to the colonists to increase and multiply have stayed with them?* from generation to generation, and, lest they should lose their character in this respect, a law has recently been enacted—a revival of an ancient one—granting a hundred acres to everj| man with twelve children. Being a sociable people they have never been too fond of leaving the old settlements and going permanently into the woods, out of touch with their friends and church, like the Englishmen, and this characteristic has, of course, been sedulously fostered by the priests. So subdivision has gone on to a certain extent. But subdivision has much C. G82 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. shorter limits than in Old France, and the result is an immense emigration to the lumber camps of Canada and the cities of New England. In the latter cases the French go together in swarms, retain their own language and their own customs. One town in New England, for instance, contains nine thousand of them, out of a total population of twelve thousand. But these people do not bid a final adieu to their own country like Britishers or Anglo- Canadian emigrants to the States, nor do they usually become American citizens. Their hearts as a rule remain behind among the long pastures, the bright-hued villages, the tall-spired churches of old Quebec. When they have a few months' pay in their pocket they are very apt to return and visit their friends and make merry for awhile, and when a substantial part of a few years' pay has accumulated, they often return as permanent residents. Others go merely to make enough money to pay off a mortgage on the paternal acres. Sometimes a farmer thus involved and his whole family will emigrate in a body for this laudable purpose, shut up the house, rent the land to a neighbour, and work in the New England factories till enough is saved to return to the old life and a home free of debt. I have myself seen several farmhouses standing shut up and deserted on this account. For though hard living and thrifty in some ways, the habitant has a knack of slipping into debt, even if he has the resolution to go and work himself out of it. As regards subdivision, I have some reason to know there has been much exaggeration in this respect on the part oi picturesque writers dealing with Lower Canada. Very likely the French system of survey has been too much for a good many passing travellers, the majority of the farms being scarcely ever less than one and a half arpents frontage. Each member of the family receives, or is supposed to receive, some share in the property. " I suppose your brother will have his share," said a friend of mine lately quartered for some months in the house of a prosperous habitant farmer not thirty miles from Quebec, and alluding to a younger member who was leaving home. Being answered very promptly in the affir- mative, he presumed on his intimacy to ask the approximate amount. "Well," said the stay-at-home brother, "he will beA HOME-LOVING PEOPLE. »3 quite satisfied, I expect, with five dollars! " And these people were, though illiterate, in a big way, owning 300 acres. The habitant away from the immediate neighbourhood of cities handles incredibly little actual money. The attitude of the younger brother above instanced may seem farcical to the reader, but I think it is fairly typical, for the habitant so contrives his life that a five-dollar bill has a value in his eyes wholly disproportionate to his substance. This love of home is surely an admirable trait ? Upper Canadian patriotism is hearty enough and is growing stronger, but it is somewhat oblivious to localities, and is not hampered to any noteworthy extent by a passion for its native valley or its ancestral acres. It is a happy dispensation of Providence that the French-Canadians should be in possession of the province of Quebec. It is all very well to sniff at their lack of enterprise and their backward ways, but on the whole a country intended by Nature for grass is kept reasonably prosperous and in fairly good order. With many notable exceptions, the soil is indif- ferent. If the British had settled Quebec in former days I firmly believe they would have deserted it for the west in such numbers that its deterioration would be to-day a depressing spectacle. An adventurous, practical, unsentimental Protestant people would have opened up nothing like so much land as the French have, from their very conservatism, but would have moved west to richer soils, under the conditions prevailing in North America; and furthermore the French have given a flavour to the character of the country as a field for the sports- man, traveller, and holiday-maker that is quite invaluable from such a point of view. The province may be roughly divided into three sections. That portion to the north of the river below Quebec; that south of the river and parallel to the United States boundary line ; and, lastly, the region west of Quebec on both sides of the river. The first section loses itself to the north and east in a vast wilderness of forest, water and mountain. The second is a relatively narrow strip, often broken and rugged, but reasonably populous. The third section, i.e., the hundred and seventy miles or so between Quebec and Montreal, has also a vague, wild G 284 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. northland, but otherwise contains the finest farming lands and the most enlightened of the French-Canadian farmers. To the south of it, too, is the old English settlement of the Eastern townships before alluded to, and to be referred to again. No one visiting the Lower St. Lawrence should omit a trip up the Saguenay. The Richelieu Company's steamers already alluded to, which start daily from Montreal, and by way of Quebec call at various points on either side of the river, make their terminus at the head of the Saguenay. Leaving Montreal in the evening, and picking up people all the way down, they ascend the gloomy current of this most remarkable of North American rivers on the second night, to return on the following morning. It is over a hundred miles from the mouth of the Saguenay to Lake St John, whence it issues. For much of that distance this mighty river, averaging about a mile in width, and of almost unknown depth, rolls between gloomy steeps and preci- pices of from eight hundred to two thousand feet in height, too bleak and sterile to carry more than the scantiest vegetation; nor does any sign of humanity beneath them break the solitude that hovers over the face of these grim walls. No fish but an occasional white porpoise breaks the surface of the ice-cold waters, whose depth at least equals the height of the over- hanging steeps, and even the sea-birds and wild-fowl seem to shun the joyless atmosphere of this appallingly sombre flood. Not many craft ply up or down it, and the extreme of its grandeur is achieved where Capes Eternity and Trinity lift a naked pre- cipice for some two thousand feet sheer out of the water. The scenery softens towards Chicoutimi, at the head of navigation, from which a railway leads to Lake St. John, and thence back to Quebec, in another eight or ten hours. This makes a triangular trip, which should be taken by travellers not pressed for time, with a long break at Lake St. John, for here is a veritable oasis in the wilderness of Northern Quebec. The lake itself is over twenty miles in length and breadth, and around its shores and near them dwell a population of some forty thousand people, mainly French, and including a large number of well-to-do owners of good farms by the water's edge. In the lake itself,SALMON AND TROUT FISHING. 85 and in the streams and smaller lakes around, is not only any amount of good fishing, but some excellent hotels for those who prefer that style of life to camping, with its attendant troubles. Directions for the angler are here impossible. The field in Lower Canada is illimitable, though distances are great, and facilities for transportation frequently altering. Good salmon fishing is mostly in the hands of lessees; but there is trouting everywhere in lake and stream, the farther back, of course, it lies, the more numerous and unsophisticated the fish. Indeed, the lack of fastidiousness in the matter of flies and tackle, when the trout are feeding at all, might be something of a draW-^ back in the eyes of some English anglers and detract from the zest of the sport. Time, no doubt, will cure this, and only too fast. At present, however, large baskets of brook trout are taken with flies of a size and hue that would send a normally constituted English or Welsh fish to the bottom for a week if they caught so much as a glimpse of one. A well-known English fisherman, who has frequented the waters of Lower Canada for many years, gives it as his opinion that the Canadian salmon requires precisely the same treatment as his British equivalent, which is natural, as both fish are strangers and pilgrims in their respective rivers, and do not feed on flies like trout, nor yet are accustomed to being flogged for. But the Canadian trout is far more confiding. He may refuse to feed on the top at all for hours or days together, like all trout, but when in a mood would as soon have a large bright fly on sea- trout gut as the neat, delicate quill gnat or an olive dun dressed on single hair, and is not over particular how it is placed before him. In Lake St John there is also a species of small land- locked salmon which ascends the streams, the ouaniche, averag- ing from two to four pounds in weight, the very gamest fish that swims, say all Canadian anglers. In face of the enormous area, not only in Lower Canada, but in the maritime provinces, which is equally prolific of salmon, trout, and sea-trout, from which the visiting angler may choose, he might do worse than take up his quarters at one or other of the hotels on Lake St. John, where he has not only good fishing close at hand, but can get outfits of canoes, guides, etc., for adventuring all kinds86 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. of waters amid this labyrinth of streams. Lake St. John, as above noted, can be reached from Quebec in two hundred and twenty miles by a railroad running for the most part through a wild and romantic country, and touching other fishing stations on its way. In the rich lands which surround the lake there are not only prosperous French-Canadian farmers established, but a colony of Finlanders have lately been introduced, and a reserve of Montaignais Indians exists in the neighbourhood. I had the good fortune to spend a day in this country with the surveyor-general of the province, who knows the whole of this anterior wilderness intimately, having been again and again by the trail leading from Lake St. John to James Bay on Hudson Bay, a distance of four hundred miles as the crow flies. A railway before long will probably traverse this region, and tentative surveys have already been made by the provincial Government. My companion held very strong views indeed on the comparative mildness of the climate, which all through this remote northern forest-covered land is no more severe than that of Montreal, with an actually lighter snowfall. It is undulating rather than mountainous, and traversed only by Algonquin and Montaignais Indians from the reserves and missions in the hunting season. Chicoutimi, at the head of Saguenay naviga- tion, and the only town in this enormous back country, is a busy little lumbering place of three or four thousand souls, as well as a notable Church centre and seat of a bishopric. Above the saw- mills and lumber yards, in curious contrast and strange isolation from the world, rises a cathedral and a bishop's palace, a large convent, a seminary, and a sailor's hospital. This is a great resort, too, of the clergy from all parts for meditation and study, and groups of the black-frocked fraternity may nearly always be seen upon the steamers traversing the Saguenay. And here, too, are one of those great pulp mills, which, thanks to American enterprise, have so largely assisted of late years to swell the wealth of Canada, and particularly of the Lower Province, which has not been so abundantly blessed by Nature as Ontario. Till quite recently, the enormous amount of spruce timber covering the more barren tracts of Canada was regarded as valueless. For lumbering, water communication is a necessity, in order toPULP MILLS. 87 float the logs out of the woods, and lumbering has always been one of the big trades of Canada. Till the western prairies of recent years produced a trifling handful of very large stock- owners or wheat-growers, there were no cattle or wheat kings in Canada, but there have always been lumber kings. When only trees fit for " saw-logs," such as large pine, with certain kinds of hard wood in certain places, were accounted of value, the nearer forests were quickly denuded of their cash-pro- ducing timber, or, in local parlance, "picked over." Timber limits were usually rented from Government for this purpose only, and immense areas of country were rapidly denuded, not of trees, but of such trees as were of value at the time. Lumbering operations pressed further and further into the back country, which, fortunately for the trade in Canada, is almost everywhere a net-work of streams and lakes. As the price of timber fluctuated, so the great advancing wave, to use a rough simile, would leap forward rapidly or stand almost still. In the meantime, however, the Americans began to call for pulp wood for paper-making, and the industry increased. Spruce was the timber in demand, and of this there is comparatively little left to the south of the Canadian line. So the Yankees naturally began to import it from Canada, a process that the Dominion Government justly regarded as improvident from the Canadian point of view, and proceeded to check by legislation. The American capitalists, joined in some cases by Canadians, then commenced to set up mills on the British side of the line, which was, of course, a move in the desired direction. Not only on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, both below and above Quebec, but in Ontario and British Columbia, these pulp mills, representing investments of millions of dollars, have been established to utilise the almost inexhaustible amount of spruce and balsam timber. Some of them not only manufacture the pulp, but the paper itself, which is still better for the Canadians. The American market is practically illimitable, for the pulp at any rate, even if an altered tariff at some future time should hamper the perfected article. Already one or two popular London newspapers are supplied with paper direct from Canada. This pulp and paper business, indeed, is one of the most88 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. satisfactory of the many lines of industry that have contributed towards the quite startling development of Canada in the last few years, from the fact that it operates in regions that have few or no other sources of wealth. The staff of most of these big mills consists of Americans. The skilled paper-makers, too, are at present of the same nationality, and mainly, I believe, Irish- Americans. The average American, even more than the average Briton, will, I feel convinced, read this last statement with surprise. Most of us, I am sure, are under the impression that ward politics, with interludes of not too strenuous or fastidious occupation, cheered by libations of rye whisky, filled the light- footed hours of this class of American. The mass of the labour, though, is of course Canadian. At the great mills at Grand Mere, just behind " Three Rivers," midway between Quebec and Montreal, three hundred horses and two thousand hands are permanently employed, the majority of them French-Canadians; though, as in all lumbering communities, there is a strong admixture of the British element, who follow a calling that in its various degrees is a skilled one. As in ordinary lumbering^ they are divided into camps of forty or fifty men, who fell the spruce and get the logs ready against the time when the streams and lakes are loosened from the grip of winter. This done, they are all paid off, and for the most part "blow" their wages immediately in Three Rivers, Quebec, or Montreal. Temperance has made enormous strides among other classes in Canada in the last twenty years, but the light-hearted shantyman has remained pretty conservative on this point Fresh engage- ments are then made, as the water work, the driving, and rafting, being a department of its own, requires a reshuffling of the force. A friend of mine, who held a responsible post in connection with the lumber camps of this company, which, by the way, is the largest of them all—speaks of quite interesting contrasts between the French of the Ottawa, the ordinary Lower Canadian- French, and those from the distant provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the Acadians of famous memory, in short. These last are good men, but not readily understood by their brethren of the old province, and the two dialects, seeing how far they throw back and the romance of theirSHANTYMEN. 89 respective isolations, should be an attractive study to the French etymologist. The French of the Ottawa, like their British rivals and neighbours on the same famous river and in the same trade, are, perhaps, the most representative type of a people whose calling extends over a line reaching from Halifax to Winnipeg—say, roughly, some two thousand miles. All the recklessness, pugnacity, clannishness, blasphemous tendencies, and rude kindness of heart peculiar to the river driver finds its most complete expression in this almost central depot, if it may so be called, of a wide, wandering breed. Their lives are a compromise between that of navvies and sailors, but have all the romance of the latter, being spent mainly in the wilderness, and for many months at a time in battling with waters, which, though not great in the maritime sense, are formidable enough. The physical qualities appeal to them with a refreshing force, which the farmer and the tradesman, even of new countries, has long done with. Fighting remains a recognised part of life's programme, if not quite so frequent as in former days. The shantyman must, at any rate, have the character of being ready for a rough-and-tumble fight, and these encounters are not much less savage than when I used myself to see something of these same people on their native element some thirty years ago. The Frenchman, however, fights in packs, as anyone familiar with the lumber camps will tell you ; or rather he may fight alone, but he wants his people round him, not necessarily for assistance, but for moral countenance, at any rate. It is only the Scotch or English shantyman that gets into scrapes when quite alone and puts his back against a wall. At the mouth of the Saguenay is Tadousac, occupied by the French even before the founding of Quebec as a trading post, and now a flourishing watering-place, backed by great sand- ridges and pine-trees and a hard country. It may fairly be called the end of north shore civilisation. Several well-known and highly-rented salmon rivers join the St. Lawrence to the east of it, and there are trifling settlements with a pulp mill or two; but Tadousac is the end of regular passenger navigation, and virtually the limit of Canadian habitation on that shore. To the south of the St. Lawrence, civilisation, and a more developedgo CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. one, extends much further east to where the extreme northern point of the Appalachian chain, which commences in Georgia, cul- minates in the wild Highlands of Gasp6, and at Metis abruptly terminates the hundred and fifty miles of villages, farms, and churches which so pleasantly stud the green hill-slopes by the waterside. Nowhere is the old French life more crystallised than in those districts tributary to the flourishing little towns of Riviere de Loup, Kamarouska, Cacouna, and Rimouski. At Metis, however, there is an old Scotch Protestant settlement, where English with a northern accent is still the prevailing tongue. Most of these watering-places are outlets of the lumbering trade, with stations on the Intercolonial Railway, behind which runs the long but not lofty chain known generally as the Notre Dame Mountains ; and behind these, again, touching the borders of Maine and Vermont, is the quite unique district of the Eastern Townships. Here, with Sherbrooke, a prosperous town of twelve thousand people, and Richmond, of smaller size, as its chief centres, lies a block of Ontario, as it were, in the heart of French Canada. A fine rolling country of admirable grass land, watered by pellucid streams and fringed and intersected by wandering outlying spurs of the green mountains of Vermont. Till the end of the eighteenth century, being neither a great river valley nor yet well situated, save in propinquity to their ancient enemies, the New Englanders, this country had been left a wilderness by the French. The British Government had it surveyed on the section and township principle of Ontario, just then being opened, and it was gradually occupied by United Empire Loyalists from the States and by other Britons from the old country. It became, and has remained, a large British settlement in the middle of the French province of Quebec, and known as the Eastern townships. Some of the finest farms in Canada are even still to be seen there, though the glory of "The townships" has somewhat departed. As in Ontario, numbers of Englishmen of good family and education settled there in olden times; churches, colleges, schools, and towns arose; the narrow but beautiful valley of the St. Francis bloomed in timothy and clover meadows, while the forests vanished from the rolling uplands and gave place to good crops of grainTHE EASTERN TOWNSHIPS. 91 and nutritious pasture lands. Many American farmers in the early nineteenth century, attracted by the country, drifted over from Maine and Vermont and became Canadians. The plainer people even now are somewhat more like eastern Americans in speech and habit than those of Ontario; but, as already noted, there was a large leven of educated English families, who formed for two or three generations something approaching an aristocracy through out the Townships. The district had, and still has, great attractions. The contour of the country is beautiful. The hills are often lofty, as those of Devonshire or the Welsh borderland, and clothed with hanging woods of ash and oak, of maple, birch or spruce, which make a rich setting for the green pasture lands and pleasant homesteads below. Long avenues of giant willows and graceful elms overshadow the valley roads, and as these surmount the higher ridges you may often look far away to hazy mountains springing up here and there upon the east or west horizon, or, again, to the southward, where, in the remoter distance, the famous lake of Memphramagog lies in the shadow of the highest peaks in Lower Canada. A favourite region was this in the middle of the century, not merely for the normal hundred-acre farmer of the country, but even for the gentleman farmer, with his broader acres and pleasant country house, when grain was high and labour available and relatively low. A comfortable and even ornate country for a life of out-door leisure, with fine stretches of mountain, forest, lake and stream within easy reach for sporting purposes. But times have changed a good deal, and the Eastern townships are nothing like so British as they were forty years ago. The young men have gone west to richer lands, and into each vacated homestead a Frenchman from the country beyond has stepped. It is an open secret that the ambition of the Catholic Church is to recover by these effectual means this part of the French province for their race and creed and round off its homogeneity. So far as the farming lands are concerned this seems likely to be achieved ; but Sherbrooke is quite busy in the manufacture of wool and linen, helped thereto by the boisterous current of the Magog River, which here joins the St. Francis with great com- motion, and in this kind of enterprise the French-Canadian is92 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. not to the fore. One of the best agricultural shows in Canada, however, still preserves the old agricultural reputation of the country at Sherbrooke, and a great Catholic seminary and church crowns the hill-top. Close by, too, is Lennoxville, a beautiful and leafy village in this same valley of the St. Francis, the seat of Bishop's College, where degrees in arts are conferred, and an Anglican Grammar School, with most admirable modern buildings. The first has only some forty undergraduates, mostly destined for the Church. The last is one of the three schools of Canada that have a some- what similar social reputation to the public schools in England, and possesses extremely good buildings, a good gymnasium, cricket and football grounds, fives courts, and golf links. Its numbers are now about a hundred. The homesteads here are built and laid out in the New England or Ontario fashion, not on the French system of arpents, and are worth from twenty-five to fifty dollars an acre. A practical farmer would do just as well in Ontario and have the benefits of a less severe winter than that which prevails throughout Quebec. Moreover, the increase of the French at the expense of the English might be felt depressing. For the gentleman emigrant, whose main object was to lead a country life on a small fixed income, the "Townships" have still some undeniable attractions—social, around Sherbrooke and Lennox- ville, scenic everywhere, and sporting in a sense of being acces- sible to good shooting and fishing in many directions. Montreal, again, is only some three to four hours by rail, and Quebec five to six. The traveller can make a pleasant detour, if he already knows the river and land route from Quebec to Montreal, by covering the two sides of the triangle and seeing the Lake Francis and Megantic country, where there is plenty of accommo- dation, and then from Sherbrooke, doing Lake Memphramagog, with its mountain scenery, and so up to Montreal. Between Richmond, near the upper edge of the townships and Montreal, there is a great deal of fine, flat, fertile country, wholly French in occupation ; and traversing it, you cross the Richelieu River, that historic highway between the French and British dominions, along which the tide of war swept so oftenFROM QUEBEC TO MONTREAL. 93 and so fiercely. These rich and level lands were first settled by the regiment of Carignan, or, rather, by the single company who remained behind when the rest of the corps went home in 1669. And on a bright August morning, when the ribbon-like strips of green meadow spread away to the foot of shadowy wooded hills like a vast carpet, striped at intervals with gold and sprinkled freely with patches of yellow mustard or purple buclcwheat, and with white-walled, red-roofed homesteads, and the gilded spires of village churches, it is a delightful outlook for the traveller either by road or rail. Much of the country for fifty miles south and east of Montreal is of this pattern. Long ago it was a great wheat region and supplied the rest of Canada and the north-eastern States. Now it is as green after a wtt summer as Leicestershire, and passing for miles through its trim and mellow levels, where in many places good stock are running between neat post and rail fences and mowing machines rattling through heavy crops of timothy, it would not be very evident wherein these regions suffer from the occupations of a reactionary people. That they have at least plenty of spirit will be tolerably evident to a traveller on the train between Richmond and Montreal, should there be any local event going forward to put the habitant on the move; for the cackle of a car full of French-Canadian peasants would even exceed the animation of a third-class carriage on a market day in South Wales. On the north shore of the St. Lawrence, too, and in the country which the Canadian Pacific Railway traverses between Quebec and Montreal, there is a great deal of this flat and fertile country, bearing the same unmistakable stamp of solid French occupation. The Laurentian Mountains, after approaching so close to Quebec as to add greatly to its distinction of outlook, fall back some way from the St. Lawrence as they travel towards the Ottawa behind Montreal. In the interval there is some poor, broken and sandy country, to be sure, but for the most part, particularly around and on either side of Three Rivers, the almost mile-long meadows stretch away from the road on either side, in narrow strips less than two hundred yards in width. Oats, hay and pasture, pasture, -hay and oats, the train seems to chant as it goes leaping past94. CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the narrow ends of these attenuated fields. Away at their extremities, too, shine the white, or pink, or saffron houses to which they belong ; while on the same horizon the tin or gilded spires of churches shoot up from leafy villages, or long rows of Lombardy poplars far away mark the fringe of the St. Lawrence, which here and there shows bits of blue water at the remoter edg~-of the glowing landscape. Now and again we run through stretches of forest, Church property perhaps, or possibly the un- cultivated remnant of a seigneury. And then around St. Anne, Batiscan, and Champlain the breezy levels open far and wide for miles and miles to the sky, and sunshine and shadows play over the long level ribs of green and gold, touching up more glittering spires and more white villages, and the same refrain of pasture, hay and oats, oats, hay and pasture, continues as the post and rail fences open and shut their narrow, quickly-passing vistas to the throbbing train. Numbers of these small properties, eighty to a hundred and sixty acres as a rough unit, have been in the family for twice or thrice as many years, and there are absolutely no English farmers in any of these countries outside the Eastern townships, save a U. E. loyalist settlement near the head of Lake Champlain. Three Rivers is the oldest town in Lower Canada after Quebec, dating back to 1618, and, with the Anglo-French Sherbrooke in the Eastern townships, a very bad third to-day in the matter of population, to wit about twelve thousand. It is of much historic interest, which, unhappily, we must pass over, except to record the fact that it once had a governor of its own from France and boasts to-day some very old buildings. It stands at the mouth of the St Maurice River and at the head of tide-water. The Laurentian Mountains, which bound the St. Lawrence valley, are here some thirty miles to the north and the beginning of a country rich in lumber, of which trade Three Rivers is a great entrepot, and rich also in interest to the sportsman and Nature lover, who can make this town a starting-point for all kinds of enterprises, through wild regions and through glorious scenery. Three Rivers is also the centre of large deposits of iron ore, and probably even thus late in the day a rising place. It is intensely French; the British population, who are generally to be found in.MONTREAL FROM THE MOUNTAIN. [To face p. 95.MONTREAL. 95 greater numbers where energy and business aptitude are required, are here only about five hundred, and such unfriendly spirit as was encountered in Lower Canada during the late war found fullest expression in the streets of Three Rivers. Unlike its ancient rival, which, happily for the world, it has robbed of its commercial vitality, Montreal lies almost wholly on a gentle slope. At the same time it is only less beautiful in its site than Quebec, for though its front lies on the river, its newer portions are already trending on the foot and climbing up the lower slopes of the Mountain which rises so strikingly in the background. The site of Montreal was discovered, and even occupied for a brief time, in 1535 by Cartier. In 1611, just after the real founding of Canada by Champlain, it became a trading station, and in 1641 developed into a more permanent settlement, under the auspices of a band of enthusiasts from France, inspired thither by mysterious voices and strange visions. Maisonneuve was the leader, together with a devoted lady, Jeanne Mance, who carried with her a large sum from an unknown benefactress wherewith to found a hospital for healing both the bodies and souls of the savages. The Montreal associates were detained in Quebec a year, and were urged to desist from their rash under- taking by their more experienced and perhaps somewhat jealous fellow-countrymen. But Maisonneuve and his band, some sixty in all, pressed on, landed at the foot of Mont Royale, raised an altar, from which the priest blessed and consecrated their new endeavour—in this case a wholly religious and philanthropic one. Thus was Montreal founded. The society grew steadily, though its pious intentions towards the natives received various rude shocks, and ultimately drifted into that hundred years of bloody warfare with the five nations of which it bore the main brunt. Missionary work and fur trading, however, prospered in spite of it. Brave men and devoted women, warriors and Churchmen, knaves and outlaws, Indians of every North-Western nation, played their part on this water-side stage, now roughly indicated by the Notre Dame Cathedral and the statue to Maisonneuve and his brave followers. Wooden pallisades gave way in time to stone bastions; wooden churches to stone edifices of noble96 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. proportions. In the first half of the eighteenth century thousands of Indians were wont to camp outside the walls, when the great convoys of furs came down from the remote west; and in 1760, when Levis surrendered the remnants of Montcalm's army and the colony of Canada to Amherst in the Place d'Armes, quite a handsome town of some seven or eight thousand souls witnessed the painful but historic scene. Major Knox, who was there at the time with the 48th Regiment, grows quite enthusiastic in his Journal at the elegance, even then, of the private residences and the gaiety, both of spirits and of conduct, with which men and women at that evil hour for France accepted the " fortune de guerre," as they put it. Montreal was occupied by the American Montgomery and his army in the revolutionary war as a base for their attempted conquest of Canada. How the French very naturally refused to aid that section of their old enemies who had done nothing for them against those who had done much, and how Mont- gomery fell, has been already told. The ancient records of the city abound in picturesque and dramatic incident. No one, for instance, to whom the past of Canada appeals at all should fail „ to spend some hours in the Chateau de Ramesy, built just two centuries ago in the old French style, and occupied by the French governors and their British successors. Looking like a ghost of the old regime in the busy heart of the modern city, there have been gathered within its quaint spacious chambers a rare store of pictures, curios, and treasures of every kind connected with old times, both French and English, in Montreal. But after all I must not treat Montreal as if it were Quebec. I doubt if one visitor in fifty gives a second thought to such matters, and I am quite sure very few of the natives do. It is the busy capital of Canada that confronts one here, with its quarter of a million of people and rows of fine wharves along the river, and a whole fleet of sailing ships and ocean steamers. It is the head of navigation, the outlet of the mighty west. Nor is its river front obscured, as in most great ports, by a mass of unsightly water-side erections, but the solid buildings of the city press down on to a great stone embankment along theMONTREAL 97 St Lawrence. New docks and piers are in process of construc- tion, which may somewhat spoil perhaps the old effect, but will better meet the wants of the constantly increasing traffic. And as a testimony to the enormous increase of this traffic, where a few years ago a single tubular bridge crossed the two miles of rapid water and posed as one of the wonders of the world, two bridges of far greater capacity, those of the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific, have now all they can do to grapple with their loads of freight and passengers. Montreal is laid out, of course, in parallel sections, rising one above the other on a gentle slope from the river-side to the foot of Mont Royale, or the Mountain, and presents a most imposing look from the river, while from the top of the Mountain the most beautiful city park in North America it yields an absolutely unique panorama. From the river the number of church spires might give the false impression that here, too, material matters were retarded by ecclesiastical zeal, which is not the case, though the French population is in a slight majority. The curious ignorance of many Americans regarding Canada was well illustrated by the remarks of a party I came down with lately on a river steamer. "Why, this is quite a place," said the younger members, to whom Montreal was evidently a revelation. " I guess you'd see more churches here than chimneys/' said another. "You bet," said the nestor of the group, who had been here before, "this is a live little place, but if you go to work right, you can size it up and see every- thing there is to be seen in a day." He then proceeded to explain how this feat could be achieved, and I saw them after- wards working out the programme at .breathless speed in a hackney carriage. The business streets of Montreal seem narrow and somewhat gloomy, from the high and massive nature of the buildings, which are mostly of grey limestone quarried in the neighbourhood. But Montreal was built to last. As you leave the business portion and ascend the easy slope to the gayer streets of fashionable shops and residences, the same air of wealth and solidity and profound confidence in the place as the commercial capital of Canada for all time to come shows itself. I am not going C. H98 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. to catalogue the numerous buildings of note, which is the busi- ness rather of a guide-book, but the Roman Catholic Cathedral, modelled after St. Peter's at Rome, is an immense and imposing edifice. McGill College, with its spacious ground and long blocks of buildings in the middle of the fashionable quarter of the city on Sherbrooke Street, is worthy of a University which repre- sents the wealthiest religious body in Canada, the Presbyterians, and is the rival of the University of Toronto. McGill College is very justly the pride of Montreal, and has been richly endowed by many wealthy Scotch-Canadians. It includes faculties of arts, law, medicine, applied and veterinary science, and is attended by over a thousand students. As trifles are often more significant than a world of detail, I may perhaps state that I have heard the favour shown to medical graduates of this University, merely as such, made the subject of quite feeling complaint by the alumni of other Colleges as far away as the Pacific coast. Notre Dame, St. James' and Craig Streets are the great main arteries of business, running parallel with one another and with the river. Massive and lofty blocks of grey limestone dominate the side walks with such imposing effect as to make the quite reasonably broad streets look narrow and the outlook somewhat oppressive, while the continuous stream of electric cars through the whole night as well as the day does not help to dissipate the feeling. Banks, insurance and steamship offices, immense stores, wholesale and retail, rear themselves heavenwards in endless and bewildering array. The stranger may fancy he reads in the towering mansard-roofs, and often decorated and always massive fronts, the conscious pride of a commercial metropolis that has no fear of rivalry, the heart, too, of a country already as populous as that which supports Brussels and Antwerp, Ghent and Liege, and a future, humanly speaking, as certain as the courses of the stars. And this is a city whose growth has been absolutely wholesome, and in due proportion to the six millions of people it represents. Can Sydney or Melbourne, or even Auckland, say as much ? Half the popula- tion of Australasia is in great cities, while half their banks and business houses, as the British public know to their cost, relapseBANKS. 99 periodically into the condition of absentee owners and graziers of foreclosed estates. Happily for Canada, legislation has never lent itself to maintaining population at unproductive labour in the cities on borrowed money, while a continent behind languished for people. Canada has never had the slightest use for the working man who proposes to pick and choose his method of work and place of residence, or else to sponge upon the public or the Government. She has gone through hard times and has worked out her salvation by the very sweat of her brow. The backwoods of old days, the lumber camps, the prairies have been splendid schools. The able-bodied mechanic, much less the general loafer who will come on charity, or on club funds, or go whining to the Government to make work when the rural districts offered him any sort of a living would get a rough reception from every class in Canada. One reads con- stantly of men tramping the streets of the Australian cities and importuning its legislators to make work, while hands are in demand up country at a pound a week. The rural districts of Australia are, of course, less economically sound from natural causes than those of Canada; still, it has never been the pressure on their resources that has created this rotten and demoralising system. Montreal has nothing of this kind to trouble itself about, and it has justly earned such immunity. Its prosperity, like that of all Canada, is built on sound founda- tions. The Bank of Montreal is one of the great chartered banks of the world, and English readers may be surprised to hear that the United States has no equivalent to it, though this fact is partly due to American banking laws and customs. The excellence of the Canadian banks is too well known to everyone with the most elementary knowledge of such matters to need any eulogies here. But that of Montreal is the oldest, the largest, and most notable of many corporations that have earned in a virtually equal degree the confidence of the country. The Banks of Commerce, of Toronto, the Merchants, Molsons and British North America, and many others have branches in every part of Canada, east and west. There is not a village in the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast where the security of one or more of these great establishments are not available. H 2100 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. They are entirely run by Anglo-Canadians. French banks exist, but, with possibly a single exception, have by no means the same standing as the others. The foundations, new and ancient, of the French Catholic Church flourish greatly in Montreal, side by side with the busy hum of modern progress. The casual stranger finds something like relief as he emerges from the somewhat overwhelming atmosphere of the business streets, and of their great stone fortresses of com- merce, into the delightful open spaces that Montreal keeps invio- late. The Viger Gardens, where one of the great railway stations of the Canadian Pacific, thanks to the sanity of architecture shown by that corporation, constitute an ornament rather than an eyesore to the landscape ; the Place d'Armes, the Champ de Mars, and Dominion Square all make pleasant breaks of grass and trees and flowers. The latter is the most notable of all, being higher up the slope, whence in Catherine Street, beneath the rustle of maple avenues, the higher marts of com- merce begin to blend with the lawns and mansions of the prosperous. Here too, facing a statue of Canada's greatest statesman, Sir John MacDonald, is the huge modern cathedral of St. James', already mentioned, with its frescoed dome two hundred and fifty feet high; and close by is the Catholic Bishop's Palace, the Windsor Hotel, and the other Canadian Pacific station—stately and tasteful piles of grey limestone. And it is in this square, so green and shady in summer, that there are reared in winter those ice palaces whose repeated reproductions in the English illustrated Press Canadians complain have been largely responsible for the impression that Canada is a land of arctic temperature and perpetual snow. Montreal has practically the same winter climate as Quebec. Both are much colder than any of the main centres of population in Ontario, save, of course, Ottawa. It is a steady cold, however, with almost continuous snow and frost and a temperature from early December to the end of March, ranging pretty steadily from twenty above to twenty below zero, with occasional excur- sions of the thermometer outside these figures. Bright skies, however, and sunshine prevail for the most part. It is only to the country people in Canada that cold has any real significance.CANADIAN WINTERS. 101 And the habitant, knowing well how to warm his house, has no objection whatever to the winter of his forefathers, for the roads are then good for sleighing, and he can haul his crops to market easily or keep the stove warm at home with the most perfect contentment, and there is certainly no indication that two or three centuries of Canadian winters have impaired his hardiness or vitality. At any rate, he has more of both than the country farmers who have shivered before the open fireplaces through what we call the "open" winters of Maryland and Virginia. To the well-warmed townsmen ten below zero, good sleighing, and a bright sky is a thing of joy. The well-to-do of Montreal, as all the world knows, regard the winter, not merely as a season of indoor, but of outdoor festivity ; sleighing, snow- shoeing, tobogganing, skating, ice hockey, ard curling are the daily pastimes of individuals and of innumerable well-organised clubs. The working classes have well-warmed houses and warmed workshops, and have seldom any reason to remain sufficiently long in the open air to feel the cold any more than the classes above them. In short, Montreal feels itself distinctly privileged beyond its sister city of Toronto with the latter's comparatively mild and broken winters. In the short season before the snow, footballers make up in enthusiasm for the briefness of their opportunity, while a riding club, equally cramped in its season, pursues the aniseed bag, or sometimes, I believe, the real animal, at the tail of a pack of hounds over the post and rail fences of the habitants' pastures. In summer lacrosse and baseball draw large crowds. Cricket languishes, but golf has long outgrown the single course that Scotchmen disported themselves on in former times for quite a length of years. Ascending the slope a little higher we come to Sherbrooke Street, another long parallel artery, and almost wholly residential and ornate. Fine stone houses, with well-kept lawns, unfenced and open to the broad maple-shaded street in Canadian fashion, are interspersed with churches or the headquarters of corpora- tions, clerical and otherwise, all conscious of their responsibility in the architectural way and anxious to live up to it. The Canadians themselves benefited both immediately and through102 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the medium of their architects by the pre-eminent taste and ability of the modern American school. No Englishman familiar with the work of the last fifteen years in the residential quarters of the American cities and in their summer resorts, and familiar also with our own country and suburban enterprises of the ordinary type, could fail to see that we are absolutely nowhere in the matter of taste, harmony, proportion, solidity, and even in snugness, as expressed in private dwellings. Probably an examination of the better American magazines would con- vince the most prejudiced mortal of this without the trouble of crossing the Atlantic. In Sherbrooke Street, too, and neigh- bourhood are to be seen in winter the best turned-out sleighs probably in the world. Indeed, the signs of wealth are sufficiently striking in Montreal. Always the most substantial city in the Dominion, it now contains quite a number of families of large fortune, though the tendency in Canada is not, generally speaking, to build houses in town or country, com- mensurate in size from a European standpoint with the owner's means, since the domestic servant difficulty is always present with the Canadians, though greatly mitigated of course to the rich who can pay fancy wages. Among the many factors that have combined to so greatly increase the wealth of Montreal, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, whose head offices are here, and in which so many prominent Montrealers were concerned, has been no slight one. Nor have Canadian millionaires been a wit behind their American equivalents in splendid donations to charitable and educational institutions. The Royal Victoria Hospital, for instance, whose large new buildings stand between Sherbrooke Street and the Mountain, was the joint gift of Lords Mount- stephen and Strathcona, and cost a million dollars. Not far off, and in curious reminder of the two regimes of Canada, the very old and the very new, the Hotel Dieu, though a modern build- ing, represents the original foundation of Jean de Mance and Madame de Bullion in 1644. It is now a large hospital where over a hundred nuns attend the wants of many thousands of patients in the course of the year. Most of the wealthier people in Montreal are British, and mainly of Scotch extraction,SCOTSMEN IN CANADA. 103 which is in strict accordance with economic and ethnological records. About four-fifths of the two Houses of Parliament, at Ottawa are men of Scotch or Scotch-Irish blood. I expended half an hour one day in mastering this quite striking fact, aided by an informing official publication which made the task a simple one. I should not take this political test alone as of any extraordinary significance, but, as a matter of fact, it is fairly in line with the general position of the Scotchman in the older provinces, and no doubt in due course the west will pass contentedly under his benign sway. It is a tremendous reaction from the Family Compact days of the early nineteenth century, for if this sociable coterie contained Scotchmen, it was quite incidental, and not due to the remarkable buoyancy of the Caledonian. It is a trifle humiliating tb the southerner to study the emigration statistics of Canadian history. Speaking from memory, I think at least three Englishmen have come to Canada in the past for one Scotchman. But I do not think it would be overstepping the mark to say that three Scotch- men have "got there," to use an expressive Americanism, for one Englishman. And it naturally follows that a certain Scottish flavour permeates Canadian society, though this is not a matter that guide-books flaunt ill the faces of their readers, or that serious works on Canada note as a broad fact. None the less, the person of observant habits and with any knowledge of Scotland, and the faintest sense of racial traits, would find the atmosphere of Montreal and Toronto showing more affinity to that of Glasgow and Edinburgh than to the cities of the south. I do not wish to be interpreted as saying that Montreal and Toronto are replicas of Glasgow and Edin- burgh. Heaven forbid! Comparisons between new countries and old ones are puerile. Each have their respective advantages, and a > considerable divergence is inevitable. Still, with the predominance of Scotchmen in commercial and social and religious life, it is only natural that Scotland should be more in evidence as the " old country" than England. Among the Canadian-Scottish, too, the Highlanders stand in the very front, and, in recalling the traditional over-sea success of Scotchmen, to speak of it as the success of a race is of course ridiculous, since the104 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Lowlander of Berwickshire or Roxburgh or even East Aberdeen is ethnologically an Englishman, own brother to the man of Yorkshire or Northumberland, while the Highland clansman belonged to another family of mankind, and till recently spoke another tongue, served other gods, mainly chiefs, flouted Scottish kings, parliaments and laws, hated civilised Teutonic Scotsmen with a great hatred, and had virtually no intercourse with them. He was regarded in turn by that pawky soul as an unredeemed barbarian and cattle thief, inhabiting sterile wilds into which no outsider to speak of ever penetrated, for two excellent reasons. First, that there was rarely any conceivable object in doing so; secondly, that without very particular letters to each chief, life was not worth a day's purchase. Such were the Scottish High- lands, save a few exceptional outer districts, less than two centuries ago, when Massachusetts and Virginia were highly organised communities. Indolence was universal, since complete immunity from toil, as in the case of the Iroquois, was a religion, so long as there were women to work. It was hardly logical, this pride of a son in his father's and grandfather's immunity from menial toil, when his mother and grandmother had guided the rude plough through the oat patch and bent their backs in the hay-field ; but perhaps it was these mothers and grandmothers that preserved the spirit of industry to the High- landers from some remote past. How comes it otherwise that almost as soon as they emerged from their hopeless industrial and often spiritual darkness they sprang to the front rank at once when mingled with Teutonic Britons, and even emerged in no long time from what might be called their temporary submersion in grouped settlements in remote corners of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or in Glengarry of Ontario, where the Gaelic still remains ? To go further—and whatever bears on Scottish life bears on Canada. The general reader will possibly refuse to believe, while the student of social history in Great Britain will not require to be reminded, that the industrious, pushful, successful Scot as a national type was scarcely fifty years old when the forests of Upper Canada were first assailed by the British axe. It seems a monstrous anachronism—I almost quail as I set itFRENCH AND ENGLISH IN MONTREAL. 105 down, most certainly not in malice—but the Scotsmen, who almost own Canada and many other goodly slices of the British Empire, can well afford to regard with complacent interest the Scotland of Drummond of Ochtertyre and Fletcher of Saltoun, who groaned over the dogged backwardness and inertia of the hinds of the Lothians and Fife ! this many a day the crack farming district, not only of Britain, but of the whole earth. There can, I think, be no doubt but that in the earlier eighteenth century, rightly or wrongly, Scotsmen were regarded by the world as unprogressive sluggards, and the Laird of Saltoun, the greatest authority of his time in this particular, tells us that out of that small population of a million two hundred thousand begged their way from door to door. But after all the ethnological interest of Canada does not lie in matters British, but as between that people and the French. And Montreal is the one great point where the two races rub shoulder to shoulder in their hundred thousands, the French, as already stated, being slightly in the ascendant. The city is but forty miles from the Ontario boundary, and the racial line, very naturally in a country under one flag, is geographically vague and cloudy. Still, Montreal itself is well inside the mark, and its rural neighbourhood is wholly French, as anyone may see by visiting the market on a Tuesday. The French and English of Montreal, though good enough friends and mixing together of necessity in the ordinary course of business, remain almost entirely apart in social life. Of course there are exceptions, and of course there are functions of an official nature, which observe no racial discrimina- tion. But in private life, without any hostility or definite ill- feeling, the two peoples keep resolutely apart. It is a rather curious spectacle, this utter lack of social sympathy or fusion among the prosperous classes of a modern and progressive commercial capital. You could imagine an old noblesse in a once conquered country keeping up the habit of " sulking." But there is nothing whatever of this in the reasons that make for racial cleavage in Montreal. Every contemporary writer and authority agrees that nearly all the noblesse of importance returned to France at the Conquest. Much of what remained has been long ago submerged. Moreover, many of the British families ofio6 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Montreal, as in all colonial cities, have the best of good old blood in their veins. As a matter of fact, Montreal does not run much on these lines. The people of Quebec and Toronto will tell you that money rules there, or at least that the ordinary social qualifications without it are not regarded as of much value. This perhaps is the rough truth, liable to inevitable modifications. I know next to nothing of Montreal in a social sense, but gather from those who do that people of culture and respectable birth and moderate income in the learned professions, who would, as a matter of course, in Toronto be more or less known to everyone, have their own sets rather, and are not necessarily sought after by the wealthier, or shall we say smarter, society in Montreal. Montreal society is, of course, so large as to drift naturally into sets. There are far more people whom the average English gentleman, for instance, would naturally fuse with than in any city of two hundred and sixty thousand in Great Britain. This is inevitable in a Colonial capital of mature standing for many obvious reasons, though it would be the reverse of true in many western towns of the United States. Possibly Glasgow has some social resemblance to British Montreal, and perhaps Toronto may in some sort be its Edinburgh. The analogy, though not accurate, is not altogether wide of the mark. But again I am shirking the French question, and drifting into commonplace Anglo-Saxon cleavages. I dare not attempt an analysis of the reasons that keep these citizens of one town and one country apart. All educated Frenchmen and many Englishmen speak both languages. Still, the latter are much behind on this point, and all things considered have more reasons to be, if not very good ones. Religion probably has much to do with it, and seems a more logical cause of division ; for mixed marriages are nowadays more than discouraged by the Roman Church, and not wholly approved of by the others. This is quite enough to put a damper on social intercourse among the young of the two creeds—and here probably you have the root of the matter. The British section, again, has taken the lead in commerce, and is proportionately wealthier. Lastly, there are a great number of Anglo-Canadians all throughFRENCH CANADIANS AND GREAT BRITAIN. 107 the Dominion who have the same wholesale prejudice against the French that you find so freely entertained among the English colony of a continental town. It is, I suppose, here- ditary or instinctive, and returned with interest. I have heard it indulged in by scores of people in Canada, and of course it amounts, as it does elsewhere, to a catalogue of the points upon which the French temperament differs from our own, somewhat crudely rubbed in. At the same time, it must not be supposed that the educated urban Frenchman has not taken on many of the attributes that a free life in a new country engenders, and that he does not share some of the characteristics of his fellow-colonists. The French, on their part, have of course inherited like prejudices, but in Canada they are not, I think, quite so pronounced as those of the British. Now, as to that much vexed and complex question, the attitude of the million and a half French-Canadians of the Lower Province towards their British fellow-colonists and the Crown. For myself I have never been long enough at a time in Lower Canada to justify an independent opinion, but have been far too much in Canada generally to fall into the error of uncritical optimism which so often distinguishes the treatment of this Anglo-French matter by passing travellers, stimulated by the sight of a Union Jack, and the politeness of a few passing acquaintances, gentle or simple. This misunderstanding of the situation was never more curiously displayed in England than during the late war, and it created much remark in Canada. The French-Canadians were again and again represented as ardent partisans of the British cause in South Africa, and as burning to give to the Boers by force of arms the privileges of British citizenship which they had themselves enjoyed so long. I read in newspapers for which I have a high regard that these people were leaving their desks and ploughs to join in the crusade, and a small company of French infantry led by French officers during various actions assumed enormous dimensions and did duty as a type instead of an isolated instance. I used to read these things with much bewilderment in England, and wonder whether it was conceivable that in the few years since I had last been in Canada the attitude of a deeply conservativeio8 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. and self-absorbed people had so vastly changed. Of course it had not! Most people in England may now be aware that the wave of patriotism which shook English Canada found a French Premier, in the able and admirable Sir Wilfrid Laurier, installed at Ottawa. Though a Liberal, Sir Wilfrid had been helped to office by the votes of thousands of French Conservatives, from the fact that he was a Frenchman. The war feeling was so strong in English Canada that no Premier could have resisted it and remained in office. Laurier had to choose one path or the other, and he chose what most of us think the better one, though not perhaps very willingly. The French-Canadians are pre- eminently followers of leaders, and Laurier just now is the worthy object of their pride and enthusiasm. The Premier did not oppose the loud demands for despatching Canadian contingents to South Africa—to the ruin of his position and his government. His personal feeling was, I believe, a negative one, but it really does not matter. His action was a piece of sensible oppor- tunism. And what he did do satisfied the mass of French- Canadians, who simply acquiesced without enthusiasm or reluctance, and then turned their attention to their own affairs. Out of the eight thousand Canadians who went in the various contingents about a hundred were French. I counted them roughly in the official list of regiments. Many of these, too, were half-Anglicised Frenchmen from the border town- ships. Many, doubtless, were of the type common every- where, to whom military employment offers congenial occupa- tion or an escape from a temporary difficulty. But really this minute analysis is superfluous. Virtually the French-Canadians showed little interest in the war, and took no part in it. Nor would any reasonable person blame them overmuch for this indifference.1 The vast rural majority neither knew nor cared what it was all about. The minority in the towns included every kind of attitude, from those who, by ties of marriage, friendship or business interests, or independent judgment, were 1 There are a certain number of French-Canadian officers in the British service who are, of course, wholly British in every particular but blood. This has no bearing on the question generally.THE FRENCH-CANADIAN CHURCH. ardent Britons, to mobs who, as at Three Rivers and in Montreal, hooted and hissed the ceremonies following on Mafeking and Ladysmith. Then there is the literary dreamer, who may have sentimental yearnings after old France ; and the average poli- tician, who is concerned with nothing but the game of local politics and how much he can make out of it; and the over- whelming body of habitants, who are virtually without educa- tion, and are thinking of nothing at all but their daily work and parish gossip. Towering above everything is the Church, more ultramontane, more watchful, and with good reason, than ever, holding the habitant in the hollow of its hand, and defied, or partially defied, by a small but growing liberal party in the towns. It is not here the Church mainly of the women and children as in some Catholic countries, but of the people generally. It has property worth millions of dollars, and an estimated income of over a million in a relatively poor province. It pays no taxes. But the habitant, as I have shown, gets his religion no cheaper on this account. His dime is exacted by law, should sacerdotal pressure fail. When he is assessed for a new church, and a mortgage is laid on his farm for the purpose, that mortgage, by law, takes priority of any anterior lien. In educational matters the tacit aim of his masters is to hold him back, which, as they control the schools, is an easy matter. Pierre, upon the whole, is a simple, ignorant, devout, cheerful, and fairly industrious person, and occupies picturesquely, without any discontent, extensive regions which his British neighbours would probably have abandoned. If this sort of system contents the French- Canadian and suits his notions, there seems to me no strong ground of complaint. Many people of high intelligence regret that when French Canada passed into our hands, consisting at the time of some seventy thousand people, virtually all peasants, we did not Anglicise it forcibly in laws and language, and alienate its Church property. It would not have been difficult, and would have prevented the present condition of things, which many regard with disfavour and some even with apprehen- sion. But the other policy fixed the loyalty of the French- Canadian during the revolutionary war, which meant much, ifno CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. it did not earn as much of his permanent gratitude as it should have done. The French-Canadians on their part have had their dreams When the North-West was first opened, wild and vague ideas of a dominant French influence there, and the encircling of British Ontario by a French nation, were in the air. But new countries are not in these days to be conquered and held by ultramontane clerics and reactionary peasants when Anglo- Saxons have an equal partnership in them. The French- Canadian Church and people hardly count in the North-West of to-day. The Church is loyal enough to the British connec- tion, not from love of it, nor perhaps from gratitude, but because it knows well that under no other conditions would it have such a free hand. If the French-Canadians and, above all, the Church were indeed devoid of thankfulness for their past treatment, one might well think that the estimate in which a considerable section in Ontario hold them is justifiable, and that victorious nations might well omit the sentimental asset from their calculations. As it is, their school-books, issued by the Church, are discredit- able alike to their situation and their intelligence. In their pages Great Britain receives scant notice and less credit, and no thanks. Every cultivated American knows that his own people have been sad sinners in this respect, and have sought to promote patriotism among the masses by distorting facts and holding up this country to unmerited odium. But the Americans, after all, are under no obligations to Great Britain as the French are, to say nothing of their being her professedly loyal subjects. With regard to the emigration of the French to the States, their priests, of course, do not like it, and follow so far as possible their wandering flocks, the Irish substitutes which are found there being uncongenial, and republican. These people, however, as we have seen, do not lose touch with their old parish. A large proportion are but temporary absentees, and much money comes back to Canada. It would be impossible, however, that widerviews and freer opinions should not come back too, if only to be whispered by the fireside. Some of the priests themselves are not free from the taint. But upon the whole, the struggle which the Quebec clergy make to keep their flocks simple, ignorant, contented and moral is successfully maintained.FRENCH AND IRISH. in Many of these emigrants come back with Anglicised names, and keep them. Monsieur Blanc becomes Mr. White; Bouianger, Mr. Baker ; while Roux returns as Mr. Wheeler. Sometimes in the lumber camps the French-Canadian names get Anglicised for convenience—not the convenience of their owners, but that of the English foreman, who will not bother with a long or unusual French name, but promptly dubs the man Smith or Roberts on the pay-roll, and Smith or Roberts he sometimes remains for life. There is no dislike of the English language and reluctance to speak any smattering of it they may possess among the habitants, of such kind as you will find in parts of Wales for instance. The few who can speak English are proud of the accomplishment, and air it freely, without any diffidence as to grammar or pronunciation. Nor is there, I think, any personal feeling towards Anglo-Canadians, unless racial fights in the lumber camps may count for such. One does not expect from so self-centred a people any enthusiasm for our Imperial ventures. At the same time, many French-Canadians have said to me, and hundreds have said it elsewhere and written it over and over again, that if Canada were attacked by the United States, the Province of Quebec would be the last to yield—from motives mainly, no doubt, of self-preservation. "We are loyal to the King, God bless him!" said a French-Canadian gentleman to me the other day, " but we don't want too much of Joe Chamberlain." Perhaps this puts in a nutshell the attitude of a majority who, as a matter of fact, concern themselves as a class very little with outside affairs of any kind. As a receptacle for the surplus population of Lower Canada, New England is indeed a safety valve. Scarcely any influences antagonistic to the domestic peace of the Dominion are thereby engendered, whereas if several hundred thousand French-Canadians went west in groups to the British provinces, followed by their Church, friction of a serious kind would be almost certain to ensue. The Irish quarter of Montreal, Griffin-town, contains a con- siderable population, but labour jealousies, with the racial and lingual difference, neutralise all religious sympathy and prevent any common action with the French. The wooded Mountain above Montreal, with its well-grassedii2 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. lower slopes rising beyond the outer limits of the residen- tial quarters, makes a public park and pleasure ground not excelled nor perhaps equalled, in any other North American city. Forest trees of noble size, oak, maple, and fir, wave a mantle of leaves over a long, bold ridge some eight hundred feet above the town and river. Art has contrived, too, that the primitive beauties of the woods should be maintained, without any of their primitive untidiness. Fine driving-roads wind around the heights and rise to the summit by gentle grades ; while innumerable footpaths lead through dells and brakes of exquisite sylvan beauty. Between the ruddy stems of giant firs, beneath the lower leaves of towering maples, to north or south, to east or west, an outlook for the gods spreads away into the blue distance. But it is the point immediately above the city, reached for those who wish it (and they are many) in a few breathless moments by a funicular railway, that is the crown of all. Probably there is no other great city that, from an adjacent natural eminence, presents its entire compass to a single glance of the eye as does this one. From a broad platform thrown out from the summit of the woody steep, every quarter of Montreal, every spire, tower, dome and considerable building, every leafy square, every main street, can be seen or traced without an effort. This sounds more remarkable than picturesque, but, as a matter of fact, on a bright summer or autumn day the effect is impressive beyond words. For the city, thus lying at ones feet, is but the foreground of the view. Beyond it, the great river, nearly two miles in width and fresh from the mighty rapids of Lachine, spanned by its two long bridges, lays a broad, blue band across the canvas. Far away the woods and meadows and villages spread southward over the Richelieu Valley; a great breadth of sunny landscape, rich in woodland but spangled everywhere by the gleam of stubble and the glint of church or homestead, to where the mountain fringes of New York and Vermont lay dimly seen upon the horizon. As a mere panorama this wondrous spectacle holds the materialistic sort of folks from shop or factory, who wander over the Mountain on Sunday afternoon, with a fascination stronger, beyond a doubt, than even the Citadel of QuebecSOCIAL AMENITIES. "3 would exercise; and they seem to find ceaseless pleasure in pointing out to one another the precise spot where their respective kitchen-fires are slowly cooling. Montreal pours its thousands on to the Mountain on a fine Sunday or holiday, and for all of them there is much more than room on its large broken surface. Joe and Jill, or Jacques and Jeanne, can find many a woodland path for love-making, secluded from the vulgar eye. Buggies, single and double, English dog-carts, Quebec caleches, an occa- sional curricle with a trotting horse, follow one another along the winding woodland roads. A complete system of electric tramcars permeates Montreal and spans the suburbs for several miles, with a uniform fare of five cents. This distributes the working classes over considerable areas, to the benefit of them- selves and families. The wives of the mechanics, artisans, and smaller tradesmen here, as elsewhere throughout Canada, cultivate the social amenities of their betters to an extent undreamed of in the old world, and, indeed, unknown in the new till quite recently. The smile will assuredly rise to the lips of the stranger as he hears these honest young matrons in the tramcar discussing the society of their respective neighbourhoods, exchanging cards and writing down their "At Home " days on the corner. But why not ? Surely it is an admirable thing, this effort to brighten their lives through the machinery used in the classes above them, and greatly conducive to self-respect. Visiting cards and " At Home" days are after all as much matters of convenience as of style. There is no assumption among these people before they are qualified, by success and a rise in the world, to mix with those above their own degree, so it is surely a practice to be com- mended rather than ridiculed, above all in a country where, even more than in modern England, there are so many people of the first generation tasting the sweets of a luxurious social life. Of the more leading hotels in Montreal, such as the Windsor and the Viger, of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the old St. Lawrence Hall, there is not one conducted on the European system that I know of, and as this last is useful to many travellers, I may mention the Carslake Hotel, a quiet, comfortable, little house, close to the Grand Trunk and Windsor Canadian Pacific Railway stations. Here, and at similar places (when you can C. Iii4 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. find them) in other cities, you pay about a dollar for your room and the ordinary use of the hotel, which has a restaurant where you can take your meals d la carte if you choose. It is so obvious that a tourist bent on seeing a city and its neighbour- hood in the summer season, even if he have no hospitable friends there, will find it so convenient to have lunch and even dinner in the neighbourhood of his investigations, that the advantage of the European plan (as it is called) in such cases is outside the pale of discussion. And again, supposing him to be making Montreal his headquarters, he should wish to spend a night or two at Ottawa, Sherbrooke, the Thousand Islands, or elsewhere. Rather than pack up all his traps, close his account and take the chance of securing his own or another room on returning, he might elect to retain it, when a dollar a day will not vex his eco- nomic soul with any sense of unjustifiable extravagance, while three and a half for such a negative privilege most certainly will, unless he be a millionaire or a quite feather-headed traveller. Montreal is on an island, about the size and of precisely the same diamond shape as the Isle of Wight, since two of the four mouths of the Ottawa River cut it off from the mainland on the north and the two others, embracing the lie Perrot, skirt it on the west, the St. Lawrence of course washing the south and east. Numbers of railroads besides the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk run into Montreal. It is the nearest point too from which the western traffic can strike the winter ports of Canada, St. John and Halifax, as well as Portland and Boston in New England. The island itself is mostly level and fertile. On its further edges, as for instance by the Lake of the Two Mountains, where the Ottawa expands for a space between high-wooded shores before rushing down the rapids of St. Anne into the St. Lawrence, the scenery is bold and beautiful. Here, within a few miles' drive of the village where Tom Moore lived for a time and wrote his immortal " Canadian Boat Song," are many country houses, the summer homes of prominent Montrealers.. To this sort of country life Canada lends itself with peculiar felicity. The winter is the gay season of the cities; with the opening of summer, if there are social pleasures there are not many social duties. The family at any rate can go to theCOUNTRY LIFE NEAR MONTREAL. 115 country, and its head in most cases can get down every night or for the week-end. The same might be said of Chiselhurst or Weybridge, but then these others are not suburban residents who go up to town for their business and amusements, but represent the wealth and fashion of the city, who thus abandon it for a country life of a comparatively simple kind. The presence of great sheets of moving water and of wood- lands, in part still untamed, gives zest and character to country life round Montreal. There are large chateaux of grey lime- stone, with acres of trim lawns and flower-beds, and ornate cottages of wood or stone, but all have ample elbow room, and stand apart in grounds shaded by old forest trees, which slope down to the rocky shores of lake or river. Here boating, bathing, fishing, and in autumn shooting, make for a paradise of youth; while on shore gardening, stock- breeding, golf, driving, or cycling fill the spare hours of the ruralising Montrealer. Canada compared to England is not the home of song birds, nor do you see and hear in woods or fields anything like the number of birds that in the old country spring from hedge and stubble or cleave the air. There are, nevertheless, a great many Canadian birds, natives and migrants. I was surprised myself, when staying recently on the Lake of the Two Mountains, to find how many eggs had been collected by two young Canadian lads, sons of a friend there. Fly- catchers, butcher-birds, cow-buds and cat-birds, golden orioles, song-sparrows, various wrens, American robins and blackbirds (so called), blue jays, Phcebes, and of course various hawks, and many others, had all contributed within the season and within a mile or two's radius to the boys' collection. On a point of land near where the Lake shores draw together for the rapids of St. Anne, and within the grounds of a charm- ing country house, stand two monuments, unique so far as I know in Canada. The one is the stone fortress of Bois Broule, built in remote times by the French against the Indians descending the Ottawa; the other is a circular stone watch tower hard by on the ridge above. The former is in ruins, a duplicate in miniature of some Welsh border keep, embraced by Canadian vines and reflected in Canadian waters. It, too, has I 2n6 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. both its forgotten and its remembered tales of blood. The torch of an attacking horde of Indians finished its career some time in the eighteenth century, when its utility was waning. The two towers still stand, the charred wood and scorched plaster inside still defying the frost and storms. The curtain walls have sunk to be mere stone breast-works, over which you may look down on to the water where it bends inward and gives the post its strength and significance, and out towards the shining rapids of St. Anne. Turf mats over the roofless floor, and an elm has grown up from it and waves its branches above the ruinous tower. Away over the Lake, perched on the mountain side three or four miles away, is a Trappist monastery, the skill of whose monks in agriculture is said to be a glowing example to the neighbourhood. And there, too, is the smoke and the white hull of a passenger steamer making for the mouth of the Ottawa. The Ottawa River is the largest tributary of the St Lawrence, and flows from the West. The capital of Canada lies about one hundred and fifteen miles up its course, and a passenger steamer from Montreal plies there regularly, the single trip just occupying a day. The scenery, though not striking, is charac- teristic, and the right method for the stranger visiting Ottawa for the first and perhaps only time is to go by water and return by rail. One expedition no visitor to Montreal should omit, is that down the Lachine Rapids, the last and the most violent of the great falls of the St. Lawrence. Half an hours run by train lands you on the steamer wharf at Lachine station, where in due course a small steamer from up the river picks you up and proceeds downwards to Montreal, running the famous rapids on the way. They are a mile wide, and may be described as the impetuous portion of an average salmon river magnified fifty-fold The steamer twists and plunges for a mile or two amid sub- merged rocks and furious eddies, guided with the skill of a life's experience, from what again and again seems certain destruction. I went down there one day during the past autumn, when a gale from the east was smiting the big breakers straight in the face and raising a tremendous commotion. A mere handful ofLACHINE RAPIDS. 117 passengers were on board, but they included a delightful couple from Vermont, an elderly agriculturist of stalwart frame and rubicund visage and kindly blue eye, and a son of five-and- twenty. They were quite refreshing people, seeing that, though well-dressed and evidently well-to-do, they had scarcely ever before left home, and were only in Montreal incidentally, as the delegates on some temperance matters which were agitating rural Vermont. They would certainly not have been in that steamer, or taken in the Lachine trip by any means, if the old gentleman had realised its nature, for he wanted to get out and go ashore every time we dipped into a fresh whirlpool, and had no use in the world for so much water of such a turbulent kind. I walked home with them to my hotel, whither I was pleased to find them bound. The younger man had never been in a city before that day, and the elder was a magnificent rustic. It was a real treat to see father and son make their nervous, spasmodic dashes between the tram-cars across the traffic-laden streets. The old man remained in the hotel to recover himself after his hair-breadth escapes by sea and land, while the other went out to view the town. The former entertained me with fond memories of the farm he had left, with evident reluctance, the day before, and told me how the old Vermont farms, so long depressed, so often abandoned for the west, were looking up again with improved times and dairying activity. He related to me, also, how he himself had gone west in 1881 to the Minne- sota prairies, two years of which proved quite enough. He was evidently of that temperament not uncommon among such people, which has artistic requirements, though ill understood and crudely expressed. He had no wealth of epithet for the green hills of Vermont, but he showed none the less that a varied landscape was necessary to his content of mind by his emphatic denunciation of the other thing. No amount of money, he said, would induce him to live in a country (referring to the prairie) where you had to put up a notice board on your farm when you left it in the morning, so that you would know it from others when you came back in the evening. " Now," said he, after an hour's entertaining conversation touching many things not set down here, " I believe I'll go and hunt up Tom." In8 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. reminded him that to set out on such a quest in the biggest city in Canada was a doubtful proposition—which struck him with some force. Almost at the same moment Tom came in from his first inspection of the town, through which there was still a big gale blowing. "Well," said the hotel manager,who, as a student of human nature, took a natural interest in this really original couple, " what have you been doing with yourself?99 "I guess, sir," said Tom, looking ruefully at certain dirt smudges on his new slouch hat, " I've been hunting my hat pretty much ever since I left this hotel/' thereby showing that a retired rural life does not, in America at any rate, obscure the sense of humour.ONTARIO. 119 CHAPTER V. Ontario is by far the most important province of Canada. It contains two-fifths of the population of the entire Dominion— is entirely British, with trifling settlements of French or aliens; and is the heart and parent of Canada as Englishmen usually understand the term. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, commonly known as the Maritime Provinces, are as British as Ontario, but apart from their combined inferiority in numbers they are less progressive, and more definitely provincial. They are countries which send out rather than receive emigrants, though this may seem paradoxical in a province like New Brunswick, for instance, which has great areas of fairly fertile land still uncleared of timber. The circumstances which make for these conditions are com- plicated, and cannot be dealt with here. Prince Edward Island is a beautiful and well-tilled region, closely occupied by a hundred thousand prosperous and mainly British people, with two Houses of Parliament, a conservative disposition, and most wholesome belief in the superiority of P. E. I. to the rest of the Dominion. Nova Scotia is mainly British, with a strong Scotch and Highland element, some of the latter in Cape Breton still talking Gaelic, and a considerable diffusion of the Acadians, whose ancestors had sense or pluck enough to defy Le Loutre and take the oath of allegiance to George II. Though a pleasant and diversified country, she attracts no emigrants save miners to her collieries, and just supplies the deficit made by her own to the west. The lands worth clearing from an outsider's point of view, under modern conditions, have long been cleared, and Halifax, the only city of much outside repute in the maritime provinces, has not fifty thousand inhabi- tants, though it is wholly redeemed from provincialism by the constant presence of a fleet and garrison, and the family ties120 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. with Great Britain which generations of this connection have created. New Brunswick has a large area of fairly good timber land uncleared, and going cheap, and New Brunswickers, with their own winter port of St John, have been asking, ever since I can remember, why they should be persistently ignored by the passing emigrant in favour of no better wild lands far inland. The answer is in part easy enough, namely, that for twenty-five years the open prairie lands of the west have killed the demand of farmers for timber lands anywhere. Yet this, perhaps, is not quite convincing, for previous to this time the Ontario forests had been drawing practically the whole stream of emigration for many years, while the revival of interest in forest lands for settlers which has recently shown itself has again wholly centred on the north-western portions of the premier province. Ontario is, in short, the heart and centre of Canada, and with its varied industries and abounding life will, cceteri$ paribus, attract the stranger with a magnetism possessed by no other of the older provinces. Capitalists seeking for minerals or timber will, of course, set up their plant wherever these may be, regard- less of other influences. Sidney in Cape Breton, for instance, which till recently was the very ultima thule even of the eastern provinces, fit neighbour almost for the grass-grown casements of Louisbourg, is now, with its coal and iron industries, quite a small Newcastle. But these oases, fed by a rapid sea transport from a score of distant points and distributing their wares about the world, make small impression on the vast territories around if unsupported by other causes. Nova Scotia has large areas of fine, well-settled farming country, and produces the finest apples in the world, and good farms could probably be bought cheaper for their value than in any part of Canada ; but as no outsiders ever go and buy them it is no use speculating on economic causes, even if the maritime province were within the scope of this work. The province of Ontario covers over 200,000 square miles, and has a southern frontage of some 550 miles lying wholly on the St. Lawrence and the two great lakes Ontario and Erie. Its inclination is to the south-west, and the climate grows milder at every stage of its advance from the neighbourhood of MontrealA JAM OF LOGS. [To J ace p. 120.ONTARIO. 121 to Detroit, and the St. Clair flats. Populated Ontario, however, is but a fraction of its geographical area, and consists of a strip along the water front forty to fifty miles .deep, which about Toronto, near the western end of Lake Ontario, spreads out into a peninsula something the shape of Wales and a little larger, but, unlike that romantic country, comparatively smooth and mostly fertile. Lake Huron, to continue the rough simile, does duty in this case for the Irish Channel on north and west, and Lake Erie for the Severn sea to the south. The long strip of Eastern Ontario, as well as this expanding western peninsula of higher average fertility, were virtually filled up when I first knew Canada thirty years ago, and most of it had been well settled for from twenty to fifty years before that again. Improved farms at that day were worth slightly more all over Ontario than they are now, for precisely the same reasons that have depreciated the price of land still more decisively in England, namely, the fall in grain and the opening of the west. Speaking broadly, agricultural Ontario has not extended its area for a generation. The peninsula, its most important and fertile portion, had watery bounds set to it by Nature, the long eastern strip from Toronto to Montreal had an illimitable back country reaching to the North Pole. But this was mostly rough, poor and rocky, and not worth the labour of clearing. Civilisation at the date above mentioned had reached the limit of the good land. Speaking approximately again, and with full knowledge of exceptions which would only bore the reader to no purpose, this eastern strip has not appreciably expanded northwards for thirty years. You may kill deer as near it now as at the latter date. It had been opened, cleaned up, fenced, and covered with farm houses and buildings for some time even then, and was skirted with a fringe of poor settlers struggling amid stump- strewn clearings and poor, stony land, helped by intermittent employment in the lumber camps. The unit of land-owning in Ontario has always been from one to two hundred acres. Less than the first figure was hardly enough for a yeoman and family to thrive upon. More than the latter was outside the scheme of economic management as adopted by the working farmer of Ontario. Thirty years ago—and I think that date, though used122 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. here for personal reasons, happens otherwise to be an extremely significant one—all the good land of accessible and known Ontario was filled up. The younger sons of a farmer, who had less hankering for town life than they now have, had two alterna- tives, the somewhat cheerless one of cutting out a farm of poor, rocky land from the bush, in regions such as Muskoka, Hali- burton, and the Peterborough lake country, or going to the western prairie States. It is not surprising that the latter was most frequently adopted. Everyone has heard of the long- sustained and regrettable emigration of Anglo-Canadians to the United States, which has happily of late years received so decided a check. Indeed, we now have the pleasing spectacle of the sons of many of these exiles returning to the north-west of their native country. In the 'seventies, however, as we shall see later on, came the opening of this same Canadian North-West, and men's minds were turned towards the fat wheat lands of the Red River, though till the absorbing question of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which monopolised Canadian politics for years, was settled, emigration from the east was limited and timid. But with the final opening of Manitoba the axe dropped from the hands of the backwoods farmer. When virgin prairie land of immense fertility was to be had on the same terms as heavily timbered land of poor quality, the latter, of course, wholly ceased to attract. With an equal soil to that of the North-West, and the advantage of propinquity, timbered land could scarcely have competed with the other among a generation who had personally known the labour of bringing a bush farm into cultivation. Ontario, then—not in the science of agriculture, which has pro- gressed greatly, but in the area occupied in it—has almost stood still for thirty years, while wealth from other sources has accumulated in its midst. Canada at the time alluded to was a poor country; it is now a rich one. Nevertheless, Ontario farms which sold readily then at sixty dollars an acre, .to take an average type, would go slowly now at fifty. This at first sight would seem a paradox if England herself did not show a still greater one, and for reasons obvious in both cases, and due to the same cause. For a time, possibly even still here and there, good wheat farms thirty miles east of London could beUNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS. 123 purchased for the same price as less productive wheat farms seventy miles north of Toronto ! Ontario was first settled, as were the maritime provinces in a secondary sense, by refugee loyalists from the American colonies after the revolutionary war. The American State Governments behaved for the most part with short-sighted rancour towards those whose only fault had been loyalty to the Crown and to their principles as they read them. American historians have at last outlived the ill-balanced judgment which distinguished the works of their predecessors on this contentious period, and have little to say for the treatment which drove thousands of men and women penniless into the wilderness for not siding with a cause that both their reason and their con- science rejected. It is generally calculated that at least fifty thousand loyalists sought refuge in the Canadian woods, some of their own accord, others banished and proscribed both in property and person. About half this number went into what became Ontario, travelling by the Champlain and Richelicu route or crossing Lake Ontario in large boats, but in most cases suffering great hardships and privations. It is a very long story—too long even to outline here. But it is as well to remember that a considerable proportion of these refugees had been persons of education and weight in their respective colonies, and for this very reason had attracted the vengeance of the popular party; that though the British Government ultimately voted a large sum for their relief, it came too late, and very little of it reached them, for reasons too lengthy to analyse here; that though free grants of land were given them in regions untouched and almost unknown, they had nearly all, the educated and the horny-handed, the delicate women and the young children alike, to begin life in the wilderness without money and without help. About twenty-five thousand came to Ontario, founding settlements where Kingston, Niagara, and Toronto now stand respectively. Fusion with French Canada was impossible, so the province of Upper Canada was cut off from Quebec and endowed with a Governor and a Legislature, which met in a wooden house at " Muddy Little York," the germ of the present beautiful city of124 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Toronto. Many other settlers came in from the United States without political motive, for the proportion of the population who " sat on the fence" throughout the whole revolutionary- war in favourable seclusion, or else confined themselves to opportune shouting, as well as opportune shooting, was of course enormous, as the statistics of troops in the field compared to population give rough but irrefutable evidence. The United Empire or U. E. Loyalists, as the original settlers of Ontario proudly called themselves and are still called, from the very circumstances of their exile, carried into the Canadian woods an almost fierce loyalty and a corre- responding resentment towards their recent persecutors. They numbered among them a strong minority of Dutch and German settlers, who were attached to the Crown for various good and worthy reasons. Their ranks were recruited, too, by emigrants from Great Britain; so that when the war of 1812 against the States broke out the Upper Province contained about seventy thousand souls, all British in blood or sympathy, with many loyal Indians. The thickest settlements in those days were about York and Niagara, extending into the interior, where lay some of the best land in Canada. Madison's war was a curious outburst of unprovoked aggression on the part of a still weakly- cemented republic. England was struggling single-handed with the armed tyranny of Napoleon, which was a singular moment in itself for a nursling of Freedom to spring upon her back. The north-eastern States, however, the section with by far the finest warlike traditions, were bitterly opposed to the whole business. The actual casus belli was the searching of American ships for deserters by British naval captains, but as the matter was not even mentioned in the peace negotiations two years later, historians of these days, like the New Englanders of those, usually credit the authors of the quarrel with less reasonable motives. The acquisition of Canada was a leading object, or was soon made one, of the war. "On to Canada" was the instant cry of regiments levied in the middle and southern States, and led by generals who caricatured the bombastic proclamations of Napoleon without a particle of his ability. England had her hands more than full. A single regimentTHE WAR OF 1812. of regular troops was in Canada, but the handful of Ontario colonists, who had found a refuge in the wilderness from their old oppressors, flew to arms in defence of it. The British sea power was useless. It had no soldiers to convey, nor vital supplies for the Americans to intercept. The first invading army was captured entirely, with Hull, its general, by a far inferior force, and his proclamations on American soil at Detroit were discovered for the edification of posterity. The second was driven back near Niagara, and a monument to the gallant British general, Brock, who fell there, now stands on Queenston heights. Lower Canada was not very seriously assailed, but the French, as was noted in a former chapter, did everything that was required of them, and on one occasion achieved some positive glory. For the next two years each side harried and ravaged the other's frontier with about equal success. The Americans burnt York and the British Washington. In 1814 Napoleon fell and released the British army, which candour compels one to state did not greatly distinguish itself in the brief opportunity allowed it. But both sides were tired of a useless struggle, the only enduring result of which was to still further embitter the U. E. Loyalists of Canada against their neighbours to the south, and to add fervour to a patriotism which still accounts for a warmth of feeling in their descendants which sometimes surprises strangers for the most part totally unacquainted with their story. After the war Upper Canada was more intensely loyal and more British than ever, and fell by an almost natural process into the hands of that not unpicturesque oligarchy known to history as the " Family Compact." Among the U. E. Loyalists there were naturally many persons who had taken leading positions in their various colonies before the War of Independence. Such pre-eminence in times less democratic than these was maintained without great difficulty, in spite of the general poverty in which most of them had started their new life. To these were added a few English families of the younger-son type, some of whom purchased or received free large tracts of land, on which they settled working men and farmers from their own districts in Great Britain. With the close of the Napoleon wars, British126 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. officers and soldiers were attracted to Upper Canada by grants of land or other reasons, and the former proved a further source of strength to a class that had already grown into a fairly well defined aristocracy, though perhaps bureaucracy would be a more strictly accurate word. The mass of the people were still struggling with the forests, and more or less isolated and tied to their backwoods homes. Outside matters, including politics, seemed to them a long way off; intercourse was difficult, time valuable. The aristocracy, however, had grouped themselves to a great measure in or near such centres of civilisa- tion as Kingston, Toronto, and Niagara, for true country life in Canada has never succeeded in permanently attracting its educated class. This gregariousness, too, was encouraged by the offices, which were not unnaturally monopolised by the class who at that time seemed the only one qualified to occupy them. They had the ear of the royal governors, who came and went and would not perhaps see much amiss with a system that made Upper Canada a pleasant place for a deserving officer or civil servant to hold his little court in. Much natural intermarriage among this oligarchy seemed to justify, though it did not, of course, give rise, to the term of "Family Compact" (borrowed from the English Whigs), so notable in Canadian history. Such a system during the embryo period of Upper Canadian existence was probably as good as any other. Moreover, it was not unnatural. The United Empire members of the " Family Compact" had inherited traditions of leadership in quasi- democratic communities. But the " Compact" outstayed its welcome, and, perhaps, it became somewhat audacious, certainly imprudent. Its members acquired large tracts of public lands, and held them for the rise, thereby retarding settlement. It retained for the Church of England exclusively the landsdthat were granted for the maintenance of the Protestant religion. It even threw obstacles in the way of new-comers from Great Britain competing with its members in the learned professions. The more democratic members in the elective assembly could do little to check all this, as the Governor and Council were financially independent. The result in Upper Canada, as mentioned in a previousDEVELOPMENT OF ONTARIO, 127 chapter, was the rebellion of 1837, led by Lyon Mackenzie, simultaneously with the movement of the French in Lower Canada against official monopoly of a more racial kind. It was almost bloodless, but brought out Lord Durham, of famous memory, whose hope was ultimate federation of all the provinces and his immediate panacea the union under responsible govern- ment of Ontario or Quebec, or, as then called, Canada East and Canada West; the notion being that the British of the Upper Province would counterbalance the overwhelming French majority in the Lower, the population of the two provinces being at this time over a million. As we have seen, the primary step failed, and in 1867, with a population of three and a half millions, federation put an end to all provincial ailments. The Government of Ontario, however, unlike that of Quebec and Nova Scotia, rejected the idea of an Upper House or Legislative Council, and were content with an elective assembly. But the " Family Compact " influence lasted long after the rebellion that broke its strength and Lord Durham's legislation. They were jobbers, perhaps, but jobbers of the good old sort, and, their descendants will stoutly maintain, were at least better than corrupt plebeians. And many of them had a really strong claim on the Government, who held the patronage and the Crown lands of Canada. The immense social influence of their members could not be killed by Acts of Parliament. They helped to keep alive English social standards in Upper Canada, and for a long time even preserved some social distinction to the world of politics. Many of their descen- dants are still prominent in Toronto society and in certain walks of public life, and it is esteemed a good thing even in these comparatively democratic times to bear one of the familiar names. In the meantime emigration had poured steadily into the country, mainly from England and Scotland or the North of Ireland, though some of the great Catholic Irish contingent, which crossed the Atlantic before and after the famine, found their way on to British territory. The fertile lands, both of the eastern strip and the western peninsula, were rapidly cleared and opened to the sunshine. The whole Niagara country and great128 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. areas of the smooth, rolling lands towards Brantford, Hamilton, and Woodstock were well settled when in 1827 James Gait, the litterateur and enthusiast, with the Canada Company, founded the towns and districts of Guelph and Goderich, while Gait itself was being planted by Mr. Dickson, of Niagara, with farmers and labourers from Dumfriesshire. Perhaps the period of the Crimean War, when wheat, even with the slow transportation of those days, was worth a dollar and a half a bushel, was that of the most rapid improvement and clearing of land. Much of the peninsula was magnificent soil. Forty bushels an acre was no uncommon crop, and these hard-living, thrifty hundred and two hundred acre farmers had a large annual surplus, which soon showed itself in the good stone and brick houses, the fine barns and outbuildings, which distinguish Ontario to-day. By 1870, or thereabouts, no first- class land but a little perhaps in the counties of Bruce and Gray remained unsettled. Ontario, in an agricultural sense, was virtually filled up, and since that day it has been occupied in changing its methods of farming and in turning itself into the chief manufacturing province of the Dominion, as well as in supplying the North-West with the hardiest and most successful of its settlers. The early settlement of Ontario may seem a prosaic tale when thus concentrated into a few bare facts on paper. But, as a matter of fact, the early struggles in the woods of the U. E. Loyalists, and those who joined them from the old country, without roads, schools, doctors, or the necessaries of life other than they could grow or make at home, form a story full of romance if of a somewhat grim order. There was some humour in it, too, and brief periods of enjoy- ment, but much more of hardship, suffering, and tragedy. Delicate and gently-nurtured women were among the pioneers, and there was then no return to comfortable home and friends if the undertaking proved too much for them, as in partially similar cases nowadays. Whatever their degree, however, they all came from comfortable situations in the older colonies of America or from England, and had to begin life again in a wilderness, where, besides the toil, the fierce snows of winter, the agues of summer and autumn, the mosquitoes and black flies,MONTREAL TO OTTAWA. 129 forest fires, wolves, and a host of minor evils had to be wrestled with. It would be difficult for a man unacquainted with back- woods life to quite realise what the taming of Ontario meant at that time. It is almost as difficult for one who is to think of this almost ornate landscape round Guelph or Woodstock, Brantford or Hamilton, for instance, so smooth now and home- like, as a waste of stump-strewn clearings and log houses amid dense forests, where settlers were wakened in the night by the howl of wolves at their very doors. There is a good deal of older Ontario, however, particularly in the eastern half, that is neither ornate nor very fertile ; but of this later. The first glimpse of Ontario and English Canada that many strangers have is the run by the Canadian Pacific up the southern bank of the Ottawa, which forms the provincial boundary, though nowhere within sight of the river. It is not interesting, nor in any way equal to the Ontario on which one's thoughts have been hitherto running throughout this chapter; at any rate, it is not characteristic. Sometimes you are in a French country, and very much so. At Rigaud, for instance, a beautiful old French manor-house dominates the village, as Town Hall doubtless nowadays, while gilded church spires at various points shoot heavenwards, telling their unmistakable tale. Then, again, districts unmistakably English border the railway track; new and crude settlements, and not the best of land; high frame houses, L-shaped and ugly as want of taste and paint can make them. The square fields of the Anglo-Canadian are here, too, with the snake fence in its rawest and most straggling con- dition, and stretches of cedar swamp and forest, and frequent fields bristling with fresh stumps of the height that clearing the bush in the season of deep snow entails. It is a flat landscape, for the most part and uninspiring ; a second, if not a third-class, country for a considerable portion at any rate of the hundred and fifteen miles to Ottawa. The last time I went through it, however, was under different conditions, and on a February afternoon, the coldest month of winter, and on one of its colder days. The thermometer was fifteen below zero. The rays of a drooping sun streamed over a virgin surface of frozen snow, hardly broken by the tops of the fences, which just peered above the dazzling C. K130 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. surface. All stumps and ragged patches lay beneath this beautiful pure carpet, which reflected every glory as the day waned into sunset and died out in brief twilight. The home- steads, log or frame, with every living thing gathered round their protecting shelter, threw up their blue smoke-wreaths and stood mute and devoid of active life, their crudeness buried beneath the friendly pall, the woods behind them dark with evergreen ; the leafless foliage of the hardwood forests above them making delicate tracings against the wintry sky. The story of Ottawa is romantic. About a hundred years ago an American settler was the sole inhabitant of the waste. After twenty years of his own company he apparently wearied of it, and sold the opposite side of the river, namely, the present site of the city, for two hundred dollars. A few years afterwards the Rideau Canal was built to enable ships to ply between the two Canadas without exposing themselves to American interruption in case of war. The entrance was about a mile below the Chaudiere Falls and the head of Ottawa navi- gation from the St. Lawrence. This fact, and the increase of the lumber business gradually swelled Bytown, as the backwoods village was then called, to the respectable size of ten thousand souls. When at the approach of Canadian Federation the struggle over the site of the Dominion capital waxed hot, Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, and Kingston were all in the running; but eventually, following the example of the United States, it was decided to place the capital with a view to con- venience, and to silence all wranglingby breaking fresh ground, and in i860 the present King laid the foundation-stone of the Parliament buildings. The name of Bytown was then haply changed to Ottawa. By 1865 the Government buildings were finished, and ever since then the new capital has been busy qualifying for its exalted position. And, indeed, the latter adjec- tive might be used in two senses, for the Parliament houses stand on a lofty hill looking down upon the Ottawa and over vast stretches of plain, forest, and mountain beyond it. No Govern- ment in the world probably is more proudly seated. Indeed, the view both of this fine block of buildings and the view from it are among the sights of Canada. The buildings are in the modernHOUSES QF PARLIAMENT, OTTAWA. \[To face p. 131,OTTAWA. * 131 Gothic style, chaste and pure; the material is light-coloured local sandstone, which even a short forty years have mellowed into pleasing tones, while red sandstone facings around doors and windows give happy touches of relief. Here in the main building are included the Senate Chamber and the House of Commons, with their attendant corridors and private rooms. In detached wings rising on either hand are the various Govern- ment departments of State, finance, public works, agriculture, militia, and the rest. But the most beautiful of all is the library, which is circular in form, and partly detached and highly decorated within. It contains nearly a quarter of a million of books beautifully shelved on the choicest Canadian woods, and has for long possessed an eminent librarian. To this delightful and spacious treasure-house the fortunate citizens of Ottawa have virtually free access. Well-kept grounds of four or five acres surround the buildings, and I hardly know whether the outlook from them is the more striking when the far-spreading prospect beneath is locked in the white rigours of winter, from the frozen river at your feet to the snowy undulations of the distant Laurentian hills, or whether in summer, when you may sit on a garden seat at the verge of the leafy precipice and absorb the glorious outlook at your leisure. There are, I believe, some three hundred million feet of lumber sawn up at Ottawa every year, and as you look down on the river, some five or six hundred yards in width, the magnitude of the lumber interest is evident enough. The town of Hull, on the opposite shore, reveals itself as wholly absorbed in the collection, cutting up and shipping of logs that have been floated from distant forests far away by the banks of tributary streams and lakes. Looking up the river, but a mile away, the towns of Hull and Ottawa seem to draw together amid a perfect confusion of timber-stacks, sheds, saw-mills, and tumbling water. These are the falls of the Chaudi£re, so split up, chained and harnessed for electrical and saw-mill purposes, that all trace of the old natural channels around which the early voyageurs and traders used to portage their canoes has vanished. Almost as I write news has come of immense fires raging through these lumber yards of Hull and the Chaudiere and the lower levels of K 2i32 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Ottawa. In winter the whole river below the Parliament buildings is frozen tight, and traversed by crowds of human beings on foot and in vehicles. I recently witnessed the fastest trotter in the United States break his "ice record," and cover the mile in two minutes and ten seconds on the Ottawa in the presence of thousands of spectators all standing on the ice. The Chaudi&re, too, at this winter season presents a curious spectacle from the bridge which connects Hull and Ottawa. The clear dark-brown water which distinguishes these forest- born rivers breaks from beneath fantastic cones of glittering ice, and races downwards between pendant columns of frozen water— gigantic icicles, which hang from every pier and buttress, to the great ice-bound calm below. The winter climate of Ottawa is rigorous, but brilliant and invigorating. The well-to-do element being large in the population of near seventy thousand, the country roads, running like white ribbons through the pervading green of the spruce and fir woods, are musical with the tinkle of sleigh bells on Saturday afternoons and Sundays ; and the almost noiseless rush of fast trotting horses bearing their fur-clad drivers over the smooth-beaten snow is continually in the ear should you be then taking your walks abroad. For the politician, the business man, or the gentleman of leisure, of which there are quite a few in Ottawa, the winter climate, cold as it is—a trifle more so than Montreal—has much to recommend it. It is generally of that bright and exhilarating frigidity which the stranger believes to be the prevailing winter characteristic of all his Majesty's Canadian dominions when, that is to say, he does not believe it to continue for most of the year. For the indoor man, who takes a few brisk short walks a day—though, by the way, not many people walk very briskly on ice-coated side-walks —from one heated house to another, with an occasional loiter in a sunny, sheltered corner, and who goes skating or snow-shoeing in his leisure hours, the cold, clear winter is delightful. Whether the men who work out of doors at slow jobs or the farmers who haul in hay or oats from the country would be so enthusiastic is another matter. And by the same token it is surprising what misleading stuff the casual correspondent will sometimes send home for publication. This does not matter when France,CLIMATE. 133 Germany, or Italy are the theme; but in Canada hundreds of eyes are eagerly turned with half-formed notions perhaps of making it their future home, and such readers have no means of judging of the qualifications of the writer, nor do they realise how long it takes to know a colony and how deceptive first impressions often are. I took up a well-known London evening paper in the Rideau Club one day last winter in Ottawa, and found in its columns an article dated from that same comfortable and hospitable establishment on one of the last days of November. "The climate of Canada," said this hopeless but anonymous individual, " is a trifle hotter in summer and a little colder in winter than that of England." We will let the summer go as near enough, only wishing that the English variety was a little more like the Canadian. But as to the other business—the letter was dated evidently on one of those belated autumn days you may often get in Canada, and the writer, who was preaching with some air of authority, and particularly to the intending emigrant, described how he was himself seated at the open window of an unheated room, treating the incident quite as normal and as a good climatic illustration. Now that very day, it so happens, the thermometer from the Rockies to Winnipeg was between ten and twenty degrees below zero, for I was there. Four days later, our friend at Ottawa, if he were indeed only a guileless being and not a brazen-faced boomer, must have been astonished, for the mercury was registering "fifteen below" in that city. I am saying nothing against a Canadian winter. The townsmen, at any rate, enjoy it; but imagine a man who would describe it a "little colder than England" turned loose to influence readers on the infinitely more subtle question of North American agriculture as affecting the immigrant. And, again, as I write, I note a breezy article from another " occasional correspondent," evidently making his first acquaintance with Winnipeg, from which vantage-point he informs his readers, among other more harmless things gathered at second hand, that any young Englishman—alluding to the inexperienced soft-handed class—can get twenty-five dollars a month and his keep on a farm. What is one to say to such stuff as this, and cruel stuff, too ? The same writer alludes also in airy134 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. fashion to the lumber camps in winter as a fine source of wage earning to the same type. I wonder if he had ever seen a lumber camp or had any notion, in the first place, of the technical knowledge and strength required, and in the second the kind of men a youth of this sort would have to eat, sleep, and work with for months together. The shanty-men of the Ottawa and elsewhere are picturesque people in the abstract, and fill their place in the social economy of Canada admirably. But pigging it with an illiterate " Homesteader " on the open prairie would be a paradise for a lad of refined bringing up to a bunk in a lumber shanty for the winter. Putting other things aside, I think I see a young Canadian of the same class doing it! And while speaking of lumbering there is a curious mixture of French, Scotch and Irish settlements up the banks of the Ottawa for forty or fifty miles above the city. The French are more cosmopolitan here than elsewhere, having been so long associated with the others in the various branches of the lumbering trade. The two races may be said to meet more or less on common ground along the course of the Ottawa which divides the pro- vinces, and if the French are the more numerous, they are not the only farmers who bring their produce into market. Lum- bering, however, develops settlement, the shanty-man and river driver often settling down into the farmer and increasing his clearing and comforts in his off months, till his sons perhaps drop the river and the saw-mill altogether for the plough, moderate their language, restrain their fighting instincts, and subside into respectable Canadian agriculturists. The Dominion Parliament meets about the end of February, and the length of the session depends entirely on the work to be accomplished. The Senate contains about seventy members, who are elected for life, and performs much the same political functions as the House of Lords in this country. The Lower House has about two hundred and thirty, and the members of both draw allowances of fifteen hundred dollars a year and mileage. It will be perhaps enough to say that the Government is conducted on practically the same lines as at Westminster by a Prime Minister and Cabinet, representing the party in power for the time and responsible to the country. I do not thinkSOCIETY AT OTTAWA. 135 a list of the various departments and their duties or a detailed description of the two chambers, which are large and handsome, is desirable here, as so many books of reference will furnish these and other like details to the enquiring soul, while the general reader probably does not want them. Ottawa, with its considerable army of civil servants always in residence, to say nothing of its professional and mercantile population, is never at a loss for society. But during the session it is a very gay place indeed. The Rideau Club, to which nearly every clubable resident, politician, and visitor belongs permanently or tempo- rarily, is a notable institution ; but in the matter of hotels, as at Winnipeg, there is room for improvement. The residential part of the city is, for obvious reasons, unusually large, and stretches back from the two main business streets in a series of parallelo- grams of leafy avenues bordered by private residences to suit various incomes. The whole city and suburbs are served by the admirable service of electric cars possessed by every city and town in Canada, and are of course lit by electricity generated by the all-powerful Chaudi£re. Perhaps it is when waiting at a street corner for one of the less frequently running tramcars that one best realises the meaning of " twenty below." Beneath the plateau on which the best of the city stands, the Rideau canal and river, some distance apart, and over flats covered with humbler buildings, flow into the Ottawa. Away beyond the latter, and practically in the country, is Rideau Hall, the Governor-General's residence—a plain but roomy mansion standing high in large well-wooded grounds. To say that this is a great rendezvous of Ottawa society is perhaps hardly neces- sary, but characteristic gatherings are those on the skating-rink adjoining the house, where many of the best exponents of the art in Canada may from time to time be seen, Lady Minto herself and her daughter being among the very best lady performers in the Dominion. Waltzing and hockey have certainly dethroned figure skating from its old position in Canada, and the best figure skaters in the world now are pro- bably to be found among Englishmen who spend their winters in Switzerland and have the leisure, denied to most Canadians, to work constantly at it. Earnscliff, near the lodge gates of136 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Rideau Hall, and finely perched on the cliffs above the Ottawa, is also an interesting house from having been the residence for the last years of his life of Sir John Macdonald, the foremost statesman any British colony has yet bred. A prominent Ottawa lady now owns the property, and has added somewhat to the house; but much of it, including the dining-room, stands as the greatest statesman and chief author of Canadian federation left it* and is duly held in honoun The fact that not greatly divergent views on the tariff question is all that for the moment seriously separates the two political parties seems in no way to have abated the ancient rivalry and sometimes even rancour that divided them when a wider gap yawned between them* There is always much bitterness among the rank and file in regard to the accusations of malpractices that each hurls against the other. If one was to believe them all, the Parliament buildings of Ottawa would surely seem as ripe as the cities of the plain for some appalling demonstration of divine retribution. The man outside politics does not profess to know much about it: he is too busy, but he generally reveals himself as a pessimist when pressed for an opinion, nor does he always require pressing. That the personnel of the House of Commons is declining in those standards which go to make desirable legislators is the opinion of some people who really should be good judges ; that the standard of culture has declined among the people's representatives I have on the very best authority conceivable; and that the French members in this respect are ahead of the English is, I believe, indisputable, for the good reason that more of them have had a classical educa- tion than the others. Still, the business of the country upon the whole is cheaply and efficiently managed, though things are done at elections beyond a doubt which the bare suspicion of in the British Parliament would rouse all England. Graver questions than have ever cropped up seem likely, how- ever, to agitate Canadians in the near future. To discuss Imperial defence, or preferential tariffs, or trade-within-the- Empire is not within the province of this modest work ; but that these matters will force themselves upon the attention of both British and Canadian in the near future seems now aCANADA AND THE MOTHER COUNTRY. 137 certainty. It would be as well, however, for Englishmen to remember that Canadians differ as much in opinions as they do themselves. When an English correspondent has written to Sir Wilfrid Laurier and got his opinion expressed in guarded language on some international matter, he publishes it in a newspaper as a final opinion of Canadians generally. Such action is childish, for, of course, he has merely secured a reply from a party leader. Then again, there are Canadians of the old- fashioned Tory and almost militant order, full of picturesque sentiment, more loyal than any Primrose League dame, and who would scarcely regard the catastrophe of a war with the United States without some secret satisfaction. The sentiments of French Canada I have already touched upon, so far as I feel qualified to. As regards English Canada, there is no doubt that the attachment to union with the Mother Country is universal, and is greater than it was in the seventies. But you will most assuredly find in the average Canadian a dislike to being drawn into entanglements and definite obligations, nor has he usually been anxious to argue on broad Imperial lines. We in this country are sitting in the centre of a great Empire, on a small over-peopled island with no dreams of local expansion to dis- tract us and our thoughts. Our conversation and theories roam over our possessions throughout the world however little we may personally know about them. But the Canadian is wrapped up in his own country. He feels bigger and stronger and prouder of it than he ever did before. He thinks of it more as a nation perhaps than a colony. He has worked hard without any very great reward for several generations, and now the grinding drudgery is over and his hour would seem to have come. His vast territory has revealed itself to be greater, more fertile, more conquerable, more habitable than even he had thought it. Now this does not seem to me in my humble judgment to have turned the average Canadian towards a more clearly defined and elaborated scheme of partnership with the Mother Country unless a higher price for produce can be secured without any corresponding sacrifice. For the greater part of the past year I have seen and spoken to no one else but Canadians by birth or adoption, and that not in a single town or province, but all thei38 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. way from Halifax to Victoria inclusive. Allowing of course for many extremes, the prevailing note that I myself have struck is a desire to be let alone, and a distrust of schemes that might prove entangling. This may be selfish, and English writers on Imperial subjects who have caught echoes of it do not fail to say so. But the Canadian will point to the South African War as a proof of his practical loyalty. And it seems likely that he will continue to prefer the bond of such obligations to be one of sentiment rather than of statute. But, with the promise of such burning questions about to emanate from Westminster, I will say nothing, unless indeed to set down the general estimate that in about fifteen years the Canadian North-West will supply enough wheat for the whole demands of Great Britain is of any help to the reader in forming his opinions on Imperial unity, political or commercial. And this would surely smother any revived attempts to make wheat-growing general in England. Under the present conditions and present prices (fifty odd cents a bushel), the wheat farmers of North-Western Canada are doing so well that the Canadian Government is inviting people from every part of the world to come and participate in these good things. The present price of stock, too, is notoriously remunerative in Canada. The plain man may be pardoned for asking why the tax-laden British consumer should be expected to contribute from his industry to the further enriching of the Canadian who is proclaiming, and justly too, his extraordinary prosperity under existing conditions. Will the prospective benefits of a limited number of manufactures and a presumable increase of wages in a fraction of the population, provided they are realised, make up for the increased price of food stuffs to those whose power to purchase it cannot increase, and for the perennial sore feeling engendered by such a move. England will become again a wheat-growing country, it is said. For how long ? When the Canadian North-West in fifteen years pro- duces enough wheat for us, and as now with profit at sixteen shillings a quarter, where will the English wheat grower be then, and the handful of people he has " attracted back to the land " to reinvigorate English blood ? There will be another crisis, as in the 'eighties. The lesson that the Ontario farmer, under exactlyFUTURE PROBLEMS. 139 the conditions of England, only with fewer advantages, has learnt so admirably, namely, to be virtually independent of wheat and do pretty well, will be postponed indefinitely. English farmers who have been adapting themselves to other methods, not without success, will be tempted back into old paths, the end of which would surely be in sight. While other farmers, who have learnt no lessons from the enormous importation of dairy stuff superior to theirs, will become more hopelessly impassive. Yet I have been told by several Canadians within the past year that this is Great Britain's last chance; that we are at the parting of the ways ; that if we take the wrong step it is the irrevocable path to—what? Twenty years ago the Canadian in such a frame of mind would have said annexation, now he says independence. Personally, I believe that to be the ultimate destiny of Canada, not so much from any logical reasoning, but because it seems to lurk in the back of the mind of so many sensible and loyal Canadians known to me, who have no sort of desire for any such climax. A seat in the Canadian House of Commons carries with it no kind of social distinction. Nothing but the highest rungs of the political ladder count for anything at all in the social circles of Montreal, Toronto, Quebec, or Hamilton. This of course is merely in accord with other democratic governments, and is inevitable. Ottawa has its political and social gatherings, the one an ex-officio business, and the other based on ordinary society lines. In this respect it is a miniature Washington, and provides a good deal of entertainment to those of the social and higher political circles who find such in the harmless vanities or the embarrassments and disenchantments of their unsophisticated neighbours who would fain " see the town." In Ottawa society, however, French and English mingle more perhaps than on any other stage, and speaking of the former, you come across here and there an old French-Canadian family of Huguenot extraction who have somehow contrived to remain Protestants, and yet prominent. It is very rare, but one such occurs to me in Ottawa itself from the fact that I happen to know several of its members in various parts of Canada. French- Canadian Catholics form the majority of the working andi4o CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. middle classes of Ottawa. There is a Catholic Cathedral arid a college of five hundred students, while the City Hall and the chief rifle range in Canada complete the leading features of its civic life. The Supreme Court of Appeal of course sits in the capital, though it is somewhat poorly housed in the west block of the Parliament buildings. In company with a legal friend, who was on duty, I attended the opening of the Court in this past February, and formed, I think, the sole outside audience. The six judges, French and English, in their scarlet and ermine, were on the bench, and the barristers in their gowns and bands (wigs are not worn) below. The first appeal was on behalf of a French- Canadian Member of Parliament elect, who had been unseated by the Quebec Courts for corruption. The advocates on both sides were pleading in English with a French accent, while the Bench, half-English, half-French, and one of the latter with an English title, in the seat of honour beneath the Royal Arms, made a suggestive and interesting tableau. The Militia of the Dominion is controlled from the Depart- ment at Ottawa, and forms, with the exception of the British garrisons at Halifax and Esquimault, the sole defensive force of the country. It is divided into a small permanent force, practically regulars, and numerous regiments, whose duties correspond to the Volunteers of the United Kingdom. The permanent force consists of a regiment of Dragoons, a Field and Garrison division of Artillery, some Mounted Rifles in the North-West, and a regiment of Infantry distributed in about five depots. The ordinary Militia has eleven regiments of Cavalry, a con- siderable force of Field and Garrison Artillery and Engineers, a small Army Service Corps and nearly a hundred regiments of Infantry. These are numbered, but for the most part have territorial or fancy designations as well. Many of them are entirely French, while none are mixed to any appreciable extent. Such are the 6ist (Regiment de Montmagny); 64th (Chateau- guay and Beauharnois Regiment); the 65th (Carabiniers Mont- Royal) ; 84th (St Hyacinthe), and many more. Then there are Highland regiments, like the 79th of Quebec, the 48th ofTHE CHAUDliSRE, OTTAWA. {To face p. 140THE MILITARY FORCES. 141 Toronto, as well as Rangers, Rifles, Fusiliers and Grenadiers, while the Governor-General's body-guard takes social prece- dence of all, and has been commanded for eighty years by members of the same name and family, a well-known one in Toronto. The total strength of all arms is about forty thousand. There is a great deal of very keen Volunteer soldiering in Canada, while it is needless to say that the many thousand veterans who have returned from active service in South Africa have not only infused fresh life into the Militia force but form an element invaluable to its spirit and efficiency. The Military College at Kingston is an institution of which Canada is justly proud. Great numbers of the best class of youths pass through it for their ordinary education. Its discipline, and esprit de corps are admirable, and a certain number of commissions in the British Army are given every year to the most successful cadets who wish for them. For the rest, it forms a fine training school for the officers of Canada's defensive forces.( 142 ) CHAPTER VI. The Province of Ontario appeals to the enquiring English- man from a different standpoint to that of Quebec. The latter is in some sense a little foreign nation under our flag. We do not go there to see how our own transatlantic friends and relatives are getting on ; nor do we ever regard it as a possible home for any more of them. Its interest for Englishmen is indirect, political, picturesque ; and as this work is not expected to treat elaborately of those political, ecclesiastical and racial problems afforded by the inclusion of French Canada in a British Confederation, I had no option but to touch lightly on the various features of French-Canadian life as they suggested themselves by a visit to its most characteristic, parts, assisted by an old acquaintance with Canada generally. Ontario I feel must be handled in a somewhat different way. Neither its people nor its landscape are as picturesque as those of Quebec, though in other ways they should both have more interest for us. A driving tour, for instance, through the farming districts, say from Kingston to Goderich on Lake Huron, some two hundred and odd miles, though unprecedented, I am quite sure as a performance would be pleasant enough for anyone fond of driving, and certainly instructive. The roads would be sufficiently good ; the country as highly civilised, minus country houses and parks, as Northampton, Bucks, and Oxfordshire, as thickly occupied to the eye and of about the same average physical contour, though in some few parts almost as hilly as Devonshire. There would however be scarcely any counterpart of the English rural village, but plenty of country towns of from two thousand to ten thousand people en route. There would be at least two considerable homesteads in Ontario for every one in the counties just named, for the simple reason that the farms average all through somewhat less than half the size, and will, inONTARIO LANDSCAPE. 143 the great majority of cases be the freehold of the men who farm them. The homesteads, though twice as numerous, will be on the whole about equal in size, comfort, and solidity to those of the three hundred acre English farmer and quite as ornamental in structure and external surroundings, always excepting, of course, those ancient buildings that still here and there in old England delight the eye. As the farms are smaller, so too are the fields, ten acres being perhaps the unit. A modern Arthur Young would thoroughly enjoy such a trip : a modern auto- mobilist perhaps find it dull, if passing objects, that is to say, come at all within his scheme of enjoyment. In spring, summer, and autumn too, the landscape will be always pleasing, if a bit burnt in a dry July or August. How indeed can fine and varied foliage, growing or ripening crops, pasture and hay meadows, clear and rippling streams (for the Ontario rivers are not sluggish like those of our English midland and southern counties) be otherwise. But there cannot, of course, be over- much variety where there are no old buildings, no history, no past, and an almost uniform social level of freeholders. But there is, nevertheless, a continuity of pleasing domestic landscape, such as would astonish those many Englishmen who believe Canada to consist mainly of backwoods, and save for the rail fences it is not unlike England. A real acquaintance with two or three stretches of a dozen miles and with the people who live thereon in as many parts of Ontario would give a stranger as complete an idea of country life and scenery as if he travelled industriously all over the province. I propose, then, to treat Ontario under the four distinct heads into which it naturally falls—the city, the country town, the farming districts and the backwoods. Nearly all the books on Canada by English travellers that I have ever seen, deal with two features only of Canadian life—its institutions and social festivities, particularly the ice carnivals and winter palaces of the big cities on the one hand and the camping and sporting pleasures of the back- woods on the other; the two extremes, in short, between which the great bulk of the Canadian people live. Even geographers have conspired to obscure the most substantial and populous and wealthy part of Canada in the eyes of outsiders.i44 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. In the best English atlases, the solitary page given to older Canada is mainly filled by the wilderness portion, thereby crowding the home of four million busy fellow citizens into a meagre strip in a corner perfectly useless for geographical identification. Even in the Times Atlas, Denmark, with a smaller population, of relatively no interest whatever to us and never visited, occupies more than four times the space of all populated Ontario and Quebec. Cuba occupies more than twice the area, Sicily a great deal more ! Why should not one page be devoted to the great wilderness areas and another to the practical geography and the portion which contains the mass of human interest? The guide books to Canada, however, have good maps in reasonable proportion, and I take it for granted that people going there will possess themselves of either Murray, Baedeker, or Appleton, for no other work can take the place of a guide book. If it does, it of necessity becomes like those invaluable publications, unreadable. The estimate in which the public hold a guide book is based on its practical qualities, not on its excursions into the field of literary decora- tion or its indifferent illustrations of the places which its readers are going to visit in the flesh. The fireside reader might be pleased with illustrations, if he had a taste for the abstract reading of guide books, but the man on his travels wants maps. And speaking of this, if the compilers of the innumerable small and useful " folders " and pamphlets that are distributed in the interest of steamboats and railroads in Canada could hear the criticisms on them they would put a little less photography and a little more geography into them. Now in Ontario there are four cities of the first class besides Ottawa, namely, Toronto, the rival of Montreal, with a popula- tion of some two hundred and thirty thousand and the characteristics of a capital; Hamilton and London, of about sixty and forty thousand respectively, to the westward ; and Kingston, the old cradle of Eastern Ontario ; this last much smaller, but of special importance as a military, academic, and in consequence a social centre. There are forty country towns of over four thousand inhabitants, and for the most part under ten. Some of these have sprungCOUNTRY TOWNS. 145 into importance since Sir John Macdonald inaugurated the "National Policy" and high Protection, and Ontario became a manufacturing as well as a farming province. Others are purely agricultural centres of stationary habit, and often, till quite recently, the stronghold of a group of families of the " Family Compact" type, if not literally of the connection. Little towns like Brockville, Coburg, Port Hope, Peterborough, and Belleville, in Eastern Ontario, and Woodstock, Simcoe, Guelph, Goderich, and others to the west of Toronto, were of this character. Thirty years ago this element was still strong, and gave a character all their own to such places. Absolute country life—living on the land, that is to say, and by its products, whether as farmer or landlord—never had attractions for the upper classes in Canada, a fact I repeat with less reluctance, as the question is so often asked in England. From earliest times they drifted together, building their houses in the towns and big villages, and following in the main the learned professions or filling the government offices. I have already told how this class developed in the early days of Ontario. Most of the small towns had a group of leading families, English in habit and of strong English traditions, who set the tone and fixed the limits of local society. These limits, perhaps, were not very rigid, but by comparison to modern times they seem so, and life certainly went pleasantly among a circle of people who all knew one another intimately, were mostly in similar circumstances, had shaken off the more useless formalities of English life, while retaining much that was best in it. The chartered banks of Canada, again, have always been a source of great pride to Canadians, and fill a position in the social life of the country which reflects this attitude. The old families acquired large interests in them at their inception, and sent their sons freely into their service, and thereby set a fashion which still gives the Canadian bank clerk a social position quite different from that enjoyed by his class, speaking broadly, in any other country. The most faithful reproduction of English life was sedulously cultivated, or, one should perhaps say, came naturally to these people. Such sport as Canada afforded was even then as avail- able to the town lawyer or civil servant as to the farmer, for C. L146 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. ducks and deer were not found in the cleared farming lands, nor was Ontario ever a riding country in any sense of the word. There was everything to keep the gentry class gregarious in their modes of life, though enthusiasts from the old country have never been wanting to try the other thing at all times from that day to this. But the glory of the Canadian country town, three or four large ones excepted, has from this point of view departed. Toronto has sucked them nearly all dry, and gathered into itself almost all the surviving representatives of the class who, passing rich on modest incomes in the old days, entertained each other and strangers with simple and cheery hospitality. I am perfectly aware this last statement would be received with a shout of indignation by many a youth and maiden who lead quite festive lives in one or other of the aforesaid country towns, and would be traversed from another point of view by the retort that the wealth and population of many of them has notoriously increased. Now we are of course on ticklish ground here, and dealing with matters subtler than mere swallow-tail coats, or dollars, or population; but I want, even at the risk of being misunderstood, to try and give the reader a notion of the social lights and shades in Canada. Truth compels me to con- fess that he would be told by Society in the cities that the country towns of Ontario, with very few exceptions, had gone entirely to the dogs in this respect. The explanation of this is of course simple. The old families, with their conservative social views, have left, died out, scattered, or been submerged. More demo- cratic notions have naturally in these times flourished, and manu- facturers and shopkeepers have made money quickly under Protection in the last twenty years. It is not that the country towns are less gay than in days of yore, when they sent so many of their daughters to follow the drum of English regiments, but the dancers and the leaders of to-day are for the most part sprung from another class, who know not Joseph, or, rather, whom Joseph did not know. The plain old assembly rooms are replaced by much finer ones, and are trod by the airy feet of young people whose fathers have risen to affluence from the beginnings of a modest shop, or as spinners, machine-makers, millers, and had battened, as the Free Traders would say, at theSOCIAL SHADES. 147 expense of the farmer and the annuitant. The professional men of the country towns, too—the doctors, lawyers, and clergymen —are much more rarely of the old sort, and more often the sons of farmers or storekeepers, who have profited by the educational advantages Canada offers to the people, and risen a step in the social scale. The bank clerks still retain something of the old official prestige, and with a combined force of fifteen to thirty in all little towns, fill a place not wholly unlike that of a military garrison in social life. There is a good deal of esprit de corps in the chartered banks outside mere financial matters. Other things being equal, the directors still like to have personable young men of good family, who will keep up the bank's credit in social life. Though salaries are small and prospects only very mode- rate, the leading banks have always attracted this class in good numbers, and they have set the tone, though the " Laudator temporis acti" will tell you that things have changed in this respect also. With the increasing wealth of Canada, however, and the greater facilities for money-making, there are signs that these honourable but small salaried positions will be less sought after by the best young men. It is much easier now, for instance, to get a youth into a chartered bank than it was ten or twenty years ago. It is a far better and more interesting life in every way than its equivalent in England. Some young Englishmen have done well in it, but it is melancholy to add that many have failed to give satisfaction, and that, too, in a career where only ordinary application and sense are required. It was somewhat painful to be told by a friend who is manager of one of the large branches of a chartered bank in the North-West, that so many disappointments of this kind had occurred that instruc- tions had come to him from headquarters to recommend no more young Englishmen. The great chartered banks of Canada are run upon the Scotch system of a head office with branches in all parts of the Dominion, a plan which has proved well suited to the needs of a large and growing country. They are under somewhat stringent Govern- ment supervision. Failures have been practically unknown for the last quarter of a century, and their business is sound and profitable. The ancient dislike of the Americans to anything L 2148 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. approaching real national banks is still shown in paradoxical fashion by the so-called national banks spread all over the country operating as independent and separate units over their own small areas, and having no pretension to the dignity or, indeed, the serenity of the chartered banks of Canada. These last issue notes of five dollars and upwards to the extent of their actually paid-up capital, and, moreover, are compelled to deposit with the Government an amount equal to five per cent, upon their average circulation. The Government issue one, two, and four dollar notes and upwards, and forty per cent, of the cash revenues of the chartered banks must be in these notes. The reserve or "rest" account of the banks is very large, in some cases approaching very nearly to the amount of their capital. They pay nowadays three to four per cent, interest on deposit, and usually about ten per cent, to their stockholders, after carrying over a sufficient amount to their reserve. The fact that the stock of all of them stands at from 220 to 240 is perhaps the best testimony, in a country where five per cent, is the rate on gilt edge mortgage, to their reputation. It is held mainly by Canadians; the double liability of shareholders under Canadian law acts as a deterrent to foreigners who do not realise the situa- tion, and very naturally rank a Canadian bank with similar institutions in Australia or South Africa. The country towns of Canada, small as they are, do not, as I have said, content themselves with being what we call market towns in the old country. The water power of Ontario is extremely good. Though the settled part of the province is fertile and fairly smooth, the rivers and brooks flow with the velocity of a mountain country, and enable flour and saw mills and manufactories of all kinds to aid the prosperity of most of the small towns, while pork packing, cheese, and butter factories are found in others, proving of the utmost assistance to neigh- bouring farmers. The woollen factories of Paris—to take a chance instance, in a small town, sufficiently bombastic in name, but picturesque in situation on the Grand River—employ some eight hundred hands, chiefly girls, though the population is not three thousand, and it is the seat also of a large plough factory Brantford, again, on the same river, ten miles off, is muchMANUFACTURING ACTIVITY. larger, and gives work to proportionately more people, the great Massey-Harris Agricultural Machinery Company, among other Brantford industries, being of world-wide fame. Peterborough has large electrical engineering works besides other flourishing industries. Owen's Sound, on the Georgian Bay, builds ships. Berlin makes buttons and scores of other useful things. Gait is particularly famous for its large output of machinery, and an exhaustive list of everything made in iron, from a boiler or a twenty-five ton safe to a pin; while Guelph turns out organs, pianos, small machines and scientific farmers, the flourishing agricultural college of the province, and one of the best in America, being there situated. But these merely random instances of country towns, once only centres of supply, where farmers dealt, and little coteries of professional or ex-military people lived pleasantly on earned or inherited incomes, are now upon another footing and have ambitions far beyond the passing hour. The big cities threatened to suck them dry of their more primitive prosperity, as they did of their local aristocracy, or, at least, to sap their energy, when the tariff of 1879 came to their assistance ; and whether it prove in the end detrimental or other- wise, at any rate kindled their commercial energies, and changed the condition of Ontario life. Railroads, as every one knows, are two-edged swords, and Ontario is a network of railroads. While they carry off produce to the best markets, they attract country purchasers of manufactured articles at the same time to the big cities, to the detriment of the local shopkeeper. But while the purchasing power of the country towns in Ontario has become very large, it is mainly represented by the well-paid artisans, men and women who, for obvious reasons, spend their money at home. The leading manufacturers, and the class who thrive by them, may do some of their shopping in Toronto (the ladies particularly), but when life and vigour takes hold of a transatlantic country town, and a spirit of emulation arises, local patriotism also waxes strong, and may be fairly assumed in a new country, at any rate, to partially check the tendency of prosperous people to spend their money in the big cities. I think the stores (a word, by the way, which has long out- grown its old backwoods significance of entrepot and is exactly150 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. equivalent to shop) of an average country town would surprise most English people, whose originally vague notions of rural Canada have probably grafted themselves on to the now familiar look of the rude little towns of South Africa, which the accident of war and its accompanying literature have made famous. In a Canadian town of eight or ten thousand people the shop windows and the show rooms before Christmas, in the matter of millinery and every kind of glass and fancy ware, will exceed anything to be found in a town of equal size in England. One example, perhaps, may be better than many general statements. A friend thoroughly conversant with such matters on both sides of the Atlantic tells me that in the principal millinery store of her country town, sixty miles west of Toronto, and with a popula- tion of only twelve thousand, there are large annual consign- ments of ladies' hats imported direct from Paris, which find a ready local sale at from ten to thirty dollars apiece. The business buildings everywhere are now of stone or brick, and the sidewalks, formerly of wood, have been mostly relaid in concrete. The streets are wide and frequently of asphalt. Most towns of ten or twelve thousand people have an electric street car service, and even the smaller ones have been lit by electricity for twenty years. The heavily-loaded telephone and telegraph poles which line the streets in Canadian towns and cities are undoubtedly something of an eyesore. On the other hand, the telephone system, which is in common use both in business and in private life, is an enormous saving of trouble and labour. There are, as a rule, both collegiate and the ordinary public schools, for secondary and primary education, both for girls and boys, practically free. A reading room, too, with the frequent addition of a public library, is universal. Nor is it, perhaps, necessary to add that there are scarcely any very poor people in these hives of reasonable prosperity. The churches flourish amicably side by side. The Church of England and that of Scotland attract the greater share of the urban wealth and education, but the Methodists, though strong, too, in the country towns, have an even greater following in the agricultural districts than the Presbyterians, while in the latter sphere the Church of England is practicallyRELIGIOUS SECTS. nowhere. There is little or none of the sectarian bitterness that characterises the attitude of the various creeds in England, though there may sometimes be a little social soreness towards the Church of England, as there is a tendency, though not so strong a one as in the Eastern States, for the newly-enriched, reared in more primitive faiths, to drift in that direction. I do not think it is generally realised in Canada that a majority of the upper class in Scotland are Episcopalians. It would surprise most Canadians, I think, to find the old Scotch landowning families of the Lothians or Fife, for instance, driving greater or less distances to the Episcopal chapel on Sunday morning, and leaving the kirk to such of the farmers and labourers who were not members of the Free Church. The Presbyterian Church in Canada is not only wealthier than its rival of the Anglican connection, but perhaps as strong, generally speaking, in social circles. A certain amount both of the capital and the inspiration which has brought new life and prosperity to so many country towns, is American—and Americans are to be found in all of them, either capitalists themselves, or holding positions of trust, and are not among the least enthusiastic regarding the future of Canada. When one sees, too, half a dozen of these small towns, such as Guelph, Berlin, Gait, Brantford, Paris, and Woodstock, all within ten or fifteen miles of each other, the character of Ontario as a manufacturing province is borne in upon one somewhat strongly, to say nothing of the three or four larger cities on which I have not yet touched. But these busy little towns, with their prosperous communities, in a fat farming country, seem to appeal to one's imagination more than the great absorbing self-centred city; the local markets they create, the healthier life and quarters they afford to the operatives, and the occupation they offer to the superfluous daughters of farmers within reach of home, who are making, at the present time of writing, a dollar and a quarter to a dollar and a half a day in the woollen mills. Not that farmers' daughters form a serious proportion of the women operatives, most of these being professionals and more or less migrants. To move your hand or foot mechanically over the same few152 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. inches of machinery for nine or ten hours a day from year end to year end must seem to many girls a heavy price to pay, even for the delights of the town and a surplus fund for Parisian hats. This brings us, by its suggestiveness of the ever-present terror, the domestic servant question, out of the cheerful busy main street, with the great factories lying down by the river- side, to the residential quarters of the well-to-do, which in Canadian country towns are generally attractive. Building land has never been very dear in such places, at any rate it has always been available, and never tied and tangled up in the settlements or encumbrances of some great neighbouring estate, as so often happens round an English country town. Houses of all sizes, of wood, brick or stone, stand in neat grounds, suit- able to the dimensions. The small towns have often followed the example of the cities in this respect and removed their fences, except where these consist, as is sometimes the case, of cedar hedges, and allowed their lawns to open out on to the sidewalk. The roads themselves are usually bordered with rows of maples, which are also the most popular garden tree of the country. Sometimes, a forest oak, spared by some good chance from the axe of the early settlers, spreads its limbs over the more recent efforts of landscape gardening, which follow English methods and usually include a tennis or a croquet- ground. The plain square or oblong house, without decorations save in the matter of verandah, but homelike withal, and digni- fied by half a century's growth of evergreen and creepers, will sometimes mark the former haunt of some family of the old regime. But these are mere survivals among the gay stretch of modern villas running out along the country roads and some- times terminating in establishments with parks and grounds that one would hesitate to classify under that unambitious title. Indeed, I almost blush to think that I made use of the expres- sion that the glory has departed from the country town; but it was merely to give the point of view from which a certain class very naturally regard the passing of a former epoch, and what might be called the triumph of democracy. There is as much fun and entertaining as ever, if of a slightly different kind.SCARCITY OF SERVANTS. 153 Sleighing parties by day and night, skating and hockey upon both open and covered rinks in the winter. Golf, a little cricket, tennis and bowls in the summer, brings people in the smaller towns constantly together, while dancing seems to have lost none of the popularity it always enjoyed in Upper Canada, since the country was cut out of the woods. When I first knew Canada, the families of consequence who lived, say at Woodstock or Niagara, or Port Hope, naturally had no sense whatever of any provincial inferiority, to the society in which their friends and relatives in Toronto lived— nor would any comparisons in style or fashion between the city and the country town have been relevant when the recognised leading class of those days were knit together by marriage and friendship, and were scattered all over the province, and in the main lived quite simply on small or very moderate incomes. The country town now goes in for elaborate entertainments of the afternoon tea or supper type, and the fear of alcohol which marks a class who have been confronted with it mainly as an evil, and connect it only with the saloon and rye whiskey, pervadfes the social atmosphere, and seems, as in the States, outside the circles of the smart and cosmopolitan, to turn the palate to a great elaboration of sweet dishes, cakes and candies. But all these pleasant residences you see bordering upon the leafy suburban avenues have their skeleton in the cup- board. The judge, the retired colonel, the bank manager, the young married lawyer of former days, with one, two or three or four thousand dollars a year, had then their one, two or three servants at a wage of six dollars a month. The comparatively wealthy people who to-day live in larger houses, cannot get them very often at any price, though here and there, by dint of giving exorbitant wages, a household may be supplied with very indifferent labour. But, speaking broadly, outside the cities there are no servants to be had. I was recently in a pleasant little lake shore town, twenty miles from Toronto. My host's next neighbour was an American millionaire, whose family had lived there for years, but had just been compelled to put up their shutters, owing to the impossibility of getting domestics. In a flourishing little town,154 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. again, sixty miles to the west of the capital, a friend of mine who was struggling single-handed with a large old-fashioned place that in England would be assessed at four maidservants and two gardeners, assured me, so far as he knew, there was not a single domestic in the whole town, though several hundred girls were working in factories The lawns were all trim, but the owners had to get up in the morning and look after them before they went to business. The ladies had to do both cooking and housework. It is a curious situation. Social intercourse, how- ever, does not seem to greatly flag on this account, and the Canadian ladies of all degrees are absolutely wonderful in the way in which they meet what used to be considered an emer- gency, but has now become an almost chronic condition. The houses, to be sure, are constructed with every latest improve- ment. There is not merely a single bathroom to which you wend your way through frigid passages as with us, but very often two or three, while in the large houses of the wealthier people each bedroom of consequence has one attached. Tele- phones are universal, and the Canadian lady in every town worthy of the name, from Ontario to the Pacific, can give her household orders to the tradesmen, if she so pleases, without leaving her door, and make her social arrangements with her friends in five minutes. The houses are now fitted up with a view to saving labour, while the furnace in the basement, fed with slow-burning anthracite coal, keeps the temperature of the whole house so equable by means of heated air or water, that open fires, for which, however, there is always provision, are matters of fancy rather than necessity. The science of house- warming has been very naturally brought to great perfection on a continent distinguished for mechanical ingenuity. Indoor life in Canada, whether in palatial mansion or homely farmhouse, throughout the winter is absolutely free from the atmospheric changes and trials with which the average English householder is continually struggling. The weather forces itself upon the latter's notice about as much within the house as without it. From the ice-cold room in which he dresses, to the hot smoking room where he has his last nocturnal pipe, the day is full of varieties of temperature. Each room and part of a room presentsWARM OR COLD HOUSES. 155 a fresh subject for comment, for conversation, or for grumbling. In cold weather it is not too much to say that the attention is very rarely withdrawn from this most unprofitable subject for two consecutive hours. I do not know whether the fact of never having to give a moment's thought to the subject of keeping warm till you go out of doors shortens your life by one year or by ten, or whether a constantly shifting temperature and cold chronic draughts about your feet, are conducive to longevity. I do not see why they should be ! The Americans keep their rooms far too hot, I grant. The Canadians, though more moderate, probably err upon the same side, but this has really nothing whatever to do with the matter, as the temperature can be regu- lated. English people come out of a month of hard weather, wearied and sick of it, because they feel it more or less the whole of their waking hours, while the more sensitive of both sexes seem quite exhausted by the struggle. The Canadians know nothing of this, even though their blood is thinner. They often get tired of the long winter as a mere question of mono- tony. But the people of the cities and towns have no reason whatever to feel the cold at all. It may seem rather strong to say that the weather in winter does not enter into their con- siderations. Still, a few brisk walks of ten minutes apiece, which makes up the average citizen's daily outdoor life either in England or Canada outside his recreation, are all the expe- rience he has of it. And these brief exposures are much more often pleasant than not in the dry brightness of a Canadian winter. I do not think Canadians pay any penalty for the com- fort they enjoy within doors during the winter season. They are as healthy, I take it, all round, as Englishmen, and certainly do more work per head. But the suffering these unfortunate people undergo when visiting English houses in winter is very genuine. A winter in Canada, would, I am sure, convince any English man or woman that he too has experienced an enormous amount of discomfort in life that has absolutely no compensation, and for which there has been absolutely no need. I do not think we always realise how reluctant we are to try anything new—and yet how inconsistent. When a Canadian or American comes over and finds, to his astonishment, perhaps,156 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. that we are twenty years behind in many matters of daily life, and says so with some frankness, he is either suspected of tire- some bragging, or else the rebuke is accepted with self-com- placent unction, as if there were really some merit in wasting a good deal of time every day in methods that had not even the excuse of being picturesque. Yet, when the improvement ultimately finds its way here, and is adopted, everybody wonders how they did without it. Some day, perhaps, the average English house will be kept warm in winter. Now, of these forty little towns of over four thousand people in Ontario, the majority resemble each other as closely as does the farming country round them. The lake shore towns have, of course, their shipping interests with their attractions of boating and yachting ; those near the back country their lumbering proclivities, those in the Peninsula their central agri- cultural position, while all manufacture something to a greater or less extent—machinery, boilers, engines, pumps, bedsteads, saws and tools of all kinds, heaters, ventilators, carpets, paper boxes, woollen goods of all sorts. Boots are the only familiar article rarely made in Ontario, the business being mainly con- fined to French Canada, where labour is cheap and the people have absorbed the art, through their experience in the New England States. For whom it may be asked, are all these little towns manufacturing besides their own immediate people ? A glance around the harvest fields of England will discover many a Massey-Harris reaper from Brantford, while in the engineering world the wares of the MacCullochs, of Gait, will be found in every clime. But Ontario's chief raison d'etre, as a manufac- turing country, is, of course, the new North-West of Canada, busy with its farming and mining, and the filling up of its vast fertile plains. The burning question, one need hardly say, is how much protection for the manufacturer the wheat-growing North-West will stand. Miles of printed matter and floods of eloquence are poured out upon the tariff question in Canada by the exponents of both parties. For the plain man who is not prepared to grapple deeply with its intricacies, it will be well to remember that the long straggling shape of the Dominion and its local detachments are its greatest difficulty, A narrowTARIFF QUESTIONS. 157 strip of civilisation extends three thousand miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific, though, to be sure, it is growing broader by degrees, but not broad enough as yet to affect the situation. The maritime provinces are severed by a belt of wild country from French Canada, which again intervenes its whole length between the two English-speaking divisions. Ontario, as now understood, is cut off from the prairie provinces by nearly a thousand miles of rugged wilderness, while the prairies have the several ranges, known generically as the Rocky Mountains, between them and the coast strip of British Columbia. It would seem natural, of course*, for these far-sundered pro- vinces to trade and traffic with the kindred people that in every case march with their southern border, rather than with one another, and Nature asserts herself with considerable force in spite of sentiment and hostile tariffs. Boston is still quite literally the hub of the universe to the Cape Breton or New Brunswick rustic. Chicago, Buffalo and New York are the headquarters of thousands of quick-witted Ontario youth. The prairie farmers of the Far West cannot be prevented by moderate duties from getting much of their machinery from the great manufacturing firms across the line, and a raising of the tariff would be, from their point of view, a direct raid upon their pockets for the benefit of Ontario. The latter, it is true, is sending her goods all over the world—to Europe and Australia, the Indies and the Cape. But in the rapidly expanding North-West there would seem to be her great market. And in this field, as we have seen, she has to compete with the powerful trusts and great manufacturing houses of the Middle West. It is argued— indeed it is an accepted axiom—that manufacturers, with a home market of ninety millions, can undersell rivals with access only to a home market of five. Even farmers recognise that a moderate tariff is necessary if Canada is to manufacture any of its own fabrics—and seem willing for the most part to con- tribute something to a condition of things that a majority argue is in itself advantageous to them as to others. But how much they will contribute is the question. I must not drift here on to ground historically and perennially contentious. But it will be readily seen that the tariff is a158 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. tremendous question to Ontario and to all Canada, and that the Ontario manufacturer, as chiefly represented now by the Con- servative party, would push protection as far as he dare, or as he can in the face of the agricultural classes, a section of whom are with him by party tradition. The strongest opposition, if pressed too hard, would come from the West, as the prairie farmers derive no appreciable benefit from the prosperity o f these Eastern towns, though they make local markets for the Ontario farmer. The actual Free Trader, or mere tariff-for- revenue man, seems to have for the moment dropped out of sight in the Old Provinces though plentiful enough in the New, as may appear later. When the present Liberal Government came into power under Sir Wilfrid Laurier, they represented all that there was of the old Free Trade party, and were supposed to be pledged to such a serious lowering of the tariff that the manufacturers of Ontario were greatly alarmed, and with much reason. To the relief of the latter, however, and to the surprise of most people, they meddled so little with the existing state of things that the Conservatives and Protectionists point with triumph to the indisputable advantages of the policy which Sir John Macdonald inaugurated in 1879. The country is virtually committed to Protection, and with the great prosperity of the moment who can wonder. Nor, again, is it surprising that the party, now in opposition, are emboldened to cry for another dose of a stimulant that has apparently worked such wonders— or, to speak more literally, that the manufacturers themselves are encouraged to press for still greater profits. To the ordinary man, going about the country from east to west and noting the present contentment and prosperity of every class, it would seem the very height of folly to deliberately disturb so happy a con- dition and vex the souls of farmers for the further gain of manufacturers, who in many lines at the present moment cannot nearly fill their orders. I will venture to say that an immense majority of people in Canada would agree with the ordinary man, but there are, of course, side issues innumerable and many shades of opinion influenced consciously and uncon- sciously by self-interest Capital is powerful in politics, and theCOUNTRY HOTELS. 159 manufacturers have both capital and capacity for combination far beyond that of the less alert and widely-scattered farmers ; yet, in the opinion of several sagacious men in the country not favourable to it, the tendency is towards a higher rather than a lower tariff. The country towns, again, are the headquarters of many societies, such as Freemasons, Orangemen, Foresters, Odd- fellows, and Templars, and social gatherings in connection with them are numerous and conspicuous nowadays for the absence of ardent liquors. The churches of each denomination are hand- some fabrics of stone or brick, with suitable residence for priest, parson or minister. There are a great many lawyers, but they earn less relatively than probably any class nowadays in Canada, for the farmers have ceased to be litigious, and land con- veyancing carries but small commissions. The hotels do a good business, but with some exceptions are indifferent, as is the case in varying degrees throughout Canada. They serve abundant meals, as they should in a country which abounds with the best of edibles, but the badness of the cooking and the crudity of the service is a byword among all Canadians of discretion. They have imported that barbarous system of innumerable little dishes so universal in the States, outside the quite first-class establishments, and honestly believe it to be a mark of progress and culinary exaltation. The average boarder, or traveller, who fills the provincial hotels, like the American of the same type, seems to entirely lack a palate, though quite exacting in the matter of a written menu and a nominal variety of food, even though it is all cooked so as to taste precisely alike. I am assured by those who have the best of reasons for knowing, that two or three really well-cooked plain dishes, served nice and hot, would be resented at the country or second class hotel. The patron of these houses likes, or has been taught to like, a phalanx of small plats, on which morsels of badly-done joint, fowl and fish, and tolerably cooked vegetables, congeal. And this is the more curious in a country where in private life among the well-to-do classes there is so much housewifely skill, energy and taste. At the same time, living is extremely cheap in these Ontario country towns, and the mere manner of cookery and service at160 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the hotels is rather a misdirected attempt to be stylish than any lack of endeavour to give good value—for the supply is ample. For about four dollars a week the bachelor who has his room elsewhere can have three bounteous meals a day, and, if possessed of a discerning palate and local experience, will generally be able to secure these in quarters where they will be properly cooked. Of amusements I have already said something, and though the Canadians are hard workers they are no Puritans in the matter of enjoyment. Whether of the old or the new society of the country towns, they thoroughly understand the art of relaxation. The thought of a dance or a picnic does not weigh upon the soul of the donor for weeks beforehand, though it well might where domestics are almost non-extant. People still go out to dance, to play cards, or to see their friends, mainly for the purpose in hand, and get quite as much variety of nourish- ment in the meantime as is reasonable or good for them, while the hostess is free from the terror of that sort of criticism which puts gastronomy in the forefront, and helps so much to sterilise social life in similar circles in England. The young people throughout Canada, ever since I can remember, have had about ten times as much fun in a social way among themselves as falls to the lot of the average young Englishman or woman, and with their increasing wealth, still continue to cultivate the art which they have learnt so well under other conditions, of getting a great deal of innocent and desirable gaiety with very little fuss, worry or expense. Most country towns, too, have their company or squadron, or are themselves the headquarters of one of the hundred infantry or cavalry regiments which form the militia of Canada, and rifle shooting has its votaries both in their ranks, and also among the lads, who have been recently formed into cadet corps. Skating among both sexes, and ice-hockey among the men, are leading winter pastimes in country towns as well as in cities. In the milder winters of Ontario, open-air rinks are often kept swept on lakes or rivers, while the large covered rinks are standing institutions. Figure skating, as we noticed at Ottawa, has not so many exponents as formerly, since hockey was reduced to a science and made a matter of keen contentionAMUSEMENTS. 161 among rival clubs. It is played in large rinks, surrounded by galleries, by six a side, and is a very different performance from the hurly-burly in which we sometimes engage, when the ice bears for a week or so in England. Of all games of this nature ice-hockey is the fastest and the most exhilarating to watch. When crack teams play in Toronto, or Montreal or Ottawa, the match draws large crowds and creates intense excitement. Sleighing, of course, still holds its own in Canadian winter festivities, and parties of youths and maidens with chaperons drive to some neighbouring town or to some place of entertain- ment, where a hot supper has been bespoken, and perhaps the facilities for an impromptu dance. Snow-shoeing is also an ancient form of excuse for Canadian society to organise little outings in bright winter weather, and the Norwegian ski has recently been introduced. It is surprising, too, seeing the limited season in autumn in which football is playable in Upper Canada, how popular it is, and every country town has its Rugby or Association club. Cricket, on the other hand, which in former years, when English precedents were stronger, held the field, flickers but feebly in the rural districts before the attractions of golf links and tennis courts. The noble old English game occupies too much time for a busy people, and when the young Canadian takes a long holiday there is always within easy reach that illimitable paradise of wood and water at his back, in which he has been accustomed, as his father before him, to find his most complete enjoyment. Besides the professional men and the manufacturers, the shopkeepers and the operatives, there is one element which in many little towns is quite conspicuous—not for the lead it takes in municipal and social matters, but for the steady drag it puts upon the wheels of progress. The vision of a retired farmer conveys to the English mind a breezy person of rubicund visage and sporting tie, who takes a day with the hounds occasionally, and frequents the back parlour of the " George " or the " White Lion." But the retired farmer in Ontario, though a worthy, is not a cheerful person, and is the terror of municipal councils. He is very often discontented, for as a rule he has given up business on a C. M162 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. very small income. In the palmy days of agriculture, he put most of his profits into his farm or used them to start his family in life, or spent some of them in a protracted effort to grow wheat after the wheat centre had shifted to Manitoba. He, as often as not, had retired from his farm with nothing but the interest of its purchase-money, say, five to ten thousand dollars at six per cent., to live upon. Sometimes he has let the farm to a son, and lives on the rent. He was a splendid worker, and Canada owes more to him than to any other member of the community. But virtues, which turned a howling wilderness into a garden, do not always adorn a life of leisure in a town or village. Probably he regrets that he ever did quit farming ; neither the cultivation of books or flowers bring him any con- solation, and the local paper is soon read. When he has to buy out of a small income the necessaries he used to sell or consume, his thrifty soul revolts within him. Modern improvements, such as townsmen strive for and take pride in, he heartily despises, and grudges every cent of taxes that he pays for such super- fluous vanities. In all such matters he is a prodigious Tory, but in many small towns he forms a body to be reckoned with, and being a leisured one may be counted upon to strenuously and actively oppose every suggested improvement that costs money. Such is the accepted character of this type of Canadian citizen, if accepted, perhaps, too unreservedly; and to mention him in a company of town councillors will certainly produce some of those flowers of humour and invective, at which Canadians are not far behind their neighbours to the South.FARMING DISTRICTS OF ONTARIO. CHAPTER VII. As already pointed out, there is so much in common, both in landscape, architecture and general methods, between all parts of settled Ontario that an excursion into one of them will, I think, be ample for our purposes here. Whether level, rolling, or, as in some parts, actually hilly, there will be the same succes- sion of well-to-do homesteads standing thickly among ten or fifteen-acre fields bearing crops, familiar to the British eye, though fenced for the most part in unfamiliar fashion. There will be woods of oak, beech, hickory or maple, reduced now to about the same dimensions as the coverts that diversify the farming lands of England. There will be clear streams in the valleys and hollows, rippling between willows and alders over pebbly beds, and stirring themselves betimes to frenzy in rugged channels after the manner of the greater rivers they feed; streams where the brook trout was indigenous, and even yet sometimes survives. A country with the surface contour of south, middle, or eastern England, and the clear, strenuous waters of the Welsh border, and the knowledgeable person would almost see at a glance why Ontario excels as the home of high- class stock. One is accustomed to regard the landscape of settled Ontario as somewhat conventional, which is in a sense true, and, of course, it lacks the mellow glories of English scenery. Yet it is full enough, too, of pleasant prospects and of charming nooks. Whether in such widely removed neighbourhoods as those of Peterborough, Coburg and Porthope, of Hamilton, Brantford and Woodstock, of Collingwood, Owen Sound and Goderich, no one could return from a twenty-mile drive in any of them without carrying away in his memory, if he have one, glimpses of landscape that appeal to his artistic as well as his agricultural sense; pleasant uplands of pasture, snug corners of green M 2164 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. meadow where shorthorn cattle are grouped between the fore- ground of glancing water and the background of hanging woodland. What remains, too, of the five or ten-acre wood lot, as the high road carries you from the furthest barley stubble of Farmer McClintock to the turnip field of Farmer McTavish, has become quite a stately grove where a few maple, beech or ash trees that have survived the exigencies of fencing and firewood, are grown and waxed mighty in the absence of their companions and throw high-arching boughs over what the partial sunlight and the assiduous tooth of sheep and milch cows have reduced from underbrush to a carpet of turf. And from the cedar swamps, again, those typical features of every Canadian countryside, there is some pleasure to be had for those who care for nature. As the road crosses it, with a help even yet in places of the primitive old corduroy road-bed, the thick green walls of odorous spruce and cedar have a character all their own, rising in serried ranks from the roadside turf that in these low spots is kept always green, even in a dry summer, by nightly dews. But the swamp is no longer waterlogged : a little stream coursing through the bushes and spouting over decaying logs carries off most of the water. The rough ground, half-turf, half-underbrush, spreads along for a few acres between the sloping farming lands on either side. A few large trees, maple or beech, shoot high into the air—some dead, some living—but cedar, spruce, and hemlock claim the black, sour soil as their own special domain, while in the open spots hazel and willow, alder and poplar, blaze in autumn with their brighter hues. Here, in these small cedar swamps, wild nature, to some extent, seeks refuge from the levelling plough of the Ontario farmer, and the golden rod, the asters, the ox-eyes, and rarer ferns flourish. Here, too, the spotted woodpeckers, the orioles, the blue jays, the red-winged blackbirds, the marsh wrens, and other natives and migrants find covert and solitude, and in summer evenings the mosquito maintains something of the terrors of its ancient reign. The cedar swamp is the last refuge of such lingering specimens of game as close farming and close settlement has not yet exterminated or driven out into the back country. They are the last vestiges of old backwoods' nature,PICTURESQUE ONTARIO. 165 left in patches of ten or twenty acres all over the face of the country. The wood lot or bush lot might be an English pheasant covert beside the turnips or the stubble, but the cedar swamp, though mostly drained, still remains a bit of untamed nature. Hither the farmer's boy, as soon as he can carry the family gun, turns his step and gets a whole season's sport out of the small covey of tree partridges and the half-dozen jack rabbits that probably represent its stock of game, and who well know how to take care of themselves. But enough of this ; we will only just notice, should it be an afternoon in late summer or early autumn, how fragrant is the scent of the evergreens in the cool, damp hollow ; how charming is the contrast, and how vivid the colouring of the fields that open out beyond the long avenue of cedar and hemlock, that carries us through it; the golden stubbles, now growing yearly scarcer in Ontario, the smooth-shaven timothy meadows, the yellow flare of the strips of mustard, the pinkish blush of the buckwheat, the blue-green of the swedes whitening as is their wont in the breath of the summer wind. I can well remember, though more years than I care to think of have since rolled by, my first impression of the bursting of spring on the Canadian landscape, and the sudden glory of the woods, the wheat fields and the pastures. But I think, perhaps, it is at the season after harvest, and, as I have said, when the day is mellowing and the shadows are beginning to lengthen, that an Ontario landscape looks its best, not greatly differing then from a bit of rural England illumined by something more than the radiance of an English sun. I have more than once, too, in crossing Lake Ontario from the American side, approached the Canadian shore just after a summer sunrise, when the blue water is flecked with the light breeze of morning, and the hill slopes are brilliant with ripening grain, and with woods and pastures bursting fresh and dewy out of the mists of night. But enough of these brief glimpses of Ontario landscape from such a point of view. Let me repeat again for the benefit of English readers who may yet persist in picturing Canada as a half-civilised waste, that humanity, as already intimated, makes even a greater show upon the soil than in an average166 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. rural district in England. There are as many railroads to be crossed in driving, as many churches and schools to be met with by the roadside, and even more farmhouses, for the excel- lent reason already noted that the farms themselves are smaller. Owners of these farms, however, in most cases the occupants, are by no means satisfied with the small houses and buildings that for the most part distinguish holdings of a hundred acres in the Old Country. On the contrary, these Ontario farmers have long ago built themselves goodly houses and usually fashioned them of stone or brick. There will be almost always something of a lawn with a few evergreens and shade trees, and sometimes even some flower-beds, but the exigencies of Canadian farm life do not allow of the expenditure of much time or money over such superfluities; an ample orchard, not unkempt, unpruned and unproductive as its English equivalent too often is, but well cared for and ready for the buyers when they come round in autumn, with a crop of from fifty to a hundred barrels of sound shipping apples, leaving enough to spare for household use. A row of Lombardy poplars, their tall tops swaying in the breeze which is nearly always moving in Canada, often rises above the building or lines the high road before them, and gives a home-like touch to a scene that is typical of hundreds of Western Ontario homesteads. Solid as are the houses, however, it is on the barns that the Ontario farmer generally lavishes most of his attention. All the stock is housed throughout the winter, and the Canadian barn is an elaborate and imposing edifice, eighty feet by forty, perhaps, with lean-to's on one or either side of it. Built when possible against the side of a slope, the horses and cattle are housed within the stone basement, while a waggon can run from the upper side on to the floor above their heads, and unload its freight of hay or grain under cover into the deep lofts above ; and this unloading is sometimes done with the aid of ingenious machinery. It will be understood, then, what a show in the country the Ontario homestead makes, together with its outbuildings, when almost every hundred acres carries one of them. There will be ten or a dozen fields on the property, fenced either with the old-fashioned snake fence, though a straighter one thanIN WATERLOO COUNTY, ONTARIO, [To face p. 167.ONTARIO FARMERS. 167 formerly, and staked and wired in the angles, or the newer and neater post and rail or post and barbed wire, which is gradually supplanting it. Twenty years ago more than half the acreage would have been in grain, wheat predominating. Fifty years ago, during the Crimean War, and later again during the American Civil War, wheat was the main crop. During the first half of the century, more particularly at those periods when high prices ruled, the fertile lands of Ontario could not be cleared of forests fast enough. When the real hardships of the first settlement of the country had passed away, the work of clearing and wheat growing progressed at a prodigious pace. Elderly men raised on farms have often described to me the feverish haste with which their fathers cut their way into their bush lands and seeded them to wheat, which in the better parts of the province produced on virgin lands from thirty to forty bushels an acre. Indeed, that large extent of country, from Kingston to Toronto and the great and more fertile peninsula to the west of it, is practically as clear of wood as England; one continuous testimony to the stubborn energy of the fathers and grandfathers of the present Ontario farmers, and of the Ontario citizen, too, for that matter. These substantial homesteads which sprinkle the country in their thousands were mainly built between 1830 and 1870, and frequently there may be still seen standing and relegated to some inferior use the original log cabin where the first settler, English, Irish, Scotch, or U.E. Loyalist, first faced the wilderness, eighty or a hundred years ago, and raised his hardy brood. With the end of the seventies came the collapse in the price of grain, which hit the Ontario farmer precisely as it hit his fellow in the Mother Country. Sometimes he had saved money, but often he had put such savings into new buildings or other improvements. Sometimes, too, he carried a mortgage at eight or nine per cent., the then current rate, contracted for the settlement of sons in business, or for improvements that seemed, under the old conditions, judicious and profitable ones. From henceforward, for fifteen years or so, weighted by compara- tive stagnation in trade, low prices, dearer and scarcer labour,168 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. and often by mortgages, the Ontario farmer had for the most part a hard and even dreary struggle. His sons and sometimes his neighbours went in numbers to Manitoba and proved its backbone, while such hired men of a detached kind as there were followed suit and became settlers. Wheat and barley had sunk below paying value. The lands had long ago reached the condition which required careful treatment and judicious farming, and in the main had received it, but with lack of cash good farming became more difficult. Some lands went down as they have gone down in parts of England for lack of labour and capital. Farmers cannot change the methods of a lifetime in a week, as the layman seems sometimes to imagine, though twenty years, which in the Old Country finds them still obstinate in many districts, is a liberal allowance for reform. But as the last decade of the century waned the revolution was virtually accomplished. The Ontario farmer had recognised by then that the West had not only fairly knocked him out, but he had taken pains to repair the damage. He no longer regards wheat or barley as his chief asset, but grows them mainly for straw. Hay and pasture, dairy produce and stock, fruit and poultry, now command nearly all his attention. Butter and cheese factories cover the country and pay him in cash for the produce of his cows, and sometimes collect the milk themselves. Even as a wheat grower, the Ontario farmer had always a liking for having such stock as he kept of a good quality, but of late years he has turned his attention with ardour and success to this business. When pork is high, which it frequently is, he has the best of Berkshires, Tamworths, or Chesters growing into meat. In milking stock the best blood of Holstein maybe seen dotting the summer pastures with their solid black and white frames. For his beef cattle he clings mainly to the shorthorn, and imports freely from the best herds of Britain. Very often he has a good pedigree herd of his own, taking prizes not only in the excellent agricultural shows of Ontario, but going far afield into the States, and often beating the Yankees in their own showyards and reaping his reward in fancy prices for bulls and heifers, Ontario, as I have said, is peculiarlyONTARIO FARMERS. 169 suited to the well-being of high-grade stock, and the class that the average Ontario farmer nowadays handles is that which contains the greatest possibilities of profit. In sheep, again, Shropshires are perhaps the favourite of the many imported strains, and are assuredly so in the districts that I myself know best. I believe there are no less than twenty farmers who visit England periodically in the interests of the black-faced denizen of the Welsh Marches. Horse-breeding on a small scale is less encouraging, though horse shows do something to sustain it. There is no fox-hunting in Canada, nor any riding in the older provinces. It is rare enough in England nowadays to see a horseman on the road, but you might travel for days in Ontario without encountering such a sight. Electric trams have banished omnibuses from the cities, and the infinite possibilities of the motor threaten something like extinction of the equine species in the not remote future. The Ontario farmer keeps his one or two teams of work horses with rather more of the cart strain, Shire or Percheron, in them than in former days, when lighter horses were more popular. He has his buggy, too, or smart spring waggon, and very often a fast horse to put between the shafts. The Ontario farmer is, beyond doubt, one of the hardest workers at his trade that the world has ever seen. Every day of the entire busy season he probably does twice as much as the average English labourer. His wife in energy and thrift is no whit behind him. The owner of a hundred acres will work them throughout the year, save for a few days in extra busy seasons, with the aid of a son, if he have one, and the son will have to move in time with his sire. The daughters in former days stood up to their mother in house, fowlyard and dairy, and at the sewing machine. Such things as hired girls were not often seen in Canadian farmhouses. Now, it is said that the daughter of the farm has struck out for more liberty, more fashion and more fun, and few people blame her, but she has to work hard all the same. It is realised that the daughters of men representing a capital of five, ten, fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, are entitled to equal privileges with those of the storekeeper of less substance or the earner of a salary equivalent to either. No Anglo-Saxon170 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. probably of like position has ever been so frugal as the Ontario farmer in personal expenditure. When one considers what they and their fathers have made of the province, and looks out over the smooth smiling fields, and big substantial homesteads, which were after all the groundwork of Canadian prosperity, it seems a poor thing to fall foul of any of the qualities that aided in bringing about such results. Yet there is no doubt but that in the struggle with the forest and the more primitive conditions of Canadian life, the iron to some extent entered into the settler's soul. A certain sombreness and even grimness, a passion for frugality, an exaggerated worship of unremitting toil, a scorn of decoration and things that please the eye, apart from mere neatness and cleanliness, are distinguishing features to-day in the mental equipment of the typical Canadian farmer, though his surroundings often seem externally so fair and pleasant. This is a matter of such old and common recognition and such frequent discussion among Canadians that any criticisms of mine would be superfluous. Exceptions, of course, abound, but it is the average type one has to treat of and which matters here. In the same way the Ontario farming class might be roughly described for general purposes as all on the same social plane, a condition rendered inevitable by the uniform size of the farms and the fact that every farmer works as a labourer and leads his own men if he have any. There is no such thing as serious farming by supervising hired labour. It is regarded as a hope- less enterprise, only tried occasionally in former days by obstinate Englishmen, and has never, within my knowledge, been known to succeed. For one thing, the Canadian hired man would almost resent working while his " boss " sat upon the fence and watched him, illogical though this may seem ; and he would be quite sure, with equal unreason, to hold him in some contempt—a state of things fatal to good service. City men sometimes keep a farm to play with, but they don't pretend to make it pay, and such cases have no bearing on the rural economics of Ontario. Here and there, too, you find genuine farmers of a somewhat different type socially, men connected with one or other of the old leading families of the country, and who keep up, as well as the hard work and drive of a farm admit, the habits of theirA RESOURCEFUL RACE. 171 race; but such people are rare and in no sense affect the broad fact that rural Ontario is virtually a democratic community of a single type ; a yeomanry occupying the entire surface of the country outside the towns, to the virtual exclusion of any other residents whatsoever but the blacksmith, the clergy, and the general storekeeper and such like. The farm labourer as a detached class never had any very definite existence in Canada. When not a bird of passage he was usually the superfluous son of a neighbouring farmer, or a backwoodsman. Now there is scarcely any labour at all, as superfluous sons, and many too who are not superfluous but badly needed at home, have gone to the North-West or the towns, while the trained workman is very apt to take himself straight to that land of promise, no longer dallying in Ontario, nor fearful, as of yore, of the final plunge on to the distant prairie. The adoption of new methods by the Ontario farmers has now begun to bear fruit. The bitter cry which met one at every turn in the late eighties and earlier nineties, and predicted ruin to the fair country which the U.E. Loyalists and the Britishers who rallied to them cut out of the woods, is heard no more. Land generally is perhaps not quite so high as it was in 1873, but it has stiffened considerably of late, and in the better districts runs from fifty to eighty dollars an acre, though the demand for Ontario farms, for obvious reasons, is just now much slacker than their actual value warrants. On the other hand, the farmers, with their varied resources in dairy produce, stock, fruit, poultry, all fully developed ; with pork and cheese factories at their doors and growing manufacturing towns calling for their smaller produce, have now fairly turned the corner, and with creditable sagacity and patience have got the better of the terrible Manitoban ogre. Everyone knows that Canadian beef cattle, both from east and west, are exported to England in increasing numbers. The present law that does not admit lean cattle to be finished on English pastures is not regretted by all Canadians, inasmuch as the money paid for this final process is then received by Canadian farmers. But I dare say it is not so generally known what a great and growing export trade in the shipment of cheese, butter and172 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. poultry to Britain is being done by Ontario. Reports of experi- ments in all these and kindred matters are periodically furnished to the farmers by the Government; and, as in England, lectures are given throughout the country on the proper making and handling of butter, poultry and fruit. The year 1902 was the best the Ontario farmers have had for twenty years, so I was assured by the heads of the Department of Agriculture, and a sanguine and contented spirit once more happily reigns throughout the country. In the fruit districts round Hamilton and Niagara, too, things seem to be prospering, and it will probably surprise the English reader who shares the common delusion concerning Canada to hear that thousands of acres round these noted centres are blooming with peaches, pears, vineyards and small fruit, to say nothing of the apple crop, which is a greater or less source of revenue to almost every township of Ontario. Fruit growing, however, seems to call for more special aptitude than ordinary farming, and seems more sensitive to the personality of the man who undertakes it Statisticians may like to know that the annual value of the food products of Ontario is rated at two hundred million dollars. Agricultural shows, headed by a very important one at Toronto, which packs the city full, are held annually in every country district of Ontario, and nothing is a stronger proof of the interest of the farmers in stock breeding than the consistent support these societies and their exhibitions have always received. The Canadian farmer has the reputation among his country- men for a thorough appreciation of the number of cents that make a dollar. The tradition of the backwoods, inherited from his grandfather when everything was made at home from necessity and nothing was purchased, since there was nowhere to purchase, still survives in a reluctance to spend money on anything but absolute necessities. Side by side with energy and industry, a certain opposition to progress in the lighter things of life, a contempt for what he regards as the vanities of the townsman, distinguish not of course the whole class but the prevailing type of it. The short Canadian seasons and the necessity for snatch- ing every hour of daylight, more particularly in former days when tillage farming was the rule, have made him impatient ofA CHANGED SYSTEM. 173 amusement, of time given up to anything but work. There is a general opinion among Canadian townsmen that this uncom- promising attitude has been overdone by the farmers, that they might have got more joyousness out of life without seriously feeling it. It is difficult to say how far this is justified, men best know their own affairs—and townsmen all the world over know very little about farmers or farming—the latter being of all trades the one that looks so simple and is yet so intricate and so exacting and withal so engrossing. In the winter, it is true, the Ontario farmer has a comparatively easy time, though in these days of dairying milking falls as heavily on himself and his son or his one hired man as in summer. Feeding and watering his horses, milch cows, young stock and hogs two or three times a day, cutting up chop or turnips, cutting and carrying wood for the stove, consume no little time. Then there is a good bit of hauling to be done in winter, not of milk only, but such grain as may have been threshed, or wood or hay, and everyone prays for a winter sufficiently hard to produce good and consistent sleighing, for it is not good for man or beast to travel on wheels through melted snow and mud. Since no Canadian wintei can be really open, it is desirable that the thermometer should rise above freezing point as seldom as possible. The climate of Ontario varies greatly, from Ottawa, the coldest part of its civilised region, to Toronto, where for half the days of winter it may not freeze at all. But in the average country districts ploughing can con- tinue to the end of November, when winter may set in at any moment. Sometimes in the first half of April, rarely before, the farmer gets on to the land again. He still has, let us say, his ten acres of wheat, barley and oats respectively, to get in, the first already sown in the autumn, the others to follow as quickly as may be in the spring, and grass and clover to be sown. Peas, too, have always been a great crop in Ontario. Then, again, there will be four or five acres of swedes or man- golds and as much more of Indian corn to be put in ; fences blown down by winter gales or displaced by the snow to be straightened, the garden to be planted, manure to be hauled from the yards, and a score of small jobs that everyone who has174 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. been a farmer in North America, or in most other places, well knows rise up to confront him at the most inopportune moment. Hay time follows in June, a more serious business than it used to be, but nothing like the anxiety it is in England, as wet is less likely and the curing powers of the sun much greater. Harvest follows in late July and August, a much less formid- able task than of yore, but then again the labour in old days was in proportion. Many farmers have silos, for which they grow Indian corn as a fodder crop. And all this time a dairy business has probably to be attended to, though in some districts the milk is collected by the factories and the hauling of it saved. The Ontario farmer, it will be readily understood, is still a busy enough man. He does not wear breeches and gaiters nor go much to markets. From early morn to sunset he may be seen in his shirt sleeves or clad in blue "overalls" working like a labourer, and if he have labourers, leading them. The twelve o'clock dinner of salt pork, potatoes, excellent bread and butter, apple pies and green tea, is prepared for him in the kitchen or living-room by his women-folk. In autumn and winter fresh meat is sometimes substituted, or fish from the great lakes. There is no game to vary the menu. Chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys are raised in abundance, but mostly for market. It is not quite fair to generalise, for there are parts of Ontario where the farmers live more lavishly and consume their own delicacies, and where the butcher's cart makes its daily round, but they are not the rule. Still, there is nearly always an abundance; rude health and a fine climate—for there is none in the world more healthy as a whole than that of Ontario—whet the appetite, and no sense of deprivation is, I think, ever felt around the farmer's board by those who gather there, whatever may be the opinion of townsfolk, who naturally require more dainty fare and are apt to ridicule the salt meat and simplicity of their country neighbours. But there are signs that life is getting less austere in the Canadian farmhouse. As in England, the farmer can never do right in the eyes of outsiders, so in Canada the people who have been accustomed to make merry at what they consider his grinding life and joyless environment now sometimes complainSOCIAL LIFE ON FARMS. 175 that his daughters no longer help as they should in the dairy, that they have outgrown the chromo, the antimacassar and the American organ of the best parlour, and now play the piano and employ the local dressmaker. From excellent sources in various parts of the province I have gathered that social amenities are increasing among the farming class, that the somewhat dreary old level, as it must be admitted, of ceaseless work, with the drive to church on Sunday, is not so generally regarded as the all-sufficient aim in life. The young people of the same class in Canadian towns, great or small, have always contrived a very large measure of social enjoyment and wisely so. Those of the country have had for the most part much less than their share of such good things, and it would be strange, more particularly with a renewal of agricultural prosperity, if the sons and daughters of farmers consented to remain objects of perennial pity and misplaced sarcasm to their commercial and professional neighbours, who are frequently themselves sprung from the land, and as capitalists are often no better off, if so well. The austerity, if I may use the word, of Ontario farm life is perhaps more practical than religious. The people themselves are mainly Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and sincere sup- porters of their numerous churches at the cross roads, in the villages or in the small towns. That a strain of Calvinism permeates them goes without saying, but in the week-day hard work has been in the main the standard by which they have judged themselves and others. Who shall say what this has done for Canada in the past ? None but the bravest hearts and the stoutest arms could have brought Ontario from a then remote and densely timbered wilderness to be the fair country we now behold it. Yet ever since I knew Canada it has been the fashion in the towns and cities, even among those sprung from the soil, to sneer somewhat at the farmer; not at his works but at his ways, his narrowness, his nearness, his conservatism, his clothes, his insensibility to the things that brighten life. The notion of living on a farm brings up the hands of the average Canadian citizen in horror. I am not criticising the attitude, but merely note it as a conspicuous fact, though curious in a province which was mainly created by farmers, and whose ablest men in all176 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. departments have more often than not come of farming forbears. The causes of this contempt of rural life, for it really amounts to this, are many and the feeling of dislike to it is not unreasonable, but the manner in which these sentiments are often expressed cannot but jar on anyone familiar with the province and its past history. Now the French-Canadian habitant may fairly be called a peasant, for he is one by nature and education, however many acres he may be possessed of. But there is nothing of the peasant in the Ontario farmer, the term would be ridiculous and insulting. The old word " yeoman " expresses him exactly, if the English reader will banish the traditional notion of beef and beer, gaiters and sporting ties, market dinners and a young hunter or two in the stable. Scottish and Scotch-Irish blood prevails throughout the province and has set the tone to what remains of the English, who originally outnumbered both. The characteristics of the Ontario farmer are mainly Scottish, modified by circumstances, just as the cities are Scottish rather than English in tone, though on another plane as it were. Our friend has had a good plain education at the public or board school. In the winter evenings—his only opportunity—he reads the agricultural and local papers, and in these days of cheap publication a good deal of trash, like other people who enjoy greater social and educational advantages. He is very much of a politician and takes an interest both in provincial and federal politics, an interest in men and parties perhaps rather than in principles. There is also the township council, with its Reeve and five members, roughly corresponding to our parish council and about as limited in its powers. There is a county council too, elected from districts specially designated according to population, which has charge of roads, bridges, poor-houses and various less important matters, hardly worthy of elaboration here. As may be gathered from what I have already said, there is a cleavage between town and country life in Canada that is difficult for Englishmen unacquainted with the Dominion to realise or sympathise with. There is no attraction in the country districts. There is no sport, there are no servants, there is noFARMING LIFE. 177 society from the well-to-do person's point of view. Amateur farming is robbed of even such pleasure as there may be in losing money over a business fad—by the condition of the labour market. The townspeople go far afield for their holi- days, to the backwoods, the lakes, the mountains, the sea coast. The well-to-do dlass, what may be termed Society, even in the country towns have little intercourse with the farmers, and as a body know little about them, beyond the look of their houses as they drive by in buggies or cutters. In England it is common enough to hear the man or woman from the town express an abstract yearning after the joys of a farmhouse. I never in my life heard a Canadian of the same class express the least desire to change places with the occupants of an Ontario homestead, though many of these are as homelike and snug as their British prototypes. The farmer in his turn may, and often does, like his contemporary in the States, cherish a certain sore feeling towards towns and townsmen. He is apt to think they prey on him, that they get their living too easily compared with himself. Brought up to think one man as good as another, his democratic soul resents the airs of superiority assumed by the lawyer and the bank clerk and even the grocer and the dry goods man. I don't want to make too much of this, for where there is little contact there can be no friction. Nor is any harm done, except that the farmer's son has the pernicious feeling that he raises himself in life by going behind the counter, and the farmer's daughter often leaves home with something of the same feeling, or remaining there chafes at her lot. There is not much margin for expenditure in the most care- fully tilled farm of a hundred or a hundred and fifty acres, but social gatherings for music, dancing, cards or reading cost little; liquor is never used nowadays in Canadian farmhouses, pro- visions are cheap and abundant, and Canadian housewives are skilful enough in concocting the delicacies in which rural Canada delights. The houses are not far apart, and means of trans- portation is always available. Of course, there are individuals and even little coteries to be found here and there among the Ontario homesteads where life has run much more brightly, but C. N178 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. I am concerned here with the rule, not with the exceptions. And the rule of the Ontario farmhouse has been in these matters upon the dreary and the sombre side—a very byword among Canadians whose lives are cast elsewhere. The detached and self-absorbed life of the farmer arises from his trade as well as his situation. In no part of North America has he ever been able to combine for political action. Shrewd as he is in his own line, no class in Canada has been so easily talked over by the glib-tongued politician. And in social matters, beyond the occasional Church picnic, for the Church of each sect is its social pivot, he and his seem to have found combination equally difficult. I feel I may have lingered too long over this attempt to describe the Ontario farmer and his environment, for the simple reason that I never remember to have seen in any book of travel on Canada any notice at all of what up to the present has been the most important section of the community, economically speaking, in the premier province, though the backwoodsman is a familiar figure in literature, as is the French habitant, whose sociability is in inverse ratio to that of his fellow cultivator. Indeed, I should like to say more of rural Ontario— to touch upon the early settlement of the various districts, the settlements at Kingston and Niagara of the first U.E. Loyalists; the founding of Guelph and Goderich by the single-minded Gait and the Canada Company; of Berlin and its neighbourhood by the German Palatines. These last were U.E. Loyalists in a sense, as they had served the British in the Revolutionary war, had been well treated by England and, full of gratitude, had pressed into the Canadian wilderness, even before the surveyors. They are now, though still German in many things even to the fifth generation, among the most prosperous and most loyal Canadian subjects. Waterloo County, counting more manufacturing towns and villages within its borders, headed by Berlin and Gait, than any other, is perhaps in all ways the brightest example of a good manufacturing and farming district that exists in Ontario. Then there are some French in the neighbourhood of Detroit, relics of the old French trading settlements, far removed and cut off from the habitant of theORIGIN OF ONTARIO FARMERS. 179 east. And in this neighbourhood too are the descendants of partisan British officers who received grants for leading the Indians in the two American wars. And Canadians themselves are seldom aware what great numbers of Germans—some from disbanded regiments, others direct emigrants from Europe or New York State—were settled along the Lake shore and have mingled with the British; their names alone, as well as those of the townships, surviving to tell the tale. The Highlanders of Glengarry in the far east of the province are still, of course, a notable and distinct community. After all these, in 1825, came the two thousand Catholic Irish imported by a member of the Beverley-Robinson family, and who-founded the town and district of Peterborough. And this further reminds me that these Catholic Irish must not be overlooked among the communities of Ontario. In some parts they have remained in possession of whole townships or districts, in others they are sprinkled about, but in either case it may fairly be said that they have proved good citizens and not as so often in the United States a doubtful blessing. They have not influenced politics for evil, nor have they swarmed into the towns and seized upon the weak spots of democracy and abused them. Whatever may be their Home Rule sentiments they have minded their own business as a body, and not wasted their breath and their time in calling names, or in dark schemes. The weakness of their numbers and the great strength of the Orange Societies in Canada no doubt compels good manners and makes the rhe- torical abuse of the brutal Saxon, to which we are accustomed in England and the United States, a matter of impossibility. The majority have probably no desire for such indulgence and have lost the habit, nor did I ever hear Canadians abuse the Catholic Irish within their gates, as the Americans do, and not without reason. Local feeling at the same time used to run high between the Catholic Irish and the others, accentuated, no doubt, by the strength of the Scotch-Irish and the Orange Societies. I can remember, thirty years ago, when the combative spirits of either connection used to celebrate their respective festivals by ferocious faction fights in the streets of Peterborough, in whose N 2i8o CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. neighbourhood there were, and still are, Catholic and Protestant townships lying side by side. But contests of this kind have long died out, and were rather the exuberance of local rivalries and animal spirits than anything more serious and deep-seated. It is true you will still find Orangemen in Canada who believe themselves to be the sole bulwark against the enslavement of the world by the Pope and his minions, and decent farmers or mere working men who will entertain you with such convictions on this subject as have not been heard in England for eighty years. Ontario boasts an admirable agricultural college, situated at Guelph, where something like two hundred young men, many of them farmers' sons, well fortified already with the manual and practical side of agriculture, study its theories and science. The cost of a course at Guelph, with its large farm and elaborate equip- ment, is less than half that of the less practical establishments in England, and can be very nearly extinguished by the labour of a pupil, should it be necessary, on the college farm. It is a Government institution, and serves as a focus of agricultural experiment and information for the province. Its graduates return to their fathers' farms with wider views, not only of agriculture but of their fellow men. They are readily sought after too, at good salaries as managers, by the leading American breeders of pedigree stock. Young Englishmen intending to go there would do well, however, to first qualify themselves for getting the most out of the college by a season's practical work upon a private farm—but of this later. Behind such districts as I have been describing, which constitute the bulk of settled Ontario; between them and the great unbroken forests, are considerable strips and fragments, less fertile, less valu- able, and far less sightly in appearance. Here are seen unpainted frame or log houses, fields still bristling with stumps or rough with rocks, the crudest of snake fences everywhere, and a general lack of finish that to the experienced eye means not the beginning of a thriving country but a struggle with inferior land. This type of country is mainly to be found in the northern half of the settled strip between Montreal and Toronto. There are always people who prefer to stay in their own province and in aONTARIO AND THE EMIGRANT. 181 timbered country to going west on to the richest prairies. Hence these inferior lands, worth from fifteen to thirty dollars an acre, with improvements. The first-class lands of old Ontario were practically occupied by the opening of the 'seventies. I remember well at that period that the counties of Grey and Bruce, upon Lake Huron, the last to be cut out, were spoken of as still offering the best opportunity in Canada to the farmer's son of the older counties or to the emigrant from abroad with small capital. One may fairly say that simul- taneously with the clearance of the last good lands of Ontario, the great North-West, with its illimitable possibilities, was brought within reach of the surplus farming population of the older province—to the detriment, in a sense, of rural Ontario and to the benefit of the world. I have found a widespread if vague notion in England that the farmers of old Canada are mainly British born. This is, of course, inaccurate. Most of them nowadays,^when not of U.E. Loyalist stock, are the grandsons or great-grandsons of the original emigrant. The farmers who have gone in since i860—to take a convenient date—are not worth numerical consideration when weighed against the others. A serious item even in this small fragment would be what may be called gentlemen emigrants, whose sojourn for various causes is always temporary, and when the North-West was opened few even of these stayed in Ontario. The final question now comes up: Is Ontario a desirable province for the British immigrant? As a place wherein to gain experience before going west there is no question that it is, but that is another matter on which I shall speak presently. Otherwise, only two types of immigrant suggest themselves in this connection: the gentleman of small income who wants merely to reside in Canada for economy or other reasons, and the man with capital who would buy a farm and make farming his means of livelihood. With regard to the last, I would put the intending settler with only a few hundred pounds out of the question. For such a man the west offers far greater advan- tages than the poor, the remote, or the uncleared lands of old Ontario, which alone would be open to so small a capitalist. The motives that keep the natives abiding on and, in some182 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. cases, still slowly enlarging such districts, have no application to the stranger with the world before him. But let us consider the larger capitalist, the man with, say, ^2,ooo, and see what a good Ontario farm has to offer him. That he would lay out his money to greater advantage in the North-West goes without saying, but how does the Ontario farm in the hands of an Englishman compare with a similar holding in the old country ? A one hundred and fifty acre farm at, say, sixty dollars an acre, the lowest figure at which he can purchase quite first-class land and buildings in a favourable situation, will approximately represent his outlay, though such properties frequently fetch much more. Three thousand dollars for stocking it, and elementary expenses, will not be an excessive estimate. Thus started, and possessed of the knowledge gained, and only gained, by working for a year or two previously with an Ontario farmer, and with a distinct bent for applying such knowledge and a real liking for his work, the settler should make a fair living, as living on a farm goes—let us say eight per cent upon his capital, charging nothing for his own labour. But this £2,000, it must be remembered, would bring him £100 a year, or five per cent, on a gilt-edged mortgage if he lived as an idle man or employed his time elsewhere. I am quite certain that this scale of profits would be a generous average for the province, which is now precisely in the situation of the old country with, of course, lower market prices and higher labour. Fortunately for itself, however, it possesses a harder-working people. The Ontario farmer works longer hours than an English labourer, and does much more in the same time. The settler who is not prepared to do this had better bank his money and take up some other occupation, A farmer in the old country with like acreage and with less capital does not by comparison know what work means. He has a much easier life, and certainly has far more amusement, one year writh another, in these days of low rents, though his rates and taxes are much higher than those of his Ontario contemporary. It is a common speculation among people who know bothBRITISH FARMERS. 183 England and Canada what the result would be if the occupant of one hundred and fifty acres in England worked it with the energy and thrift of an Ontario farmer by his own and his sons' labour. But the English farmer of that acreage does not expect to engage in such unremitting toil. The Ontario farmer prides himself upon it, and is moreover used to his system and to hard manual work. He is in his own country, among his own friends. He is absolutely independent, except of his mortgagee —a somewhat frequent appanage, unfortunately, and far worse than a landlord. He can generally make both ends meet, and often something more, and he is, at any rate, in calm waters again after a troublous time. His worry now is not lack of means but lack of the little labour he actually requires, and the sight of his sons preferring the North-West or a city life to the paternal acres. It will be gathered from what I have said already that there is somewhat less than nothing to be gained by the British farmer exchanging a leasehold or rented farm in England for a freehold in Ontario. Canadians generally have strange ideas of the British farmer, ideas which had some foundation in 1870, and emigra- tion literature emanating from Canadian sources shows the same curious beliefs. The tenant farmer is still pictured as a down- trodden individual, paying a high rent to a landlord who holds him in his grip. I have met few Canadians who in the least realise that the tables have been turned these twenty years and the tenant in most parts of England is now " on top " ; that there are not enough good farmers to go round; and that farms producing acre for acre an equal yield to the best of Ontario can be had for a pound an acre. Furthermore, that even where leasehold is not customary a yearly agreement, so long as the rent is paid and the farm reasonably treated, is virtually perpetual occupa- tion, with the advantage to the occupant that he himself can get out and withdraw his capital at short notice. Much is made in books, pamphlets, and by townspeople of the sentiment of land- owning. There is a good deal of this in the old country, as well as some social prestige, but absolutely nothing of either upon the other side. There is a thousand times more sentiment about a homestead in England that the tenants have rented for184 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. only a couple of generations than about any freehold farm in English Canada, which last is regarded in precisely the same light as a manufactory or a shop, and sold as lightly for profit or advantage, with very rare exceptions. I have been asked again and again in Canada, and I have seen the futile query urged in emigration speeches and publications, why the British tenant farmer does not bring his capital to an Ontario farm and become his own landlord. The simple answer is that such people cannot know England or, like several million Englishmen, only know the cities and nothing of its rural economy, and are often influenced by a sentiment that a practical farmer does not share. The tenant of a good farm in Great Britain pays a fraction more in rent than the interest of the money sunk in the Ontario freehold would bring; but if his barn or his house wants a new roof, his landlord does it for him, and a great deal more besides, being satisfied with about two per cent, of interest on his estate. Now, the Ontario freeholder has to do these things himself, and, as I have said, for his stock and produce gets about two-thirds of the price received by his British cousin, for reasons obvious to anyone. Ontario farms, too, have long ago reached their limit of value, save in peculiar situations such as would apply in England. There is no " unearned increment" such as may be looked for in the west, and there is an old saying in North America that when a man buys a farm he is very apt to be married to it—for in the older provinces land may be every- thing that is desirable, but a long time in finding a purchaser. Over and above all these reasons against Ontario for the British farmer, which are not matters of argument nor opinion but salient facts, much discount must be allowed for the great uprooting that transplantation for this kind of man means. However desirable the country of his proposed adoption, it means new faces, new ways, and new methods, and the British farmer is not the most adaptable of his nation. It means also good-bye to friends, neighbours, and relatives. With a young man about to start in life these things do not, and should not, count for much; but with a family man of settled habits and making a living upon an English farm it would be worse than purposeless to exchange it for a farm in Ontario, fine provinceONTARIO AND ENGLISH FARMERS. 185 as Ontario is. For a man who cannot make a living on a small farm in England certainly could not make one in Ontario. The North-West is wholly another matter, and does not concern us in this chapter. But the writer or speaker who would urge the former course must be quite ignorant of the conditions under which the British farmer now lives, or else a mere propagandist without a sense of responsibility. As a matter of fact, however, Ontario has no serious designs on the British farmer. It would profit the province little or nothing for a few of its farmers to be bought out by men from this side, of fixed ideas, who would have to unlearn much and would very often not prove equal to the high pressure at which an Ontario farm is run. Nor do the spokesmen of Canada on these matters seem to have grasped the fact that there are nothing like enough farm labourers to go round in the old country—Ireland excepted. I sometimes think the majority of Canadians have the same hazy notions concerning the British labourer that they have of the British farmer, which picture him as swarming on the land at starvation wages, and ground under the heel of tyrannical land- lords and farmers. If I were a young man of this class I should certainly go to Canada at once ; but for the middle-aged, married man, with a comfortable cottage and regular work, even at fifteen shillings a week and harvest money, the move would be one of very doubtful wisdom. The young labouring man will do well to gain his experience with an Ontario farmer before proceeding to the North-West, whither he will probably find his way in due course. He will have to work harder and move faster than he has been accustomed to, nor will he in his first season usually get quite the full wages of a Canadian hired man, which have now risen to about £ 35 a year and board and lodging with the farmers family. But in the present tension of the agricultural labour market in England, which threatens, moreover, to grow more acute, Canada will have to look mainly, so far as Britain is concerned, to that redundant population which congests almost every industry except that of the land. How to make the best of this is a problem which the British philanthropist takes lightly till186 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. experience sobers him, but the Englishman who knows both Canada and his own people must feel it beset with difficulties. A few words in conclusion regarding that special product of Great Britain, the gentleman emigrant, who proceeds to a colony with the sole purpose of making a limited income go further than at home. Ontario for all time has been a favourite resort for such fugitives from the cramped surroundings and useless but obligatory expenses and dull life that a large family and small income often means in the old country for gentlefolk. This kind of emigrant, filled with British notions of the dignity of the soil, sometimes makes the mistake of including farming in his scheme of life, and Ontario farming does not lend itself to half-hearted measures, and treats the amateur who plays with it somewhat hardly—reducing instead of increasing a limited income, and causing a great deal of worry besides. The wiser part, however, have gone to the country towns, invested their money at the higher rates still to a certain extent current in Canada, and there found most of what they expected. But Ontario is a dearer country to live in than it used to be. Farm produce is not yet so high as in England, but almost everything else is somewhat higher and the virtual absence of servants must be faced. Still a man with a family of girls can meet this last difficulty out of his own resources, without losing caste, and not without profit to the young women (as well as to the house- hold exchequer) who in their leisure hours will have an infinitely livelier social time of it than nine out of ten such families in England ; provided, that is to say, they have common sense and hit it off with their Canadian neighbours, which all Britishers unfortunately do not. There are more opportunities, too, for putting boys out in the world in a new country, provided you live there and identify yourself with its life. To many people, again, if not too far advanced in life, there is something stimu- lating in the atmosphere of a new country that is prospering and expanding : a sort of pride in it is contagious, and adds a certain zest to life wrhich every Englishman who has experienced it is conscious of, though to the outsider not readily definable. There are often quite fine and solid mansions, relics of the old regime, with a few acres of land attached, in the outskirts ofTHE GENTLEMAN EMIGRANT. 187 the country towns, that can be bought extremely cheap, because they have not the very latest improvements which every Canadian will have nowadays when he sets up housekeeping. I came across more than one quite recently, and heard of others that were being offered for five or six thousand dollars. The back lakes again, with their fishing, boating and duck shooting, afford a fine outlet to such a household in summer and autumn, with a minimum of expenditure if they choose the popular method of camping out; but of this more in another chapter.( 188 ) CHAPTER VIII. Canada, as regards the British emigrant, is essentially a country for the young. They have a great advantage, at any rate, over the middle-aged, who are apt to be too set in their habits and unduly disturbed by even the small novelties of life that grate upon them ; and the less educated classes feel this, I think, more than those from a higher social sphere. On the other hand, while the former find themselves treated with more con- sideration than at home, the latter are sometimes apt to wince at the democratic condition of things that meets them outside the more social circles of the towns. For farm labourers there is a perennial demand, both east and west; for mechanics of all kinds there is a brisk demand in good times, with a great slackening off in periods of depression ; but work of some kind can always be had, and the Canadian who cannot find it in one line turns readily to another. A lusty English shoe-hand, out of work in a district where rural labour at fair wages is deficient, informed me lately that he would rather starve—a form of speech for living on charity of some kind—than go into the country and work for half-a-crown a day. For this kind of man, whom we all know in Britain, there is no use whatever in Canada, and public opinion would consign him to starvation with cheerful unanimity. Nor is there any demand for clerks and lawyers, though clerkships are of course frequently obtained by private interest or family connection. Of lawyers there are already far too many, in proof of which I could give details and particulars, but the main fact is an ordinary truism of Canadian life and needs no endorsement. Those excellent people in England who have hazy notions that there are mysterious "berths or something" in Canada where a young Englishman of goocj family and no practical accomplishments will be welcomed as a ray of socialVARIOUS EMIGRANTS. 189 light among a half-civilised people, are still with us, though in rapidly decreasing numbers. There are a great many " berths " in Canada requiring no high intellectual or special business standard, but they are reserved exclusively for the politicians and those who have a pull with them. If there were any to spare, which is not likely, the rest of the population of Canada would very naturally be preferred for selection in their own country. After that the Englishman and the stranger might present their claim. Now most of the young men who set their faces towards Canada proceed in the first instance on to the land. All other departments are filled or nearly filled by native Canadians. The proportion of these lads who ultimately drift into other trades is very great. It would be odd if it were not so. So far from being peasants, wedded for generations to the soil, and fearful of towns, like Mennonites, Doukhobors, Finns or crofters, the majority of these miscellaneous parties of emigrants are almost as ignorant of any farming life as they are of the moon, and quite as ignorant of Canadian farming. Some take to it, but if a large number did not find country life and labour uncongenial, human nature would be false to itself. If you collect together a hundred young men of all grades, antecedents and tastes, with almost as many different motives for emigrating, united only in the laudable desire to emigrate, and if all these young men, regardless of disposition, were planted as bricklayers or lawyers or carpenters, how many would be following these respectable and useful trades in three years' time ? A few of these emigrants—mechanics or farm labourers—go out with the intention of following their own trades, but the majority either have no trade, or intend to abandon it, for what seems to them the easy and pleasant life of a farmer or his assistant. Canadians cannot and do not realise the mystic attraction that anything in the shape of an outdoor life has, in theory at least, for the Britisher of all classes unused to outdoor labour, above the actual working man ; and unfortunately those who know the country only as an abstract thing of beauty, or a field for amusement and relaxation, and who could not tell barley from rye, nor clover from sainfoin, nor a Hereford from a Shorthorn,igo CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. nor an ash from an elm, are increasing throughout every class under existing conditions in England. Is it any wonder that such people, though they go out on to the land, since that is virtually their only channel of emigration, drift off it into the towns in vast numbers. I am not speaking of paupers—for if any solution of that dreadful problem could be found upon the waste lands of the North-West, England would be indeed fortunate—but rather of the middle and lower middle classes, the majority of whom are not cut out for agricultural pursuits, though, tired of shop, office, or factory, they vaguely hope, unlike their Canadian equivalents, that they may be. To anyone who has watched these movements for two or three decades, there is something almost pathetic in the simple faith of the well-meaning and evergreen philanthropist, who with light heart will dump down large groups of Englishmen en bloc in a district or on a tract with the fond hope that they will stay there. It has been tried a hundred times, and may perhaps be tried another hundred, but with results wide of the promoter's intentions. Other races, and even the other stocks of the British race, can stand and even thrive upon this herding system, but the South Briton never. As a breed he is no longer a successful tamer of solitudes, his true instincts being much more often town wards, though he talks to the contrary ; and coming from a country the majority of whose population in these degenerate days live in towns or within their sphere, it would be strange if it were otherwise. It may take him one or two years to find it out, which is the more unfortunate. The practical countryman must always be in a small minority, as we have none to spare; the more educated amateur, if I may use the term, will more often than not wear out his preconceived rural ideals before the stern realities of hard work, and will drift into occupations for which nature better fitted him. Thick settlements of miscellaneous Englishmen have other drawbacks. The Englishman is less adaptable, or at least more obvious in his unadaptability, than the Scotchman, or the people of other races ; more independent and obstinate, more prone to disagree even with his own people when herded together in another country. He is apt to despise the industrial methodsSETTLING IN GROUPS. 191 and the customs of his adopted country and the advice of its people, only to find out his error when it has ruined him. Much more often than Scotchmen or Irishmen, he fails to hit it off with the people of the country. Yet of all emigrants, even if the statement seem for the moment paradoxical, the Englishman is the last who should settle in groups. If business success is of any importance to him, a condition assumed in the case of most emigrants, the Englishman should shed his prejudices, go directly among Canadians, make friends with them, mix with them, and in short become one of them as quickly as may be. But in regard to the great number of young Englishmen who make their debut on a farm and drift into other lines—I should like to correct any impression I may have given that this neces- sarily implies failure. Not a bit of it. Three-fourths of such emigrants, having no definite accomplishment, or only such as there is no demand for, cannot be distributed directly into con- genial situations. The farmers are ready to give almost anyone with health and strength their board, at any rate, and sometimes m0re—an arrangement which gives the emigrant time to feel his feet, learn the ways of the country, ascertain whether he is fitted for farm work, and, if not, to seek opportunities for altering his condition. A few months' hard work in the open air on a Canadian farm of the better sort is no bad beginning for any transatlantic career, and I am sometimes inclined to think that a brief compulsory course of it would be salutary for the entire youth of England before starting in life, for their muscles, their health, their general intelligence, and their point of view. I commend the notion to enterprising undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge in the Long Vacation. They would only be out of pocket their travelling expenses in the whole four months, less, that is to say, than the cost of a month in Switzerland, and would gather priceless wisdom anent their fellow-creatures, and have an experience to think about for life. Seriously, however, I would urge the friends and relatives of boys of any class, who have gone out to make their way and start as farm hands, not to think they are necessarily going to perdition or are rolling stones when they hear that they have shifted to a store or a machine shop, or, if lucky, to a bank.i92 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. The custom in England that apprentices a boy to a certain trade, at an age when he knows nothing of the world and little of his own mind, and regards any restiveness within the groove as something almost immoral and of ill-omen, does not obtain in Canada or the States. Farming, above all trades, is the very worst for a man who does not like it, for the rewards do not compensate grudging labour; though, fortunately, a sufficiently large section of mankind have a natural instinct for the soil—are drawn towards it and the animals that pertain to it by a magnetism most of them could not explain, and would not even admit. " O beatae agricolae quid si sua bona norint," sang the poet two thousand years ago. But the English are not colonists in the sense they once were, and the youth who dislikes farming after a fair trial had better get into something else as soon as he possibly can or come home again. One thing, however, must be remembered, when comparing the pertinacity with which the settlers of old days stuck to their homes and redeemed the wilderness and the lack of persever- ance in such work now so often shown by the modern South Briton, namely—that the ancients could not very well get away from their enterprise, nor easily communicate with the outside world, whereas a few dollars and a few hours will now transport the dissatisfied into far distant scenes of enterprise. Within the last few months I have accidentally run across a dozen English boys of the humbler classes who had been sent to %farms by emigration societies or Government agents, but by temperament unsuited to the life, have thrown it up, gone to the city, and taken situations as hotel porters, shoeblacks, messengers, bell boys and so forth. If these lads would stay upon the land as labourers, it would be a good thing for the country and a whole- some and sufficient livelihood for themselves, but if their nature turns from a life for which Providence had not intended them, and they find satisfaction as well as a living in that of a hotel bell boy or as the driver of a city baker's cart, a thousand times better they should follow such inclinations, which in Canada give a poor but sharp lad much greater chances of bettering his condition than rural labour without capital.THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN EMIGRANT. 193 But I should like to say something about a special class of emigrant who does not come under the head of those already treated of, though too often he is lumped in wholesale fashion with them to his after detriment. This is the English gentle- man's son of tender years who goes out labelled by the some- what inapt title of "farm pupil." More nonsense has been written upon this subject in the past few years than upon all other questions connected with emigration put together ; and it is one that has caused a great deal of superfluous hysteria, and lends itself peculiarly to dogmatism and sensational writing on the part of the ill-informed on this particular subject. I am not sure whether it is worth while filling any space in this book with matters relating to the young gentleman emigrant; for, if the truth be told, he has had very little influence on Canadian development, not because the numbers which have gone there, and the money they have taken, would not warrant them as something of a factor in the work, but because such a great majority of them have failed and passed off the stage of active rural life—some to the towns to success or the reverse, some home again.1 Canadians have no opinion of them collectively as settlers and ridicule them mercilessly, though recognising many very brilliant exceptions. They count for so little on the industrial map of Canada that I should omit the subject alto- gether but for the sake of the parents of such young men, to whom the matter is one of infinite misunderstanding, of bewilderment, and of wild writing. In what I have to say I confine myself wholly to the youth of the upper classes (speaking broadly)—the public school boy, that is to say, or his social equivalent, in his teens. Not that the young man who has just emerged from them is always able to take care of him- self, very far from it; but he is supposed to be thus qualified, and nearly always thinks he is, and in drawing the line of age the reader can use his own discretion and knowledge of life. Moreover, it is immediately on leaving school that this type of 1 It may reasonably be hoped that the fresh exodus of this class now ap- parently proceeding to Canada in considerable numbers may profit by the lessons of the past, as their prospects, in other respects, are undoubtedly more encouraging than were those of their predecessors. C. Qi94 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. emigrant intended for a colonial career mostly sets out for it, or should do so whenever possible, for at that moment his ideas are more apt to be simple, manly, and moral, dissipation not yet having come in his way. Another year or two spent in so-called "preparation for the colonies " is at the best time almost thrown away. You cannot reproduce Canadian life and atmosphere in England; the idea is almost ludicrous to any one who knows both countries in an agricultural sense. In cases of necessary delay apprenticeship to a real hard- working small farmer is probably the most practical stop-gap. I have known a few young men do this to really some after- advantage ; but in elaborate schemes of preparation for the colonies I must admit I see no good. It is so much better to prepare in the country itself on a good farm, and then an agri- cultural college if you will. But there is a more active objection since it stands to reason that many of these emancipated young men will be far less adaptable to the ways of life which will be required of them in Canada than when they left school at seven- teen or eighteen. They will have escaped from discipline into various households and establishments in England, where nothing of the kind is seriously considered, and certainly not enforced. They will grow into manhood under auspices that are neither school nor university, with their accompanying tone and esprit de corps. For many, a good grind in an office would be really a better beginning, for business knowledge and discipline "is at least something to carry into life. We all know what learning farming too often means in England, while agricultural colleges, whatever use they may be to such embryo country gentlemen, land agents, or large farmers as elect to take them seriously, are not calculated to equip the youth whose future is a Manitoban farm or an Alberta ranch, even if he is willing to be thus equipped. The thing is an anomaly. Many young men are so naturally sound and zealous as to be proof against adverse influences, but why expose them to such and waste their time, to say nothing of money. Out of six young men of this type filling in time before proceeding to a colony, every man of the world knows well that three at least, though possibly with some future use in life, are bad companions for those who are keenCOLONIAL TRAINING. 195 and hope to make successful colonists. And it is not by any means the best young men who set the fashion in groups that are not restrained by the traditions of public schools and univer- sities. Lastly, there is no question whatever but that as the boy grows into a man he acquires in England wants, notions, and ideas that for home consumption are possibly normal and harmless, but which make it more difficult for him to adapt himself to the ways of colonial farming life. No! if he is going at all, start him off by all means as soon as he leaves school. If practicable, let him get his training in the country he is destined to do business in, and begin it while he is still adaptable, comparatively innocent, and unexacting in his needs. He will be no whit the greener for all his youth than he would be two or three years later aS regards colonial matters. He will not want to teach the Canadian farmers how to run their own farms, which sometimes happens in the case of a young man weighted with a smattering of English farming, which has to be mainly unlearned. There are, of course, exceptions, but as a rule the finished schoolboy has the best chance of being moulded into that frame of mind and habit of work and right under- standing with his Canadian neighbours that is necessary to happiness and success as a Canadian farmer, either in the east or west. The difficulty, of course, lies in the fact that at seven- teen or eighteen a lad's destiny in life is not always settled ; very often the unfortunate (for emigration purposes) interregnum of an army crammer precedes his exit. The ultimate destiny of nearly all these lads is and should be the North-West. But as two, three, or four years must in most cases, and happily so, intervene before they are entrusted with capital to purchase land, it has been for a long time the custom, and I think a wise one, to recommend a year or so on an Ontario farm before proceeding to the newer and cruder countries. A youth of any class, if he takes to the life and does not shrink from it, emerges from such a course efficient at every branch of Canadian farm work. If, for instance, he has in his second year received more or less full wages from a good Ontario farmer he is " hall marked " and fully qualified to go anywhere and do anything in his own line. He is as different from a freshly-arrived young O 2196 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Englishman, " colonial trained " or otherwise, in his capacity and smartness for work as anything that can well be imagined. Ontario farming, again, being of a mixed nature, every tool is in full use, from the handling of the Canadian axe, the management of stock, the ploughing of land, the seeding and saving and threshing of grain crops, to the saving of hay, the milking of cows, the care and handling of horses, the tending of orchards. These things are not learned by looking on at them from the back of a horse or the top rail of a gate, with an occasional " lesson" in the various arts—usually futile when put to a practical test—but by working continually at them till mind and muscles alike move easily and in harmony, and work the right way, not the wrong one, at each job. A very old joke in Canada, founded too surely on innumerable facts, describes the newly-arrived young Englishman of this position as waxing indignant at being set to harrow wheat or load hay, and declaring that he came out " to learn farming, not to engage in menial occupations." There is now, however, a better under- standing of such matters in England than formerly, and it is pretty generally recognised now that a farming career in Canada, both in its elementary and after stages, means personal labour, though it is not equally well understood what an enormous difference the brain and will behind the labour makes. Assuming that a year or so on an Ontario farm is the best preliminary for the gentleman's son, a difficulty at once besets the anxious parent—that is, the farmer to whom the youth should go—for though in acreage and style of living there is a certain similarity, and the people are as a class no better nor worse than other Anglo-Saxon Christians, there is an immense difference in their suitability for handling kindly and reasonably a youth of a sort wholly strange and new to them. The Government emigration agents make no distinctions of class, and from their point of view they are probably right, for they would become involved in endless difficulties and responsi- bilities outside their powers and their capacities. The young man goes through the labour bureau, so to speak, classed as " unskilled labourer." Farmers in need of a hand apply to the city offices in Canada, and get one labelled more or less as to his previousTHE YOUNG GENTLEMAN EMIGRANT. 197 knowledge. This is quite sufficient for the ordinary emigrant who can shift for himself, and there is an end of it. The young men of coarser fibre, to whom an immediate livelihood is of vital necessity, have a really good chance given them. To the other kind of immigrant a few shillings a week, more or less, is of little immediate moment whatever compared to the sort of household and the sort of man the gentler-nurtured youth is first introduced to. I am not speaking of luxuries or refinements. Practically every Ontario farmer is a plain-living, hard-working man ; but out of two neighbours, that for other purposes rank much the same, the one will treat the strange, inexperienced youth, who is inevitably something of a puzzle to him, with forbearance and patience in the field and kind-hearted geniality within doors. He will not press him too hard at first—will take some pains to initiate him into the various crafts of agriculture, which are not the natural inheritance of any fool, as many appear to suppose. He will entrust him with a team at plough and waggon work as soon as he is qualified, will give him a half-day off now and again to go and see his friends, and sometimes even a buggy and horse to take him there. I have known myself several farmers who will do this, and it must be remembered that a youth who is working for his board and lodging, the usual trial rate for this type of immigrant, has no claim whatever to such concessions. He is on a business footing, which is so near the line of equity as to be frequently rejected as a proposition. Another sort of farmer, and a pretty numerous one, will do none of these things. From his point of view he has made a bargain, and expects to get the most out of it. You can hardly blame him, though you may blame those who run the risks of exposing a son to quite unnecessary and undeserved disagreeables. He may be rough of tongue, hard and ungracious in manner/with- out being a bad kind of man otherwise—unsympathetic with the difficulties, and probable awkwardness, of a type of employe he has no sort of experience of and does not understand, for it must be remembered that the kind of lives these lads have led at home and the training they have received are absolutely outside the comprehension of the average Ontario farmer. Hard work and long hours are the inevitable accessories of Canadian farmhouse198 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. life, and the parent who relieves himself of all expense and throws the onus of supporting himself and learning his trade at the same time on his unsophisticated offspring puts himself out of court altogether, and he cannot complain if an over-strenuous employer lacks the tact and feeling of a well-paid tutor. The sort of farmer under discussion is very apt to make a " chore boy " of the gentleman apprentice, which involves neither cruelty nor breach of faith, but merely retards his acquisition of the various branches of field work that he has to learn; and means that he spends his time around the house and yards, chopping stove wood and making himself useful to the women of the household in the minor industries outdoors that belong to their sphere. There is a strong temptation to a farmer to leave a lad who is not quick or apt, in this position rather than bother himself with teaching him the more strenuous and difficult arts of the field, and where machinery and horses, particularly young ones, are concerned, there are risks and trouble involved in unskilled assistance, only too well understood by farmers acquainted with it. With a farmer of the temperament above described there is not only the probability of a boy suffering a good deal of super- fluous unhappiness, but the equal chance of his getting utterly disgusted with the life and the country and returning to the paternal roof, a result not perhaps wholly undeserved by a parent who regards his own responsibilities with such remarkable levity. With the right kind of farmer, however—the man who may be relied on to do well by a lad of this sort, whose family (another consideration) are in accord with him, and whose table (yet another consideration) is wholesome—a young fellow who really means business may be safely placed, and if this does not turn him out a practical farmer nothing will. While again, if he flinches from even such modified roughing it as a respectable Ontario farmhouse means, and the work that a considerate Ontario farmer will give him, he had far better abandon all thoughts of a farming life and turn his attention to something else; not, however, till he has given it a reasonably fair trial, for I have often known young fellows, after a period of extreme depression, settle down to the life quite happily afterwards.THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN EMIGRANT. 199 It must be remembered that very few of the Ontario farmers are members of the Anglican Church; but there is no sort of prejudice in these matters in Canada, and a farm pupil, if a Churchman, naturally attends the English church in the nearest village. What I have said about the difference between Ontario farmers for the particular purpose under discussion is not merely a personal opinion formed from a good deal of experience, but a matter of common knowledge to any man familiar with the pro- vince. Indeed, no man of the world would require even this much to grasp a tolerably obvious truth. Besides the difficulty of selection to a parent without friends in Canada there is another—namely, that there is nothing whatever to prevent a farmer from terminating such an engage- ment at any moment if he is dissatisfied with his bargain. He makes no compact—indeed, he would be a fool to do so— but virtually takes on trial a (to him) unknown specimen of mankind. Indeed, it is eminently desirable that any such arrangement, if it proves distasteful to one or either party, should be terminated: but in the case of a raw youth of seventeen or eighteen, alone in a strange- land the situation may be an awkward one, and must be risky; it is certainly not a fair one. But many British parents of this class, who in all other walks of life, both near home and far off, take consider- able pains to safeguard their off-spring's welfare, and sometimes spend much money in so doing, face this situation with the utmost equanimity. It is not too much to say that nearly the whole of his own class in Canada who live in cities and towns are scandalised at him, and think him an unfeeling monster. The Canadian emigration authorities, on the other hand, take the opposite and the optimistic view, reject all distinctions and have the one prescription for all. Their agent at the port or city will find him a job, twenty, fifty, or a hundred miles off, from among his applications, and if he does not like it, or the man does not like him—well, that is his business; every- thing has been done that can reasonably be expected. This is perfectly intelligible from the Canadian point of view, but it is the British parent that for the moment is con- cerned. Now, Canadians being only mortals, unless they200 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. have mixed a good deal in English life, understand this par- ticular type or the causes which make him what he is, with his virtues and his failings, not at all The well-to-do class of the cities cannot understand what he leaves England for, or, if so, why he wants to farm, the trade of all others they most despise. The immigration departments very naturally take a precisely opposite view, and are glad to welcome all immigrants with money or muscle, but cannot see why the squire or parson's son should be dealt with any differently from the village grocer or carpenter's son. Any man of the world, of course, will be able to form some sort of opinion of his own. I have merely set down here a few simple facts to help him to do so ; for the question is complex and has many sides. Various emigration societies do fine work, but I am not alluding now to the class who are accustomed to look to charity organisations for assistance. Moreover, there is no earthly object, but much the reverse, in a boy from Rugby or Marlborough going out with a big heterogeneous crowd of emigrants under a conductor. The journey from Liverpool to Toronto or Winnipeg or Calgary is so absolutely simple that no boy of eighteen could possibly go wrong unless he meant to, and I am not discussing "ne'er-do-weels." It is when he gets on to a farm that the want of some one to whom he can turn in case of need, and upon whom the father knows that he can rely, is needed. For it is only then the critical time which may make or mar such a lad's future begins. He may come out all right, he may not. It will depend partly on what sort of hands he gets into—indeed this is vital—and partly on his own adaptability and force of character; but, of course, it is always a great risk. I sometimes wonder what sort of sense of responsibility a fond parent has who shoots a green youth into space on another continent without the faintest knowledge of the people to whom he is going or even of the type to which they belong. This very uncertainty has been one of the causes that have so often inclined parents of this class to send their sons to English settlers of their own social stamp at a premium. The selection of these, influenced wholly perhaps by a distant relationship to themselves or their neighbours, or some meagre introductions has often been most unfortunate—sometimes from a moral,THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN EMIGRANT. 201 sometimes from a practical point of view ; but that is their own fault or misfortune, and has nothing to do with the main point. Now, all over Canada, particularly in the North-West, as well as in the United States, there is a fair sprinkling of those excep- tions, and sometimes very brilliant exceptions, to the rule which, I fear with truth, sets down the gentleman emigrant as a failure. Many of these who have utilised a good capital with good judg- ment in ranching or in wheat-growing occupy an enviable and prominent position, and are perhaps the most valuable settlers in the whole North-West. Their opinions on this particular matter are worth, for reasons too obvious to need mention, considerably more than that of any other class in either country, for they know their own sort at home and have been themselves through the mill. They know also, not merely Canada, but Canada from the practical agricultural point of view ; so it is very natural that when some inquiring parent hears through his relations in Blank- shire, and perhaps on yet better authority, of their quondam neighbour's flourishing position, he feels he would like to send Tom to him—'it would be such a capital start." In the mean- time he has read everywhere in pamphlets and newspapers that it is not necessary to pay a premium—an obvious truism. So when he prefers his request to our ranching friend he conside- rately remarks that he will not, of course, expect Tom to receive a salary just at first; but he was in his house football team, is devoted to the open air, and has been for six months with a celebrated land agent in the North of England ("Yes, at ^150 a year," soliloquises Mr. Ranchman, who knows the whole pro- gramme), learning land valuation, and seeing something of tile draining and the erection of model cottages—so he is not wholly without experience, and should prove most useful. Mr. Ranch- man smiles a grim smile. He has seen young Englishmen come out for ten or fifteen years, and has his own views as to the rela- tive proportion of sheep and goats—and has very decided opinions as to the " acquired experience." He hands the letter to Mrs. Ranchman, who ten years ago left an English country rectory for the west, and by pluck and ^nergy, aided by her husband's success, has kept the house a centre of refinement in somewhat of an oasis as regards such things. I will draw a veil over the202 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. enthusiasm with which Mr. and Mrs. Ranchman hail the prospect of an occupant for their spare bedroom, and a stranger and possibly even a troublesome young man at their board and within their domestic circle, for three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, in exchange for his valuable assistance. I am afraid from the Red River to the Pacific there would be only one answer from this type of man—a polite one, to the effect that the writer was not accustomed to receive young gentlemen upon these terms. He might add that he would find him a place with a settler in the neighbourhood. But if his wife were looking over his shoulder—hospitable soul as she is, having cooked and made beds for scores of wandering fellow- countrymen in her time, and not received more, perhaps, than a third of her due meed of gratitude, and rendered cautious—I think she would say: "No, my dear, I would say nothing about that. If he and his farmer part company we shall have him on our hands, perhaps indefinitely ; and it will be regarded as a matter of course—possibly even a favour conferred on us. His people would, of course, scream at the bare possibility of such a thing happening to them in England, where housekeeping is easy; why should we lay ourselves open to it ? " At any rate, Mr. Ranchman would decline with great politeness. What he would like to say is this:— " If I wished to send a son to England and to board him in a simple but refined home in the country with people of my own class, and requested, as you have done, that he should be well cared for as regards morals and discipline, etc., etc., and if I had reason to suppose you were open to that kind of thing in your rectory, and in consequence made inquiries as to your terms, they would almost certainly be or £ iooa year, and I should not complain, nor would anyone question its approximate equity. " Now, my house here is as good a one on the whole as yours, and as well, though somewhat differently, furnished. My table is quite as good ; we appear at our evening meal decently clad, and spend our evenings like you—among books, newspapers, maga- zines, music, and such ordinary indoor pursuits as are current among your neighbours in Blankshire. Meat and bread are some- what cheaper than with you, groceries dearer, servants' wages farTHE YOUNG GENTLEMAN EMIGRANT. 203 higher, and the onus of an extra inmate far greater—living as we live—than in your case. I am also expected to take moral responsibility for a youth I know nothing about. And the conditions of a new country and a new life are notoriously apt to stimulate young Englishmen of our class to enterprises which, if not necessarily vicious, are trying and troublesome to those in charge of them. My compensation for this is to be the value of the work to be taught him by me by the way—that this unsophisticated and possibly unsteady and even undesirable inmate of my family may accomplish in the year during which he will condescend to reside with me without a salary. "We will assume he is immaculate and trustworthy. Ignorant he must be. In such a case 150 dollars, or £ 30, is the very utmost his services could possibly be rated at for the first year under the most optimistic valuation ; £20 would be a fairer estimate, while he might be actually more trouble than he was worth. I cannot say as to this, having never seen him; I can only strike an average of three or four hundred young Englishmen I have known come out here, and this would be nothing like £30. However, we will take the maximum, and deduct that from the £100 you would ask me to pay you in like case. " As a final word, I should like to remark that if you were apprenticing your son to a lawyer, architect, or engineer you would pay large sums for the mere privilege of his sitting in their office, and pay his board bill besides. If you were writing to a farmer of a lower social grade than myself and with a rougher menage, in England or Scotland, you would not venture to make the suggestion you made to me. Nor would you, in writing to planters or farmers in India, Ceylon, Australia, or New Zealand, expect such terms from them, and why to me because I live in Alberta or Manitoba ? "You are the victim of misconceptions and phrases. Your son can certainly go as a hired man to a plain Canadian farmer without a premium. He might even be offered small wages. The conditions of life are quite different, as you would under- stand if you paid a visit to the neighbourhood. He can and would be, moreover, got rid of promptly if unsuitable. This might be the best course for him to pursue. I offer no opinion204 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. on it, not knowing your son—therefore I should not like to be responsible for the outcome. " When people of my sort want to hire hands we prefer to have skilled ones and pay them good wages, and turn them off when done with. If a young Englishman with a year or two's experience of this country achieves such a standard and earns a reputation for sense and energy, I would as soon, perhaps sooner, hire him than another; but I have no ambition to play the role of instructor, guardian, and host, or to see the domestic duties of my wife, already sufficiently trying, increased—and most certainly not without some quid pro quo, even assuming that your son is a well-behaved and sensible inmate, an assumption that no one with fifteen years of experience in this country would dream for a moment of making off hand." These are practically the universal sentiments of the kind of men whom many well-to-do English parents, if they knew the country, would to an absolute certainty most desire to place their sons with—men whose record, influence, and example is stimu- lating to youth ; and a young Englishman, when he sees the best traditions of his own class maintained with all the other qualities necessary to success in colonial life, is more likely to be inspired to imitation and emulation than by any other kind of man. Indeed, it may not be merely a matter of a few pounds, but the very saving or making of him. Unfortunately, these men are not very numerous, nor often available. Moreover, all these considerations, sufficiently luminous to any man of the world, are naturally beyond the comprehension of the ordinary western settler or hired man, who would probably tell the pupil that he was being swindled, or at least that he was a fool to work when he was paying what they would only regard as " big board money." Indeed, many people who ought to know better talk and write as if the sole object of the son of a well-to-do father, who had gone out to learn his trade, was the amount of shillings a week he might possibly earn during the first few months of the process, and, in the meantime, ignore completely the vital question of the people among which he may be thrown at the most critical period of his life. One hates to say anything against the general principle of a young fellowTHE YOUNG GENTLEMAN EMIGRANT. 205 being self-supporting, but it is apt to be made a mere fetish of, to the exclusion of other considerations, in some cases a thousand times more important. Just after completing this chapter, I had occasion to write to an English acquaintance who has been ranching for twelve or fifteen years in the North-West with zeal and ability, and asked him in a postcript to send me his views on this question if he had the time or inclination. Whatever they might be, I knew they would be valuable and interesting, from the status of the writer both in Canada and England, and his intimate experience of both. As the member of an exceptionally gifted and well- known family, my correspondent has devoted his share of these abilities with a more than sufficient accompaniment of physical strength and energy to a ranching life in the North-West. His place is a model of what a North-Western ranch should be, and he is himself one of those settlers whom Canada could not have enough of but gets so few. His letter lies before me, and covers four pages. It is extremely trenchant, and exhibits on this subject views of a most strenuous kind. The writer says that the matter is so much one of personality that you cannot prescribe, but, speaking generally as regards these young men, he thinks that four who are sent as regular pupils to men of their own social stamp who have succeeded will ultimately come out good farmers for one of those sent in the ordinary haphazard fashion as hired men to the Canadian farmers in the North-West. He uses almost identical language to that of the imaginary letter that my own experience had suggested as expressing the sentiments of his class and quoted above. He admits that these are not the off-hand opinions of the masses, but remarks that the masses are quite unqualified to feel sympathy with the young Englishman under such circumstances, and do not give a second thought to any feelings of responsibility that a British parent of this class may or should possess, and look only to the outlay of the immediate moment. At any rate, I have no hesitation in quoting the opinions of so able a judge for those who care to have them, and I should perhaps hesitate to do even so much if they were not those of the majority of this type of man, of whom I know and have known so many206 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. in the course of the last twenty or thirty years. His letter winds up:—" One does hear such pitiable nonsense talked in the trains and among people who know nothing about the matter. The papers write articles on the one side, showing absolute ignorance of the plain facts of the case and going on the principle that because it is in the colonies it will be all right. I think just the opposite; in the colonies a boy is cut loose from every tie which holds him in his place in the old country, and you cannot be too particular as to how you start him." I may say all this the more freely, and present the point of view of the enlightened English ranchman, as I incline myself towards the preliminary year or two with a well-chosen Ontario farmer before going west Nor, again, should it be forgotten that great numbers of people have in the past taken premium- paying pupils who were qualified neither by character, experience, nor circumstances for doing so. This, however, has nothing whatever to do with the principle itself from the first-class ranchman's point of view, who merely declines to have anything to do with a pupil under any other conditions, and he must be the best judge of what pays or does not pay. England itself— in farming as in every other profession—is rife with absurdities in the premium system. I have said nothing of the Guelph Agricultural College as a resort for the intending settler, though I have mentioned it as one of the best institutions of its kind to be found anywhere. I think, however, there is little doubt, but that a young man gets more benefit from such a course when he has had some experi- ence of ordinary farming life. This is the case, of course, with most of the Guelph students. Though manual labour of all sorts is carried on by the students, and many of them reduce their expenses by working on the college farm, it is better, I think, for the quite inexperienced to have a year of regular farm life first. The lectures and experiments in agriculture and its theoretical side are so much better understood by the student who has actually helped to plough, to sow and to save a crop, to milk cows and to tend horses. Moreover, the best agricultural college cannot reproduce the life of a family who are making their living out of the land, and leading such a life as the youngTHE YOUNG GENTLEMAN EMIGRANT. 207 farmer himself expects some day to lead ; just as the wise youth in England, who is anxious to fit himself for land-agency work, does not go to an agent who takes six pupils, but one rather where he will be by himself. If the would-be farmer in Canada wants to see the genuine thing he will take at least one year—and that for choice the first—where he will be in daily contact with the hundred and one small matters, indoors as well as out, that go to make up the life of a farmer, but not of an agricultural college. Among the many suggestions made by leading men in Canada whose lives bring them in contact with this type of young Englishmen, and who feel sorry for the desultory and friendless fashion in which they are pitchforked about the country, is that of a sort of training college for them alone. This is somewrhat against the democratic spirit of Canada and is in reality only the taking of a great many paying pupils on one farm. It has been tried in a private way several times, and in two or three cases by men of good experience and high position, who were individually superior probably to any official that such a small training college would be likely to attract. It has failed from the fact that with a dozen, twenty, or thirty young Englishmen of an age and in a situation where discipline is most difficult, and of a class that produces the largest pro- portion of those who need a strong hand, success is practically impossible. Here comes in the old trouble that the steady and well-intentioned are submitted to the influence of those who are the very reverse at close quarters. Such a body of young men, too, is apt to be classed by the tone of its most visible members —and these will be the rowdy, the idle, and the foolish. This sort of notoriety makes an establishment unpopular, or, even worse, ridiculous, and ridicule even on the prairies kills. All these remarks, of course, are intended to apply to the cases of young men of the public school description in their teens, the best period of life for most of them to emigrate, for reasons already given. Those of a maturer age, and all those of a different social type, may fairly be left to take their chance with the help of the labour bureaus, and after all they form the immense bulk of British emigration.208 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. The others, as I have said, are, from the Canadian point of view, perhaps not worth a chapter, but to the anxious parent, for whom it is written—pity, indeed, that he is not rather more anxious sometimes—the subject is, or should be, one of vital import and personal interest. And I trust it may assist in moving him to exercise some of the prudence and forethought in consigning his offspring to a country three thousand miles away, and to an untried life, that he would exercise in sending him to an adjoining county, and to have some sort of guarantee that a boy who requires and deserves encouragement at a critical period should not be handicapped by unnecessarily depressing surroundings, and a " boss " that is not qualified to do him justice. Relative roughing it to what he has been accus- tomed and hard work are inevitable, and, indeed, salutary, if he aspires to be himself a settler; but the different way in which these conditions may be introduced to him by two types of men, much alike in the eyes of their world, is remarkable, and of much import to himself, his friends, and possibly to his future. And above all things, let not the hasty parent send a youngster out to learn his business with another young fellow who has as yet acquired neither wisdom nor experience merely because his relatives at home live in a neighbouring parish or he has some acquaintance with his second cousin.TORONTO, 209 CHAPTER IX. "Where the blue hills of old Toronto shed Their evening shadows o'er Ontario's bed." Thus sang Tommy Moore when the last century was still young, and with a most outrageous indulgence in the proverbial poetic licence. For the fair city, that was then a village, and now contains nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants, lies upon as gentle a slope by the lake shore as is reasonably sufficient for the needs of the sanitary engineer. Toronto is not only the social, commercial, and political capital of Upper Canada, but is an entire class ahead and many times the size of Hamilton, London, or Kingston. Its situation in a sheltered bay at the north-western end of Lake Ontario is in every way superb, both for its shipping trade, its importance as a railway centre, and its nearness to all the fattest land of the province, and, combined with other causes, makes it the most popular place of residence in Canada for those who, in this respect, are in a position to please themselves. Montreal, though a larger city, is divided between two races, who, as we have seen, mix with each other scarcely at all. Toronto is entirely British. Regard- ing it as an Anglo-Saxon community it is in some respects, as is inevitable, very American, in others more English than England herself. There is certainly no city in North America where an educated Englishman could reside more pleasantly. What can one find to say about the physical properties of one of these large modern towns across the Atlantic ? They have so often been described, from the huge tree-like poles by the sidewalks that carry the innumerable telegraph and telephone wires through the busy quarters to the.leafy avenues of the suburbs. Of course, Toronto is laid out in parallelograms, the chief and busiest streets, such as King and Queen, running parallel with the lake shore—the others crossing them and trending up C. P2io CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. that long, very gentle slope, whose shadows Tom Moore's vivid fancy has described as falling on Ontario's bed. Yonge Street is the most celebrated by far of these lateral arteries, not so much on account of its business as from the fact of its retaining its name for thirty or forty miles out into the country, a survival of old primitive days. This has furnished jokes for the visitor to the Queen city from time immemorial, and even an ancient intimacy with its peculiar humour is apt to fail one for a moment, when some passing acquaintance recalls the rural joys of his or her " old home on Yonge Street," alluding to a farm two counties away. Substantially built and dignified are the main streets of Toronto, though not quite so aspiring as the business blocks of Montreal. They are of stone and brick, of course—red sand- stone, grey limestone, red brick, white brick, and all fashioned with as much regard for form and art as could reasonably be expected, in banks, insurance companies, or departmental stores. Somewhat unfortunately, perhaps, the railroad tracks, with all their buildings, intervene between the city and the shore, and effectually prevent any desire to wander by " Ontario's bed." Indeed, you may spend months, winter months certainly, in the most popular residential quarters of the city and forget altogether the fact that you are virtually at the seaside. In normal weather you can just see across the lake at this point, and in clear summer weather may even mark the misty cloud that overhangs Niagara to the south and sixty miles away. A feature, too, of the lakeward outlook from Toronto is " The Island," that long, narrow strip of natural breakwater, two or three miles out, on which stand various resorts for the crowds who in summer time throng the steamers that lead there. Seventy or eighty years ago Toronto straggled along the lake shore in its old character of York, " Muddy little York," as the old makers of Upper Canada, who lived there or gathered there for snug " Family Compact" sessions, used to call it. The Americans had burnt it contemptuously in the war of 1812 ; but it cost them Washington, which was destroyed in retaliation by the British, though English history books, which seem to get their facts on these topics mainly from American writers,ABSENCE OF POVERTY. 211 generally omit to say so, and represent General Ross as a wanton vandal. " Little York," however, had risen phoenix-like from its ashes to the dignity of nearly 3,000 souls by 1830. When I first knew it in 1873 it boasted some 60,000, though it still had the character of a great country town in many respects. Now it is very distinctly a capital city in all its attributes, as well as in its quarter-million of population. I should doubt, moreover, if any city of the same size contained so few of that class whose poverty calls for organised assistance, or who live at the edge of want and give a more or less squalid appearance to the quarters they inhabit. The bigger American cities have always a considerable element of Irish, foreigners, or negroes, who provide among them quite a large semi-pauperised class. Toronto is not, of course, free of such an incubus, but I should be surprised if its population were not, as an average, about the most well-to-do in the world. I fully believe that the province of Ontario would give an individual record of comfort, man for man, that no other community of two million people in the world could show; none, at least, of those which occur to one as rivalling it in this respect are so free of the element that would drag the average down. To give in detail the numerous industries that flourish in the capital of Central Canada, midway between the ports of Halifax, St. John, Quebec, Montreal and the West, would be superfluous. It is a great and growing distributing point. The Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk Railroads both enter it; several other short lines of road bring the trade of the province to the city. Great banks, commercial houses, insurance and loan companies, trading as far as the Pacific coast, have their headquarters in Toronto. The departmental stores, like Eaton's and Simpson's, are almost as large as Whiteley's, though arranged more on the Parisian plan, and, in spite of a 20 to 30 per cent, tariff, the average price of manufactured goods will be found there but a fraction higher than in England. Railroad shops fill an important place in Toronto's industries, while pork- packing houses, agricultural implement factories, iron foundries, distilleries and shipyards, carriage and piano works aid in swelling the volume of its trade. The well-to-do people of the P 2212 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. country towns come up here to shop, while a large stream of travel from all four points of the compass is continually surging through its many excellent hotels—tourists as well as business men; for Toronto is not only a point of departure for the steamer trips down Lake Ontario, by the thousand islands, to Montreal and Quebec, but also for the back-country resorts, whither Americans now go in their thousands. The city boasts of one of the best electric tramcar services in North America. The long cars follow each other in quick succession down the main routes or up the lateral streets, their tickets, at " six for a quarter," carrying you into the remotest suburbs with admirable velocity; while their conductors, of whom I have had a pretty wide experience, are for a free country, and considering their arduous duties at the crowded hours, the most amiable and polite of their kind. To tabulate the public and conspicuous buildings of Toronto would be usurping the functions of the guide-book and boring the reader at the same time. Before leaving the business centres, however, we might note the fairly venerable pile of St. James', which combines the functions of diocesan cathedral and parish church ; the public library, which, with its fine reference department and devoted librarian, is about to find quarters more worthy of its importance, with the help of Mr. Andrew Carnegie ; and lastly, the Toronto Club, which, in a city so full of " clubbable " people as this, is an institution not merely of old standing, but of great importance and of exceeding comfort. As an instance of the old-time conservatism of Toronto, one of its oldest and most distinguished members told me that he well remembered about forty years ago the first candidate in trade (wholesale trade, of course) being put up—and black-balled on that score alone—and the indignation he felt, being then, as now deeply imbued with liberal principles. Trade in Toronto is now "on top." Perhaps that is too strong. The Queen city has still much of the old leaven, and prides herself on still holding a somewhat-different point of view from Montreal. Both the Canadian capitals are thoroughly healthy in their growth. When you look at the population of Sydney or Melbourne, near half a million respectively, and then atTORONTO. 213 that of the colonies they represent, a feeling that something must assuredly be wrong, rather than one of respect for their rapid growth, takes hold of you. But the growth of Toronto has been thoroughly healthy and proportionate to that of the Colony. No Socialistic legislation to give the loafer wages at unprofitable public works, paid out of borrowed capital, is com- patible with the Canadian frame of mind. If there is no work for him in the city, he must go to the woods, the farms, or the prairies, where always, in some shape or form, it awaits the willing man. Toronto, for a time perhaps, sucked the country towns some- what of their vitality, but the growth of local manufactures has checked this tendency of late. It can only be said to do so now in the restricted sense that people who make money in the small places naturally hanker after a wider sphere to spread their newly- found social wings in, but this really amounts to nothing. Toronto suffered, not many years ago too, from an insensate land boom, the more curious as it occurred at a time when Canadian pros- perity was the reverse of buoyant. However, like Winnipeg in '82, which had more reason to lose its head, the lesson was so sobering a one that it will probably never again be required. Land values now go slowly but surely up. If there is a city in the world whose steady growth is certain and justified, it is Toronto. Rents are high, but food is cheap and extremely good. The fattest agricultural districts of Ontario lie all around it. The fruit orchards and vineyards of the Niagara district are at its doors, while its connections with all parts of the continent are intimate and speedy. It is commonly said that a good table can be maintained in Toronto for less money than in any big city in North America. Perhaps it would be safe to say that the average price of staple foods was 30 per cent, lower than in England. You cannot get the equivalent of Welsh mutton, to be sure, nor for some strange reason is good breakfast bacon to be had, but everything else, turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, beef, butter, cream, cheeses of many sorts, are all abundant and of the best. Salmon, both from the Pacific and Atlantic—the latter the best, though not quite equal to British—is cheap and plentiful. So, too, of course, is cod, while the white fish of the214 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. great lakes, and trout of all varieties in their season, together with wild fowl and other game, swell the menu. Lastly, oysters are cheap and consumed in great quantities. This food question leads one naturally to that of housekeeping in a big Canadian city, and the question of housekeeping, which in other classes is merely a matter of prices, when it concerns society—using the term in a sane, not a fanciful or restricted sense—becomes interesting. Even in Toronto, whither such servants as there are in the province naturally drift, the question is acute. There are many millionaires and a great many wealthy people now in the city, which was not the case two decades ago; and where wages are no particular object the problem solves itself. But the great majority of educated and sociable people in Toronto, as elsewhere, are, of course, not thus blessed, and experience considerable diffi- culty in getting and retaining servants. Great numbers of people who by birth and education mix naturally in the best circles and go out freely, have only one servant—but then the Canadian ladies are marvels of housewifely cleverness, and they are assisted by labour-saving contrivances that would be a godsend to English housewives. I do not suggest that the average household of this class outside the actually wealthy has not more than one servant, but the latter condition is an extremely common one, and in houses, too, which in Kensington would cry aloud for three at the very least Nor would there be anything to sug- gest this discrepancy of labour in a comparison between them. There are some people again who have given up the servant question in despair, do their own housework, and have their meals in some adjoining hotel or restaurant. This sounds deplorable to the British mind, but in a small family of capable people home life under such circumstances is apt to be as dainty, and in a quiet way as well appointed, as in many households where servants are tumbling over each other under a timid or unpractical mistress. A Canadian lady must have a practical knowledge oi her duties. At any moment, not merely in Toronto, but far more in other parts of the Great Dominion whither fate may lead her, she may be left without domestic help of any kind, and have to cook and do housework for any length of time. SheHOUSEKEEPING IN TORONTO. 215 usually contrives to achieve this, however, in such unobtrusive and skilful fashion as would wholly deceive the unknowing stranger who only saw her appear well-dressed at meals or in the drawing room, into the notion that the usual staff was busy in the back premises. Yet what hundreds of middle-class households of small incomes there are in England with three or four athletic daughters eating their heads off, who, if such an interval occurred, would call upon the very heavens to fall in their helpless condi- tion. I have myself received so much graceful hospitality under conditions of this kind both in the East and in the West at various times, that I feel the question is almost too personal a one to touch upon from any point of view. No educated women, naturally, court this situation, or like it, and this makes the way they achieve it all the more worthy of admiration. With shrinking incomes, and a growing scarcity of domestic servants, it would be a good thing if the daughters of England in small establishments, who had no more profitable occupations, followed suit in even a modified way, and helped out their fathers, mothers and brothers, where this would be a saving. For a girl who can play hockey all the afternoon and golf all the morning, three or four hours of cooking, bed-making, and washing up, would be child's play, and a trifle to what her Canadian sister often does, who plays an admirable part in society at the same time. There is, in short, a very fine opening for domestic servants of all kinds in Toronto; both for those of the ordinary sort, who merely give the bare service of their contract, and profess no further interest, and a really splendid one for those who have the gift of making themselves really valuable to their employers and a wish to do so. For the latter, both in wages and reciprocity of treatment, rewards are very great. For the lady-help, too, the prospects should be better from every point of view than in the old country, where such experiments seem mostly to be a dismal failure—always provided the candidate be both a lady and a help, instead of neither one nor the other, which I am told is frequently the case. This sort of talk brings us to the thorny question of society in Toronto, a subject always difficult to enter upon for anyone but an entire stranger, and the diagnosis of an entire stranger is not apt to be accurate. I have said that Toronto is probably216 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the pleasantest city in North America from an all-round English or Canadian point of view. Twenty or thirty years ago, when it was much smaller, everybody knew everybody. There was not then much wealth, though a great deal of solid comfort, and certain families stood out as social leaders. The older society of Toronto consisted very largely of the same class that used to run the country towns—sons or grandsons of English officers, or civilians of the same type, who had emigrated early in the century, descendants of U. E. Loyalists who had taken a lead in the Colony, and a smaller leaven of English families who for various reasons had come out to reside there. At any rate, it was a society mainly of people belonging to the professions or living on private means, very much connected with one another by marriage, and a good deal married into the British regiments, who in those days garrisoned the country. Its point of view was what would be there described as " very English." It is very English still, but the point of view has shifted in both countries. Toronto has quadrupled in popula- tion since those days, and probably the class of people eligible for "society," when means permit and inclinations point that way, has much more than quadrupled. A vast amount of money has been made in trade and speculation of late years, and it has practically revolutionised Toronto. Numbers of new people and new names have sprung into social promi- nence who can afford a style of living far more profuse and showy than the mass of the older set either can or care to emulate. Money has by no means got it all its own way in Toronto; it is too new. The old traditions, the numerical strength of the older families, aided perhaps by a very large element of culture connected with the universities, would be a check for the present, at any rate, on any monopoly of distinction by wealth alone. But the change has been very great, both in expenditure and in the immense enlargement of the social area. Toronto ladies now complain that they spend every leisure moment in paying calls. People who have known the city and its society all their lives declare that they frequently see handsome equipages occupied by elegant individuals of whose identity they have not the remotest notion, and in the same way see accountsSOCIAL TORONTO. 217 in the newspapers of gorgeous receptions given by people whose very names they never heard. Perhaps this does not mean so much to the reader as it would to people who knew Upper Canada in former days. In addition to the regular cycle of dinner-parties, balls and receptions, there are social items drawn from the American repertoire. Crowded tea parties for ladies alone is one of them, where the decorations and refreshments are lavish, and two or three rooms are full to bursting of well-dressed women criticising each other's garments, unkindly as vulgar man would insist, but with the artistic interest which the fair sex, who, after all, dress for each other, always evince. Then there are young people's dinner parties, with dancing afterwards ; married ladies' lunches, which are very elaborate; girls' lunches and girls' teas ; and functions of various kinds in honour of " buds," that is to say, young women just launched into society. Toronto society is so large, and has so many sets which would certainly resent being graded like that of a commercial city into best and second best, that appraisement is difficult A plutocracy in the second generation can acquire a certain social supremacy in a new country, but in the first generation, when it is face to face with a comparatively old organisation full of long- honoured names who have not been accustomed to take money into very much account in their social estimates, but other things a good deal, and, as a matter of fact, have been themselves mainly people of moderate or small fortunes, it is a different matter. It has for the present, I take it, to be content with equality, and be thankful for so much. In another generation, if things continue to move in Canada at their present rate, there will be great changes. But, indeed, I think there is much social sanity in Toronto. I do not think the new wealthy element suffer unduly from enlarged heads, while the old-timers, who have, after all, been born and bred in a quasi-democratic country, give the claims of wealth its full meed of recognition. Wherever Anglo-Saxons are gathered together there will be snobbery and vulgarity. In the United States the latter probably achieves its highest development. The former has, perhaps, a finer field for display in England, and finds there its chosen home. Toronto is218 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. human and Anglo-Saxon, but I should be inclined to say it was freer from both these social characteristics than most of the sister communities in other countries. Some day, doubtless, it will be like the rest At any rate, it has resisted the dropping of the terminal " g," which speaks volumes in its favour. I have spoken, I trust, with becoming reserve as a mere male, of the ardour with which the ladies entertain each other, when the gentlemen are away in those more serious realms of brick and stone that look out over Lake Ontario. The latter, too, entertain one another a good deal, not only at the clubs in the ordinary way, but there are quite a number of small dining clubs composed of souls congenial to one another, who meet at stated periods, sometimes with a purpose, sometimes with no other than that of enjoyment. Among these, the Round Table Club, which is academic and literary, dines once a month at M'Conkie's, where the now venerable Professor Goldwin Smith is a not infrequent guest. Most characteristic of all, however, though in a different sense, is the Canadian Club. Here, once a week at lunch time, nearly all that is brightest and most vigorous, par- ticularly among the younger men of the city, meet in a large hall to the number of three hundred or more. Exactly half-an-hour is allowed for lunch, which consists of a single sufficient course with coffee. Some well-known speaker then addresses the club for precisely twenty-five minutes, leaving five for the club business. At one meeting last winter "Municipal Government" was the subject of an address by Dr. Goldwin Smith. Toronto has suffered for years from the insignificance of the men who have been elected to office in its various wards, not from any fault of the electors so much as from the refusal of the right sort of men to concern themselves with civic affairs. Dr. Smith, whose interest in Canadian concerns never flags, though some of his views are unpopular, carried the house with him on this occasion when, with one of his flashes of dry, caustic humour, he declared he had long ago given up trying to find out who the various obscure persons were who got themselves elected, and, for his own part, had "voted straight wifh his butler" for the last twenty years! On another occasion I heard Dr. Parkin, fresh from a tour inSOCIAL TORONTO. 219 the United States in the interests of the Rhodes scholarships, address the club on his experiences and his hopes. Before finishing my remarks on Social Toronto—which I feel are extremely inadequate, partly perhaps because they must be brief—I should not omit to say that dinner-parties are a popular form of entertainment, not only in the larger houses, but among people with smaller establishments, who do not hesitate to entertain one another in this most sociable and truly hospitable of methods. How about the servant question, the fair reader may very properly ask, after all I have said about it? The difficulty is very simply solved by a staff of two or three professionals at the business, who go round to houses when required on such occasions. If sports and pastimes come under the heading of things social I have not yet finished, for Toronto is eminently athletic. Football during its short season, lacrosse, with boating on the bay, are all popular; so is cricket, as much at any rate as any- where in Canada. Rifle shooting engages the attention of about the same proportion of the volunteers as in the old country ; but, as in Montreal, ice hockey on the great rinks is the most spirited pastime perhaps of all. Golf fills a very important place in the world of sport, and there are several fine links with spacious club-houses within reach of the city. That dreariest and most negative of games, baseball, has a certain following. And lastly, there is a hunt club, which is a semi-social, semi- sporting association, with fine quarters, kennels and grounds, some six miles out. The aniseed bag, it is true, is unavoidably the main object of pursuit, and the sport of hunting is painfully exotic in Canada at the best; but heaps of fun is had, and many dinners are held in the most delightful club-house. There is a rival M.F.H. to the other one in Montreal, and the club not only gives men who are fond of riding an object, which is sorely needed in a non-riding country, but provides a rendezvous for sleigh-driving in winter. The soft, powdery snow on the Toronto roads makes admirable going for what would be called in London the " liver brigade," and even with a thermometer near zero you may see any fine afternoon well-appointed horsemen, singly or in groups, cantering towards the country, the breath of the horses making thick clouds in the frosty air.220 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. But this perhaps is enough in such a work as this of social, athletic, or frivolous Toronto. I have as yet said nothing of the appearance of the residential districts which in summer are famous for their bowery and verdant appearance. The houses are mainly of brick or red stone, and having been usually built by private individuals, with the help of architects, for their own use, show a reasonable level of taste. The lawns on which they stand, as elsewhere in Canada and the States, are open to the sidewalk, while every street is bordered by rows of maples or lindens, mostly by this time full grown. In the actual suburbs, such as Rosedale, on high and broken ground a couple of miles out of the city, land is sold on the condition that the pur- chaser builds a residence from a choice of plans supplied by a first-class architect. So on the whole Toronto may be proud of its appearance, particularly in summer, and I may add is so. On late winter nights too the effect is very beautiful in these avenues when the electric lights cast the shadows of the leafless trees upon the frozen snow, every bough and twig showing in marvellous and weird relief. But winters in Toronto and along this strip of the lake shore are extremely unsatisfactory from a Canadian point of view. They are too mild, while for out-door comfort they are not mild enough. The winter of 1902—3, for instance, was above the average of severity in Canada generally. Quebec had difficulty in grappling with excessive snow falls; in Mon- treal twenty below zero was frequently passed and the frost was continuous. In places a couple of hours to the north and east of Toronto the winter was only less cold and steady; but in the city itself the thermometer did not touch zero or fall below it more than about ten nights in the three coldest months. For at least half that period it actually thawed during much of the day and sometimes even at night. Sleighing is always inter- mittent and often somewhat farcical, as it is not always convenient to shift from runners to wheels at short notice, and the weather gives none. Frequently in January and February the streets are for several days a sea of slush. Men dress as they do in an English city, a few fur caps, from old habit rather than from necessity, turn out, and in the short cold snaps fur coats emerge to some extent, but a pot hat, an ordinary overcoat &nd UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. [To face p. 221.UNIVERSITIES. 221 dog-skin gloves are the usual winter dress of the Toronto man and quite sufficient for the normal winter day. The coachmen are exceptions: they are all clad in heavy furs and for good reason. The ladies, however, have long given up the jaunty and becoming fur caps that in former days were almost the universal headgear in Canada, and the Paris hat or its equivalent—fragile and gay with colour—does not to my thinking look nearly so harmonious on the top of thick winter garments and against a background of ice and snow. One article of wear no fashion nor caprice can ever tamper with for either sex, and that is the over- shoe or the rubber, worn over boots or shoes in the streets. The sidewalks of all Canadian towns, Toronto included, for daytime thaws have little effect on them, are practically a sheet of ice all the winter through. Without rubbers walking is impossible, and even thus shod vigilance must never for a moment be relaxed. Tumbles are frequent and sometimes rather serious. Custom, of course, palliates the evil. But I have seen the oldest inhabitants sit suddenly down on the sidewalk with the utmost resignation, knowing well that a certain number of these mishaps are due in a lifetime, if not during the winter. The Queen's Park in Toronto lies well above and back from the business quarters, and is surrounded by the fashionable residential streets. It is an undulating, well-timbered stretch, and gives space and dignity to the two fine blocks of buildings which stand within it, namely, the University of Toronto and the Parliament buildings of the Province of Ontario. The former now numbers some eight hundred students in the Art School alone, and nearly as many more in science and medicine, and has a very large staff of professors. These figures include a certain number of women. It is the leading Protestant University of Canada, is democratic in spirit and inexpensive in cost, which last can be readily kept at a rate of two hundred and fifty dollars a year. On this very account a considerable proportion of young men come up to it in a somewhat unripe condition for the lecture-room desk. Trinity College, or Trinity University, is a small and more exclusive institution. It is a fine building, in spacious grounds, with chapel, library, and rooms for about a hundred undergraduates. Distinctly a Church222 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. of England foundation, and just fifty years old, Trinity sends a good many graduates every year into the Church, and has, moreover, affiliated to it several well-known schools for the higher education of boys and girls. The Colleges of Victoria and Macmaster, Baptist and Presbyterian respectively, and both in Toronto, complete the degree-giving institutions of the province. "Upper Canada College" is at present the most flourishing of the schools of the English public-school type in Canada. The Anglican Church in Ontario with its six bishoprics finds its main strength in the cities and towns. In the old days of the Colony large grants of land, known as the " clergy reserves," had been set apart for its maintenance, but the growth of the country running very strongly on Presbyterian and Noncon- formist lines soon made this a political question, and over half a century ago, after much feeling on both sides, the Church of England was relegated to the position of a self-supporting cor- poration. The rural parish of England, with its vicar holding the peculiar religious and social position towards its inhabitants, even to its Nonconformists, is unknown in Canada. The mass of the land-owning families being of other communions the Church is virtually driven into the towns or residential villages, though attached to these there are frequently small churches out in the country, served after the fashion of mission chapels, for the sprinkling of Anglicans that are present everywhere. It may be repeated too that the various denominations have not the same reluctance to attend each other's churches as is the case in England. The Anglican Church in the towns is numerically strong and on a good footing. As a corporation, however, it is not financially as prosperous as one might imagine from the number of wealthy laymen within its ranks. Indeed, one hears complaints throughout Canada that rich Anglicans do not sup- port their church outside their own parish like their Presbyterian and Methodist contemporaries. The provincial government of Ontario is well housed, as I have already mentioned, in the Queen's Park. Unlike Quebec and Nova Scotia there is no legislative council or upper house, but only an elective assembly of about a hundred members, aLEGAL TORONTO. 223 ministry, and a lieutenant-governor, who for his five years of office occupies Government House, which becomes in some cases a centre of Toronto society. It may be perhaps worth mentioning as a remarkable feature of Ontario politics that at this time of writing the Liberal Party has been in power for thirty years. The lawyers have their tabernacle at Osgood Hall—another large block of buildings, which include the Law Courts, Libraries, Judges' Chambers, and all the accessories pertaining to the legal headquarters of a province already as populous as Denmark. Here again, though also in the heart of the city, we have a fine and important building set with becoming dignity inside its own domain, and removed from contact with the traffic of the street by several acres of well-kept grounds. The interior both of Osgood Hall and of the Parliament buildings is profusely decorated with the portraits of judges, politicians, lieutenant-governors, and governor-generals, who have been associated with the public life of Upper Canada during the past century, and it will be a long time indeed before the province outgrows the capacity, so far as dignity goes, at any rate, of its various public buildings. The two branches of the law are here combined, and in view of the great number of lawyers in the province, it may be remarked that the profession undertake a good deal of work that is outside the sphere of English solicitors, and that the law, for various reasons not here relevant, and some of which are regret- table, is the almost universal stepping-stone to politics. Whether that career is entered on with noble or ignoble ambitions, pro- vincial politics in the main follow national lines in party matters. As national lines in Canada at the present time are reduced to a somewhat theoretic difference in the tariff, the scope of con- troversy to the provincial legislature is reduced to a mere question of " ins-and-outs," in which occasional bribery cases play a prominent part. As the province on the whole is governed with the hard-headed sense of the North Briton, the matter of personality is not a burning one outside the players in the political area. Municipal matters seem to cause more discontent, so far as the capital is concerned. What would224 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. puzzle any stranger in Canada is the tolerant contempt with which politics and politicians, with, of course, notable reserva- tions, are spoken of by the mass of the educated class, and yet the reasonably capable manner in which affairs of the country are somehow or other conducted. Toronto, of course, shares with Montreal the market of Canadian finance. Its. Stock Exchange is an active body, and during the recent rise of Canada into almost another plane of existence has been extremely active; and I need hardly say its business is virtually confined to Canadian and American enterprises. In the share lists of the newspapers few European or African concerns are quoted, and what sort of field for the investment of money at interest Canada presents is a question that many people naturally ask, and it could not be put at a more opportune time than when we are in one of the two financial centres of the Dominion. Things have altered vastly in this respect during the last quarter of a century. I can remember when the great banks gave temporary depositors 6 per cent, for their money, and their stock could be bought at figures which paid 8 and 9 per cent. Now 3 per cent, is the usual interest on deposits, and the stock of banks like those of Montreal, Toronto, Commerce, and Nova Scotia, which pay a steady dividend of about 10 per cent., stands at 225 to 250, in spite of the double liability, which is the Canadian law. This perhaps is more eloquent than any words of mine could be of the absolute confidence which the chartered banks of Canada inspire. Some of the loan companies have high reputations, such as the Canada Permanent, which is fifty years old. At normal prices this class of stock only pays from to 5 per cent, to purchasers. Town and city bonds are apt to be actually higher than their interest would warrant, as they are a popular form of investment among bankers for funds which are held in the nature of reserves or guarantees. First mortgages 011 city and country property in Ontario now yield 5 per cent, to the investor, whereas in the 'seventies 8 and even 9 per cent, were current rates. But mortgages are hardly perhaps a form of invest- ment to be recommended to the absentee, not because in the hands of a trustworthy agent the principal is insecure, butINVESTMENTS. 225 from the fact that such loans are usually for short periods of years ; and again, should foreclosure become necessary, whether of house or farming property, inconvenience which was worth risking for 8 per cent, is no longer so for 5. The loan companies operate throughout the west, where interest is higher, and more- over can utilise good opportunities that carry no risk at all, but could not be handled by individual absentees. For house property or building land there are reasonable opportunities for men on the spot as elsewhere, but an English investor with his eye to a rise in values and " unearned increments" would naturally cast his eye on the new countries of the North- West. There are, of course, all sorts of industrial and land corporations of recognised standing open to the Canadian investor, carrying bonds, debentures, and such forms of security that the non-speculative look to, but this is a very wide field of discussion, and requires at the crucial moment expert advice. The great railways, such as the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk, are so familiar on the English market as to require no comment. I think, however, it would be safe to say that an investor who lived in older Canada could place his money without risk or trouble to himself at from to 5 per cent. Insurance is a very prominent business in Canada, and Toronto is one of its chief headquarters, sending out troops of agents over the whole country as far as the Pacific coast. I know that there are insurance agents in England from modest notices hanging here and there on the walls of shop or office, but in Canada you may travel with a whole smoking compartment full of them, and dine at tables in hotels where there is no one else. There are many great and notable companies with whom wise men insure, and there are other companies, who offer more tempting rates, with whom fools insure. I do not think that there is a man of substance in Canada uninsured, not because prudence is a specially Canadian virtue, but in view of the number of insurance agents perennially upon the warpath, including several who must be friends or relations. I do not see how any man could hold out against the pressure, or what excuse he could possibly give to his energetic friends, who can urge at the same time the obvious duties of insurance and their own claims to bringing C. Q226 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. its peace of mind and security to his wife or his future wife and family. I do not know the statistics, but I should doubt if there was such a thoroughly insured people in the world as the Canadians. Montreal being situated in French Canada, more than half its journalistic energy is expended in publishing French papers. The chief English organs, The Star and Gazette, however, share with two or three leading papers of Toronto the honour of the premiership of Canada in such matters. The Globe (Liberal) and The Mail (now Mail and Empire) (Conservative) have been the chief organs of Ontario ever since I can remember, and are well printed, well edited, and influential. The News, an evening paper, has recently been reorganised as a third rival upon independent lines, and there are other dailies of large circulation. The Press in Canada has a great mission before it in fighting political corruption. The natural result of party government is that the clean of both sides are too apt to denounce the unclean in the rival camps only. If everything were true that even high-minded and well-informed Canadians speak and believe of Canadian politics, things would be in a parlous state indeed. That there is a good deal of crooked work no man could be found to deny; but we may hope that the exigencies of party zeal often exaggerates, and sometimes misrepresents, the action of political opponents and their backers. One admitted weakness of the Canadian Press has hitherto been the cabled news from Great Britain. For economic reasons this has hitherto always come through American sources, and consequently prepared for the American palate, not only in matters of high politics, but in the wasting of space, so far as the Canadian reader is concerned, on the unimportant junketings or performances of American citizens who may be figuring for the moment in London or Paris society. This, I believe, is to be shortly rectified. Journalism leads one to speak of literature, and of this Toronto, so far as English is concerned, is naturally the head- quarters. Canada for her population has not in the past been prolific in her literary output. She is young, strenuous and busy, and, moreover, little encouragement has been offered to theLITERATURE IN CANADA. 227 native author. The United States pours its productions across the frontier in a fashion most depressing to native talent, which has to spread its wings beneath such mountains of imported print, monstrous trash though a good deal of it may be. In literature, as in other things, however, the leap forward of Canada has cheered and stimulated the talent that was merely waiting for the sunshine of prosperity in order to blossom. Toronto alone has a nucleus of younger men that, with the help of the publishing activity that is for the first time showing itself in the country, should give an impetus to Canadian literature. With the example of the Mother Country before one, it may seem audacious to hope that in Canada the small minority of the reading public who appreciate something beyond fiction may increase upon the mass. But the feeling seems quite sanguine now among those who can best gauge the taste of the Canadian public that better times in that respect are coming, that among other things a greater interest is already being evinced in the dramatic history of the land, the noble men and the noble deeds that in the last three centuries have contributed, not only to the making of North America, but of the British Empire—heroes that gain nothing by the bathos of fictitious love stories and whose deeds stand best alone, in simple narrative, not as a peg on which to hang a glorified " penny dreadful." There is, indeed, already a strong movement in this laudable direction, as in others of a kindred sort, and that the capacity to do it justice is there already, and will develop yet further as Canada grows, is a matter beyond doubt. Some good fiction cleverly preserving local colour, that is fast fading away, is being written. A good deal of useful historical work, though not so very much as yet in popular form, has already been done. It seems natural enough that the literary sentiment of Canadians should turn freely to verse, and that the romantic nature of the northern wilderness on whose edge they live should stir the chords of song. There have been a great many Canadian singers, both French and English, most of whom show in their work the influence of the boundless lakes and the clear, buoyant rivers—all so eloquent, ir one may say so, of the mysterious northland into which they stretch. Archibald Lampman, who died in Toronto a few years Q 2228 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. ago, all too young, is the most remarkable of the group, and left behind him a thick volume containing many exquisite lyrics and sonnets. Duncan Scott, his friend and editor, Mr. Lliss Carman and Mr. Roberts of Nova Scotia, who has done much good historical and other work, and M. Frechette, the well-known French-Canadian, are those whose names would occur as the best-known Canadian singers now alive. On very different lines, too, there is no one in Canada so popular as Dr. Drummond of Montreal, whose intimate knowledge of the French habitant character is expressed with infinite humour in verse written in the broken English used by the lumbermen of the Ottawa and the border regions. Tennyson and Browning Societies flourish in Toronto, and the Authors' Society of Canada shows quite a strong list of clever and rising writers. I have said that practically the whole of the well-to-do class in Toronto, as in other large towns of the older provinces, fly to the woods, the lakes, the mountains, or the St. Lawrence, in the summer holidays. The beginning of July sees the first of an exodus which, by the way, does not necessarily include the breadwinner at that early date. The scope for choice is some- what bewildering to those who are not tied; some go to the coast and inland watering-places of the United States, a few to Europe, but the shores of the great lakes and the whole course of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Saguenay, and the cliffs of Gasp£ take far more. But the most typical and time-honoured holiday for the Upper Canadian is in the delightful back-country of his own province; and camping out is the good old-fashioned way of enjoying it. Now the whole back-country of Ontario, from the valley of the Ottawa across to the Georgian Bay, is one vast network of lake, stream, and virgin forest: too rocky and poor for the most part to have tempted settlers beyond such few as hang about the skirts of a lumbering country. The towns of Peterborough and Lind- say lead directly into one section; the railway to Haliburton opens up another ; Muskoka a third, and the best known of all ; while the island studded broken shores of the Georgian Bay make a district of themselves. Here are lakes innumerable, of all sizes, and covered in some cases with hundreds of islands.CANADIAN HOLIDAY-MAKERS. The far-famed Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence, now thickly occupied by the gorgeous summer cottages of Americans and greatly spoiled, is nothing unique, as guide-books and passing tourists would lead one to suppose, for precisely identical scenery is to be seen in all parts of the great Ontario back-country. There are here, it is true, no high hills nor moun- tains as in Quebec; and, indeed, a certain uniformity of character may be set against it in appraising the level of its beauty. Woods deciduous and woods evergreen, water in repose, water foaming in cataracts, rock and sky, everything that can be had with these constituents alone is present in the Ontario back- country. Here, too, in all the more accessible regions summer hotels have arisen ; islands and promontories, that twenty or thirty years ago would have been thought ludicrous objects for a title-deed, have been purchased and adorned with summer cottages. Lakes that in youth I have camped on for weeks in absolute solitude, but for the rugged denizen of the waste in his hunting canoe or the passing lumber drive, are now hives of social life, and advertised with illustrated pamphlets all over America. But all this in no sense interferes with the freedom of such as may wish to plunge into the wilderness beyond this its mere fringe, frequented by the most sociable or less mobile of holiday-makers. It is of immense advantage to Canada, this forest wilderness at its gates, as a field for those water and woodland pastimes which the hereditary instinct of Canadian youth turns to, while as a delightful outlet for the older and the hard-worked, who with the familiarity of a lifetime of such vacations can usually handle the paddle, the gun, the rod and the camp outfit with skill, it is a priceless boon. It should be said, however, that Americans nowadays are as numerous as Canadians along the outer rim of this great back- country, and many have cottages of their own there, some coming from as far south as Baltimore and St. Louis. The question of over-crowding happily does not apply here, from the fact that there is nothing at all between this fringe of holiday- makers and the North Pole to cramp its expansion. Here in the great reed beds the summer duck, the black duck and the teal breed, though in moderate and decreasing quantities.,230 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. and the " fall duck " from the far north and west halt in October in their southward flight amid the great beds of wild rice, and show fine sport to the serious sportsmen who know where to go and how to play the game. In the woods, owing to the excellent game laws of later years, which strictly limit the kill of deer to each sportsman, the latter have increased con- siderably, and there were more killed in Ontario this past season than for many years. The Canadian partridge or ruffed grouse is the only game bird of the Ontario forests, but from its scanty distribution and elusive habits and deplorable fondness for squatting perdu among the top branches of spruce and pine trees, it is of small account except on the table, and is the quarry rather of the ardent youngster or the pot-hunter than the regular sportsman. One disadvantage, however, of the Ontario waters, compared to those of the less accessible back-country of Quebec, lies in the fact that the black bass and the maskinonge are the indigenous fish of the country, and not the trout, as in the former. In some of the tributaries of the Ottawa on the one side, and of the Georgian Bay on the other, the nobler species flourishes ; but the typical camp or cottage throughout this country has to rely mainly for its pot and its sport on the coarser varieties, which abound, one or the other, or both together, in almost every lake and river. The bass and the maskinonge, however, rank next to the trout both in edible and sportive qualities. The former, as every fisherman knows, will rise in certain places and at certain times freely to the fly, and I have thus occasionally killed good baskets on the rapid rivers of Ontario. But it is lakes more than rivers that the Upper Canadian woodsman, whether amateur or professional, has chiefly to disport himself upon, and the manner of fishing there is mainly trolling from a canoe with feathered spoon. The old method was somewhat original, and consisted in holding the line in your teeth as you paddled quickly in and out of the bays and over the likely fishing grounds, keeping the spoon some forty yards astern, at the right depth. A ten-pound maskinonge under these conditions was apt to give his captor almost as big a shock as he got himself when he fastened. There is a peculiar charm and a rare sense of freedom aboutA CAMPING SCENE. [To face p. 230.CAMPING OUT. 231 camp life in the Canadian woods, where health-giving cedar- scented breezes blow on most of the warmest days across the ruffled lakes. Glorious sunrises and sunsets mark the opening and the close of day. Wood is abundant, and the camp fires flare at night against the sombre background of the forest. Round its cheerful glow the social evenings pass on winged feet, the bull frog's intermittent boom sounds from the swamps, and the solitary loons far out in the watery darkness ". . . bemoan the light With weird entreaties, and in agony With awful laughter pierce the lonely night." What is there in the world, too, for water travelling like a Canadian canoe of bass wood or cedar. Firmly set against the thwart with knees on a cushion or sheepskin, the light one- bladed paddle in accustomed hands, and his face to the world of waters that lies around him, and perhaps with the girl of his choice as his only freight, the Canadian of all watermen is the most to be envied. There is no clatter or splash of oars, nor yet any waving of paddle blades. Strongly and noiselessly you push your light but seaworthy craft through tortuous channels, scraping over beds of water-lilies or swishing through beds of wild rice ; or you force it in the wind's eye over the white-capped waves of breezy lakes or run down tumbling rapids, or again, when the need arises, hoist it on your shoulders and carry it through the woods. The poet Lampman, whose passion for this life virtually cost him his own, turns to it again and again in his verse with graceful and happy touch— " We run with rushing streams that toss and spume, We speed or dream upon the open meres ; The pine woods fold us in their pungent gloom ; The thunder of wild water fills our ears; The rain we take, we take the beating sun ; The stars are cold above our heads at night. On the rough earth we lie when day is done And slumber even in the storm's despite. The savage vigour of the forest creeps Into our veins and laughs upon our lips ; The warm blood kindles from forgotten deeps And surges tingling to the finger tips."( 23a ) CHAPTER X. In all that I have said about Ontario in the last chapter I have had in my mind the old and populous part of the province, with the wilderness immediately behind it. Its actual boundary line, it must be remembered, runs far away to the north and north-west, even to the bounds of Manitoba. Till recently all this was a solitude, of which no one but the lumberman and the mining prospector took much heed. Indeed, it was reckoned as too barren and rocky for agricultural settlement, and much on a par, in quality, with the back-country we have just been discussing. Moreover, with the rich prairie land settling for many years so slowly, equally remote and far inferior soils, burdened in addition with unsaleable timber, were at a hopeless discount in the eyes of the not too voluminous stream of immigrants. A change, however, has now come over the scene, due to various causes, and a new country altogether is gradually opening up, many hundred miles to the north-west of the old settlements, known as New Ontario; but of this region, more anon, as we shall shortly pass by it. We must now take leave of old Canada, with its two provinces and its four millions of people, English and French, so sharply divided from one another in language, creed and territory, and strike out for that great North-West, which for the last generation had such small significance ; indeed, we have actually done with all that Canada stood for in times so recent as the American Civil War. If I had been writing this book thirty-five years ago I should now have arrived at the final page ; but I should before thi£ have enlarged at length on backwoods farming and the difficulties that faced the immigrant and the pioneer—the labours of clearing bush land, the erection of the log house, the first crop among the stumps, the rude and hearty frolic of theROUTES TO THE NORTH-WEST. logging bee, the long-suffering oxen and the deplorable phrase- ology by which they were urged, and in the lumber camps are still urged, to their strenuous task. I have seen ail these things, nay, more, have taken part in them, in what, by Canadian standards, might be called olden times, when the Red River was a land of remote and doubtful promise, and the Canadian Pacific Railway regarded by half the country as a scheme unpracticable and unprofitable. I well remember, and indeed have reason to, the everyday talk about the North-West and its prospects in those days. Its fertility, to be sure, was thoroughly realised, though the grasshopper pest curiously enough was then a big deterrent factor, and the temptation to venture was admittedly strong. It was generally checked, however, by the very prevalent view that the settlers might be left for an indefinite time without transportation for their grain, to say nothing of the very considerable difficulty of transporting themselves and their effects there in the first instance. But all this is ancient history, and we nowadays have only to choose one of the two luxurious routes which the Canadian Pacific offers by rail or lake respectively, and in a short time, doubtless, there will be yet other alternatives. The emigrant or traveller bound direct for the North-West from England by through route would start from Montreal, and, traversing the wilderness country at the back of Ontario and skirting the northern shores of Lake Superior to Fort William, at its head, about seven hundred miles in all, would thence go through to Winnipeg, yet another four hundred. If the more desultory or curious wanderer finds himself in Toronto, as he certainly should not fail sooner or later to do, he can hit off the all-rail route just mentioned by an eight-hour journey due north on the Grand Trunk, which connects with the great transconti- nental line at the junction of North Bay. If he is wise, however, he will go out by the lakes and return by the " all-rail"; I give the order of preference under the assumption that the season for going west is usually a finer one than that of the traveller's return, and the lakes almost demand fine weather. I will repeat again, speaking in round numbers, that Canada proper is separated from its great west by nearly a thousand miles of what,234 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. till recently, has been a shaggy unpeopled wilderness ; and much of it is so yet, and will for ever thus remain. The judicious traveller, though not perhaps the emigrant, will take the lake route, and, leaving Toronto by the boat train about mid-day, will find himself speeding northward through a pleasant, but for the most part second-class, farming country, and will reach Owen Sound, on the Georgian Bay, in three to four hours. Here is a typical lake-shore Ontario town, of five or six thousand souls ; business streets of brick and stone, with aspiring churches of all denominations shooting their gables and spires heaven- wards above leafy suburbs, while villas and country houses, varied in material, colouring and style, but all much given to verandahs, crown the low ridges around in more dignified isolation. But there is no time for closer inspection, as the train dis- charges its passengers alongside of one or other of the fine Clyde- built Canadian Pacific steamers which ply upon this route and face the uncertain temper of the two inland seas of Huron and Superior. These steamers, which register some 2,000 tons, are seaworthy enough, as nearly twenty years of successful navigation has sufficiently demonstrated, but their deck arrange- ments are of the American river or coast pattern—the saloon, that is to say, standing upon the main deck and occupying its entire length, save a small space at either end, and its whole breadth but a narrow passage at either side. The state rooms open out of this, which, it may be remarked, is most comfortably upholstered and seated, while on the top of all is a promenade deck. These details may be worth noting, as in normal weather they will be of some moment to the traveller for the extent of two days and two nights. The hundred or so saloon passengers (there are a few steerage in the lower regions) will be mostly Canadians by birth or residence, with a sprinkling of American or European tourists. On my last journey up I was confronted with the surprising spectacle, and one that Canadians will best appreciate, of a retired Ontario farmer of venerable aspect and superb appearance and physique starting off by himself for a pleasure trip round the world, taking in South America en route. He had never been out of Ontario, and this, he said, was hisON LAKE HURON. 235 ufirst jump" as the long peninsula of Bruce/the youngest of Ontario's finer counties, and Cabot's Head faded into the summer night, and left nothing but the distant twinkle of light- houses to give the veteran a last farewell of his native shore. He was a fine specimen of the ordinary well-to-do type, and held forth to a group of carefully dressed young drummers on the superiority of farming as an honest and useful pursuit over all their enervating occupations, which he delicately implied preyed upon it. Born in the woods before the rebellion of '38, he took a pardonable pride in the work he had done in his earlier life, the long days he had put in, the acres he had ploughed under pressure of the season, the land he had cleared —now this forty yeiars smooth meadow or grain field—and the snow storms he had got his team through in the old times of " real hard winters." His story was a common one enough. His boys, with the cussedness of modern youth, differed materially from their sire as to the fascinations of agriculture, so he had sold his farm, and I have no doubt, from its locality, at seventy-five dollars an acre. One of his sons was a lawyer, a career he had evidently grave doubts about on moral principles ; the other was a doctor, to which no objection could possibly be urged, and he was going to look him up in the North-West on his way round the world and have a few days prairie chicken shooting. He was six feet three, seventy years old, as straight as a pine, and must have weighed well over two hundred pounds. A finer specimen of Ontario raising, moral and physical, could not have been selected for a travelling advertisement, but I am quite sure the simple-minded but sprightly old gentleman had no thoughts beyond a conviction that he had done his part in the world's work with zeal and honesty. He may have had prejudices about its being the finest work that man can do, but more power to him, there are plenty to undervalue it. A pronounced specimen of another type of Canadian was on board on this occasion. An Ontario Orangeman of the true blue sort, a working mason in this case, and a man I dare swear did thoroughly whatever he put his hand to ; and I am quite sure if he had got at the Pope he would have brained him on the spot. He had been over to Ireland recently, and I need not say236 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. what he thought of Home Rule and would-be Home Rulers and Irish priests and bishops, but then this was nothing, and only natural. His views on the Romanising of the universe were what made him an out-standing person. The mediaeval religious darkness and Popish despotism to which Canada, Great Britain and the United States were drifting unawares was the subject of daily and hourly concern to this bulwark of Protestantism as he laid his bricks. But misdirected zeal may perhaps be forgiven something in a labouring man who has such laudable and single-minded anxiety for the welfare of a world in which he has " no stake," as a capitalist would say. The C. P. R. steamers keep outside the archipelago of islands which fringe the eastern coast of Lake Huron, a sheet of water only less vast and stormy than Superior. But on this route we only cross the upper end of it and get among the islands and narrows which lead up to the Sault St. Marie in fourteen or fifteen hours' quick steaming. The shipping on Lake Huron has always been considerable, and of course increases with the development of both the Canadian and American shores. For be it noted by those hazy in transatlantic geography that the northern corner leads into Lake Michigan, via the Straits of Mackinaw, and opens out a world of traffic along the shores of that other great inland sea which numbers Chicago among its ports. Grain and lumber, one need hardly say, are the mam burden of the steamers and schooners which plough these somewhat treacherous deeps. In former days the trading vessels that went out from the Canadian ports of Colling- wood, Owen Sound, and others had a reputation that would have made good Mr. Plimsoll turn in his grave. At any rate, the natives of these towns, who ought to have known, used to quote, perhaps with some freedom, most gruesome figures as to the average life of a Lake Huron steamer. Owners no doubt were often short of capital. There was no inspection so far as I know. The line, too, between amateur and professional sailor, is apt to be thinly drawn on fresh waters, however vast and stormy these may be. Watermen on the Ottawa or Muskoka Lakes were not necessarily equal to navigating inland seas ; but they are not a class noted for caution or lack of self-confidence, and itTHE SAULT ST. MARIE. 237 used to be said that the craft which sailed or steamed out of the Georgian Bay were often manned by river-drivers and commanded by lumber bosses. However this may have been, the loss of ships and human life on these iron coasts was in former days a byword. All this has doubtless changed now. At any rate the steamers of the Canadian Pacific, and their long career, are a sufficient proof that their passengers and freights have always been taken good care of. As we draw into the neck of the hour-glass which divides the two lakes, and approach the rapids of the Sault St. Marie with their famous locks, the steamer's course lies through river-like channels winding amid wooded islands. Along the shores humanity is fairly thick, the small frame houses of fishermen, saw mill hands, and those who do business generally on great waters or in the adjoining woods, standing in small clearings among the birch and pine woods. The ubiquitous summer visitor from the States is here, too, with his inevitable flag, some- times on his own, sometimes on the British shore ; but for the most part with quite a modest scale of establishment in the shape of small cottages of from two to half a dozen rooms scattered among the woods at the water's edge, and suggestive of comfortable camp life rather than that of a regular residence. Some, indeed, are evidently a compromise between the two, for white tents gleam among the evergreens, while the happy occupants of these al jresco establishments may be seen swinging in hammocks or fishing for black bass from boat or bank. Much more serious objects of distraction are the great cargo steamers laden with grain or lumber snorting through these narrow channels, and the long trains of queer-looking cigar- shaped craft known as " whale-backs," sunk deep in the water, with loads of wheat from western elevators. Sault St. Marie, generally called the " Soo," is a place of great and growing importance, and stands where the Ontario district of Algoma, still mainly a wilderness, is separated from an outlying portion of the State of Michigan by the rapids of the St. Mary River, which connects Lakes Superior and Huron. These celebrated rapids are nearly a mile in width and present a fine spectacle of seething foam. On both the American and Canadian238 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. shores towns have sprung up and are growing rapidly into im- portance. On either side is a ship canal, and the joint traffic through them is already of greater annual tonnage than that recorded by the more famous canal at Suez. The largest pulp mills in the world are situated here, and represent altogether a working capital of some sixty or seventy million dollars. The wild forest district of Algoma stretches some 360 miles due north from here to the shores of the Hudson Bay. Largely sterile and rocky, but containing mineral in great abundance, it possesses also fertile tracts which in the future will add to the wealth and population of the Dominion. In the meantime, machinery hums and men toil in shops and factories at the " Soo"; an oasis of industry amid an almost silent wilderness. From the latter, how- ever, comes the timber for the pulp and saw mills, and mineral for treatment or for shipment. A railroad running north into these solitudes, with a view to reaching Hudson Bay, is in progress, while the passing traffic, of such volume as we have indicated, is no slight factor in the building of towns that twenty years ago had practically no existence. The Canadian " Soo " owes much to the ability and energy of one of those captains of industry, able to command any amount of capital, who are the special product of America, and have been for some time now exploiting Canada. Mr. Clergue came here from Maine about nine years ago, and began with a comparatively small investment, a 5,000 horse- power canal, which he quadrupled, and then prepared to lease power to intending manufacturers. But none forthcoming he got tired of waiting, and went into the pulp manufacturing business himself on a great scale. Besides this his company now own waterworks, light and power plants, railroads, telegraph and steamship lines, valuable iron mines, smelting, and blowing, and electro-chemical works. There is no coal near the Soo, but charcoal is made by some new process from the immense forests owned by the syndicate. This wonderful man had the training of a banker and lawyer, but is a mechanical genius by nature. A story relates that he once required an apparatus for drying pulp to save freight payment on 50 per cent, of useless moisture. There being no such machine he invented the plans for one, but theLUMBERMEN GOING TO THE WOODS. [To face p. 238.THE SOO. 239 experts refused to make it, saying it was unworkable, whereupon Mr. Clergue, nothing daunted, set to work and made the machine in his own shops, with such success that it is said to save him a thousand dollars a day. A few years ago wood pulp constituted but a tenth or there- abouts of the ingredients of the worlds paper. To-day it con- stitutes four-fifths. And it is by no means only paper that is made from the produce of these spruce forests, but scores of other commodities including car wheels, water buckets, boats and buttons. If I were not afraid of intruding too much history into a book with so eminently modern a title, I should remind the reader that the French missionaries and voyageurs were here in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and that Michillimackinac, on the Straits of Mackinaw close by, was a famous trading station and frontier garrison. It is strange, too, to think that British redcoats were quartered there after the conquest of Canada nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. And what appalling exile it must have seemed to the Tommy Atkins and his officers of that dim period, with their thigh leggings, their pigtails and three-cornered hats! It is hardly likely that the enquiring traveller, as he sits upon the high deck of the steamer while she is lifted through the huge locks, or strolls upon the wharves for the two or three hours of inevitable delay, will ruminate on such things as this. Stir and life are palpitating all around him, though he will have no time, unless he break his journey, to inspect the industrial wonders of the Soo on either the American or Canadian side. After leaving Sault St. Marie it is not long before we are fairly out on the broad bosom of Lake Superior, with a run of over three hundred miles to Thunder Bay and its twin ports of Fort William and Port Arthur. For part of this distance, should it be daylight, the wild north shore of the great lake with its bays and islands, its outstanding headlands will lift their dim forms above the horizon ; for much of it, however, the steamer's course takes us altogether out of sight of land, and then, indeed, par- ticularly if the weather be stormy, one realises of a truth the yastness of this freshwater sea. Lake Superior can put up as240 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. big a storm when it chooses as the English Channel, and fling its cold waves when in angry mood far over the high decks of even these two-thousand-ton steamers. Sometimes all the craft on the lake, big and little, have to run for shelter into one of the many natural harbours that indent the coast. I have experienced it once at least in this mood, and there is something profoundly desolate and awe-inspiring in this tideless, land-locked sea, lash- ing itself into oceanic fury with no land in sight. I have also traversed it in a dead calm under clear skies, and in so doing have run into banks of fog at night as if off Newfoundland, and have lain awake in my berth listening to the raucous bellowing fog-horns near and far off. If the day be fair the sight of Thunder Cape, which guards the entrance to Thunder Bay, lifting its head some seventeen hundred feet above the waves is an inspiring one. Long before this, how- ever, the wild and high north shore has again forged into view. Solitary islets draped in scrubby woods stand out upon our right, while on the left the narrow island of Isle Royale unpeopled, though some forty miles in length, discloses its green waves of virgin forest. Thunder Bay is a fine horse-shoe of barren hills sloping to the water, guarded at the entrance by its grand Cape, almost a sheer precipice upon its outer side, and by rocky heights scarcely less lofty upon the other. In the curve of the bay lie the two towns and two ports, within half a dozen miles of each other—Port Arthur spreading up the slope of the hill, Fort William set low at the mouth of the Kaministiquia River. The latter was in former days the chief trading station of the great North-Western Fur Company of Montreal. It was built in the year 1800, and in and around its walls gathered in their hundreds the Indians and half-breeds of the West, with their skins and peltries. It was strongly fortified, and was occupied by quite a garrison of the Company's employes. Dr. Bryce who has had access to their old journals, quotes freely from them in his memoir of the Hudson Bay Company, and we are told of the wild revels that at Christmas and other festive seasons used to transform partners, clerks, and the whole bureau- cracy of this remote settlement into uproarious schoolboys. In the great dining-hall, sixty feet long, and hung with pictures ofFORT WILLIAM AND PORT ARTHUR. 241 the nabobs of this North-Western wilderness, liquor flowed lik* water, and the revellers, seated in a long row one behind the other on the floor, using tongs, shovels and brooms as imaginary paddles, ran imaginary rapids, and shouted the boat songs of the woods, while Indians, half-breeds, and coureurs des bois looked on in wonder and admiration. Fort William retains not a vestige of its ancient character. Where schooners used to lie awaiting their load of furs great steamers now receive their burdens of Manitoban wheat from rows of the biggest elevators in North America As a matter of fact, however, the old trading station had a narrow shave for its existence as a place of any kind. For when the Canadian Pacific was completed from Winnipeg to this head of Lake Superior, Port Arthur was built to act as its depot there, and the head of navigation as well. After some years the authorities relented in their neglect of Fort William, and recognising its more convenient situation made it their main railway terminus for the lake trade from the North-West. Port Arthur, in the meanwhile, had developed into a town of several thousand inhabitants, when a rival sprang up on the mouth of the Kaministiquia, with which the patronage of the railroad bids fair to outdistance the other. However, a cat and dog life within the compass of a narrow bay hundreds of miles from anywhere would be deplorable, and as the six-mile interval between them is traversed by an electric tramway the two ambitious young towns merge their rivalry to some extent in the common hope of one day joining hands and becoming more or less one city. As it is, they fill to some extent distinct missions, for Fort William is on a flat, swampy, undesir- able location, while Port Arthur straggles in picturesque fashion up a dry hillside; so the one no doubt will serve as the business mart, while the other will continue to be the residential quarter. The steamers at present call at both, touching at Port Arthur before discharging their cargoes at Fort William. The outlook either from the water or the higher streets of Port Arthur is striking. It is curious to see two towns of five thousand souls possessing all the stir and importance of bigger places, without any tributary country, and set in an amphitheatre of sterile-looking hills clothed with a green mantle of spruce, tamarak, and cedar. C. R242 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. But in these new countries the practical will mingle with the artistic in landscape—and you see at once that it is not the pressure of other business, or a regard for the view, that has kept the axe out of those hills of evergreen, broken as they are in some places by cliffs and scaurs of naked rock. This does not prevent Port Arthur from being a delightful place in summer, for its people do not live by farming. However enterprising railroads may be, and however many of them are built from East to West, Thunder Bay must always be the head of a vast naviga- tion, while water transport, whatever may be the inventions of the remote future, can scarcely lose all its advantages. But all this wild North-Western part of Ontario is calling loudly for recognition, and under the title of New Ontario is cir- culating maps, photographs, statistics, and all kinds of data to prove its claims, not merely to distinction in the matter of lumber and minerals, which everybody has always recognised, but to show that it has vast agricultural potentialities which till recently were not dreamed of, and most certainly valuable gold deposits. It has done more than this, for hundreds of settlers have gone into the various districts, where the deep clay and loam soils of old Ontario are repeated in these remote, or perhaps one should say, once remote regions. New Ontario has now a place of its own in the rural economics of Canada. We are accustomed to think of French Canada and then of Ontario with its wealth and power as just described. Then the mind of the person reasonably knowledgable in such matters leaps west- ward to Manitoba, and pictures the prairie regions growing wheat till they approach the Rockies, and then from a lessening rainfall and even better reasons giving way to the land of cattle, horses, and sheep—till rugged British Columbia on the shores of the Pacific fills in his mental picture. This is the ordinary scheme of Canada that anyone familiar with it has had floating before his mind's eye for the last quarter of a century. For some time now, however, we have been asked to readjust it a little; to insert yet another wedge, and picture a great farming country lying in belts and patches to the north of Lake Superior and westward to the Manitoban border. The heart of the country, or at least of this movement, at present, is the RainyNEW ONTARIO. 243 River district, which is tapped by the C. P. R. between Fort William and Winnipeg. There at any rate the main proof of its potentialities is to be seen. But in a work like this, the intricacies of New Ontario, which, wrapt in virgin forest, straggles into worlds unknown with its mixture of barrenness and fertility, cannot be dealt with. There is no doubt, indeed, that immense tracts of fertile land await the settler's axe, and that settlers are rapidly going in. The result of their endeavours remains to be seen. The advantage of prairie land not more, or but little more, remote has in past years been so obvious that clearing land for grain has virtually ceased to be a typical industry of Canada. An asset, however, has now been added to the account of the woodland farmer which before had no significance, for timber has become scarcer and consequently more saleable than in former days, and above all the rise of the pulp industry has provided a market for grades of timber, mainly spruce, that have hitherto ranked as valueless. With regard to the geographical limits of New Ontario, which, it must be remembered, is only a district, not a province, they stretch from the Lake of the Woods on the Manitoba frontier to the western boundary of Quebec, a distance of about nine hundred miles as the crow flies. A portion of Minnesota, with Lakes Superior and Huron, bounds the district on the south. On the north the channel of lakes and rivers, which run due east from Lake Manitoba to Hudson Bay, mark its limit. In width, from north to south, the distance ranges from two to four hundred miles. It is subdivided into four subdistricts, those of Rainy River, Thunder Bay, Algoma, and Nipissing, running in this order from west to east. Had we come to Fort William on the all-rail route, either from Toronto or Montreal, we should have entered New Ontario at North Bay, a small town on the shores of Lake Nipissing, amid a region famous for lumbering, hunting, and fishing, where the Grand Trunk joins the Canadian Pacific. For almost the whole of the six hundred miles of the journey thence to Fort William the road traverses a rugged wilderness of rock and lake and illimitable stretches of pine, spruce, and tamarak forests, often reduced by fire to miles of bare and blackened R 2244 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. poles. In the silence of winter it is a dreary spectacle, these myriad charred spears of the forest bristling over endless ridges of virgin snow, with the frozen lakes sleeping and colourless, and scarcely distinguishable under the all-pervading mantle of white. But in summer or autumn the outlook over this section of the C. P. R. has great compensations. The numerous little lakes then twinkle with bright colours ; the rocks and barren soil are all aglow with the gay tints which autumn gives to the ground vines, creepers, and humble bushes which at other seasons do little.to redeem a landscape from monotony. At all seasons of the year, however, the very moment the railroad drops down to Lake Superior, and begins that beautiful run of two hundred miles to Port Arthur along its curving shore, the views are consistently glorious. Lifted for the most part high above the lake, the road follows every bend and bay; borne by tressel bridges over deep ravines, where strenuous streams, brown with the dye of far-off cedar and tamarak swamps, go gurgling to the deep; clinging to the face of precipitous steeps, and following their sinuous course round almost land-locked bays, with the broad expanse of the lake itself sometimes closed in with lofty cliff-bound islands, sometimes opening out to a wide horizon of sea and sky. Signs of life are so few and so far apart that they only emphasise the solitude. A hamlet of wooden houses now and again sheltering in some gorge or bay suggests that a mine is being worked near by, or that a pulp mill is in opera- tion, but the stations that seem on the map to cluster pretty thickly along the route of the railroad between North Bay and Port Arthur—a stretch as long as from the Isle of Wight to the North of Scotland—are in the main mere punctua- tions for present railroad purposes, a small building, and a name upon a board. There are some spots, however, not wholly con- sisting of potentialities. Sudbury, for instance, has two thousand people, and the largest copper and nickel deposits known in the world. White River has yards for resting cattle on their way to the eastern markets. Jackfish is the main coaling station for the railroad, and possesses zinc and gold mines in the neighbourhood. The famous Nepigon is crossed just east of Port Arthur, a river which, issuing from a lake of that name, yields the finestFORT WILLIAM TO WINNIPEG. trout fishing west of Quebec, and is greatly resorted to by anglers from Canada and the States. In the run of four hundred miles from Fort William to Winnipeg, occupying some fifteen hours, there is for most of the way the same sterile-looking wilderness of rock and swamp, of birch, spruce, tamarak and scrub, of pine woods, and of blue lakes. It is immediately to the south of this, however, that the Rainy River agricultural and lumbering district lies, which is now attracting settlement. A railroad starting from Fort William traverses the whole of it, and, as already stated, it forms a portion of a rich tract of clay and loam whose precise limits are not yet realised. Timbered land is rather for the emigrant from the older provinces of Canada familiar with the axe, than for the European. It is claimed, and no doubt truly, that the settler who buys forest land in New Ontario for three, four, or five dollars an acre, can easily pay for it by the sale of the timber he cuts off it to the saw and pulp mills. In the long winters, too, when the prairie farmer is enjoying an enforced leisure, the bush settler can take his axe and his team, if he be so minded, to the lumber camps, and earn a dollar or two a day, with keep for both man and beast. The English immigrant, however, unlike many from Eastern Canada, has no hereditary hankering for the woods, no aptitude with an axe, and, not being at home in lumber camps, will probably do better to make straight for the prairie. At the Lake of the Woods, on the Manitoba boundary, the town rejoicing in the uneuphonious name of Rat Portage, with its fine water power, is a centre of sawing and milling, and of distribution of food and supplies through various arteries in the wild country around, which, among other products, includes gold in considerable quantities. Here, too, on the Lake of the Woods and in the tributary country, the sportsman makes great holiday. As we arrive within forty or fifty miles of Winnipeg the forests that wrap the eastern half of North America as with a mantle, except where cleared by the settler's axe, begin to yield, and the first patches of prairie dispute with the everlasting woods the richer and more level lands over which the train now runs at an increasing speed. The thousand miles of rugged wilderness which the Canadian Pacific, in a good hour for246 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Canada, and with fine audacity, cut its way through, and in so doing truly consummated the federation of the Dominion, are now fairly passed. Tunnels and bridges, tressels and cuttings, sinuous curves and giddy viaducts, fire-smitten forests and tumbling streams, are done with. For just another thousand miles, freed from the obstacles whose overcoming was the engi- neering triumph of the day, the great road leaps forward, without let or hindrance, to those still greater triumphs which ' mark the conquest of the Rockies. A flat agricultural country, half prairie, half woodland, sparsely settled, and that often in a fashion suggestive of the half-breed rather than the ambitious colonist, carries one into Winnipeg. And, perhaps, it is not till one is actually rumbling over the bridge which spans the Red River of the north, with the smart spires and towers of the future Chicago of Canada in sight, that one fairly regards the Rubicon as passed and the line between the forest and the prairie zone of North America as crossed. The outline of Manitoba's story, including, of course, that of Winnipeg, is so familiar that it may almost seem superfluous to recall it, but some, no doubt, may need reminding that till 1870 it was little more than an important trading post of the Hudson Bay Company, surrounded by small groups of settlers, mainly Scottish Highlanders, who had *been brought out in 1811 by Lord Selkirk in a partly philanthropic, partly commercial spirit Besides these there were Scottish and French traders and settlers attached to the Hudson Bay Company, as well as innumerable half-breeds between these two races and the Indians. Altogether in the district in 1870 there was a mixed population of some ten thousand souls, with Fort Garry, a mere village, clustering on the river bank, around the fort itself. The Hudson Bay and the North-West Companies had hitherto controlled the country to the Pacific. Its fertility was of course known, but the com- pany's business was fur trading, not farming; the last thing they desired to see was the settlement of the country, and there is no doubt they belittled it. Earlier in the century settlers had been actually hunted out of the district by the fur traders, and on one occasion a whole party was murdered by the North- West Company's people. But the early settlers stuck in spite ofRAILWAY STATION, WINNIPEG. [To face p. 246.THE BIRTH OF THE NORTH-WEST. 247 the fur traders' opposition and the onslaughts of grasshoppers, which in those primitive days were serious. In course of time came an agitation on the part of the settlers for the district to be made over to the Canadian Government, and it met with favourable consideration. Late in the 'sixties, with perhaps some lack of tact, the Government officials, surveyors and others, began their preliminary inspections, and caused quite a panic among the French half-breeds and others of their sort, who had been persuaded that annexation meant confiscation of their lands and rights. Somewhat tardily a conference was held and their fears assuaged, as was supposed. But insidious influences were at work, and the rebellion under Louis Riel— with its proclamation of a republic, imprisonment of British residents, and murder of one of them—brought about the Red River Expedition under the present Lord Wolseley in 1870. This proved the birth of Manitoba and of Winnipeg. The province was organised and handed over to the Crown, and the first legislature met in that year. I have already spoken from my own recollections of how timid Canadians were, in the early 'seventies, of venturing to the new province, and with good reason. In 1873 it was further from Montreal in time than was Liverpool. It was the "Great Lone Land," and still savoured of romance, and the Ontario farmer who ultimately proved its backbone had not much use for romance. The Canadian Pacific Railway was the burning question in Canadian politics; Con- servatives and Liberals fought for and against it tooth and nail. Outsiders and globe trotters made merry over politicians who had nothing apparently to divide them but their diverse views on the building of a railroad. Yet never had a colony a more vital subject for discussion, or one more far-reaching in its results. If I had a vote to-day in Canada I think I should record it for the Liberals as the more moderate tariff people, a personal intrusion I merely perpetrate for the sake of saying that were I a Canadian Liberal I should find it hard to get over the bitter opposition offered to Sir John Macdonald on this tremendous question. There was ground for scandal, beyond a doubt, but if ever the means could justify the end these irregu- larities did so. . Even when Sir John was fairly cornered by the248 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Opposition, and they had the evidence of irregularities in their hands, that resourceful and nimble-minded statesman had his parting shot ready. He rose to reply to the accusations based on documentary evidence—purchased, if I remember right, from an employe by the Opposition. Amid a breathless silence he proceeded to relate how these same papers had been offered to him—for a consideration. An inexperienced Liberal member leaped to his feet and called on the Conservative leader to say what answer he gave him. " I told the man," said Sir John laconically," to go to the devil—and he went to Mr. Huntingdon " (the leader at the moment of the Liberal party). The incident was related to me by a well-known and venerable French- Canadian, who was a prominent member of the Opposition, and in the House at the time, and who greatly enjoyed the joke. In 1870 there were two hundred and thirteen people in Winnipeg. Three years later it was incorporated. By 1875 the population had risen to five thousand. By 1881—82 railway communication had been established, and the great boom came and went. People rushed in from all parts of Canada and Great Britain ; property assumed the heated and fictitious values common to booms in North America. Comparatively little money passed, but people made fortunes and lost them in a week, on paper, at any. rate. Land was sold at higher prices than it would fetch to-day, when Winnipeg has a population of fifty thousand and an absolutely assured future. Town lots were pegged out and sold, not in the outskirts of Winnipeg only, but out on the prairie, in the purlieus of embryo towns that would to-day only fetch farming value. The madness of that brief period would make an entertaining volume. Its freaks, financial and otherwise, were so unlike the serious demeanour of the North- West, either before or since. At any rate, it damaged both city and country for years. Immigration, however, continued to flow in steadily from the eastern provinces and Great Britain as well as from eastern Europe, and spread out as far as the Rocky Mountains. Winnipeg increased at a reasonable rate, but things progressed slowly for a new and notoriously fertile country. For a long time it disappointed its friends, not in its pro- ductive qualities, but in its development and slow rate of growth,DEVELOPMENT OF THE NORTH-WEST. 249 and only unsophisticated writers from England waxed eloquent on the subject. The North-West, in short, suffered all the ills of a new country, emphasised by undue inflation at its start. One of them was the great number of settlers who were unfitted by experience, temperament, physique, or grit to grapple with prairie farming in its elementary stages. Another was the frequency of early frosts, an evil which the general settlement of the country seems to have really diminished. Quite as much as anything, too, though not so often put forward, was the fact that everything about the country had to be learned by experience. The con- ditions of tillage and of life were new even to the Canadians, and they had no precedents. The best kind of seeds, the best moment to sow them, are mere items in the list of experiments whose solution has by degrees made life easier, and toil more profitable, in the North-West. For many years, roughly speaking through the 'eighties, there was a vague feeling among the wisest that things were in a more or less tentative state, that the country was not thoroughly proven as suitable for profitable and thick settlement. Great numbers of the less sturdy were dissatisfied ; the small towns grew very slowly ; people who had purchased away from them waited in vain for branch railroads which did not come; and the price of wheat went on declining. Land increased not at all, or very slowly, in value, for though immi- gration came in steadily, but not rapidly, including settlements of Mennonites and Scottish crofters, the extent of country to choose from was so wide that it affected very little the price of the already settled lands. Gradually, however, but quietly, times improved. Numbers of those not adapted to a farming life had disappeared, and many others remained because they could not get away; but the capable and the steadfast remained, also improved their houses and buildings, and enlarged their acreage of grain. The land retained its fertility; the winters proved less formidable inside good, well-warmed houses, and even abated somewhat in severity with extended cultivation. The human frame flourished and grew vigorous in the dry and bracing air, and the country emerged triumphant from its experimental stage. There were no fortunes made to attract attention abroad, but thousands of men were quietly gaining in modest substance250 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. every year, and the total wheat output was attaining large propor- tions. Still there had been so many failures in the North-West' from various causes, and particularly, perhaps, from the unsuitable character of much of the earlier immigration, that the country found it difficult to get rid of the character which unsuccessful settlers and their friends had given it. Still, matters progressed, despite the small encouragement from Great Britain, and Winnipeg, being its only town of impor- tance, achieved a population of some thirty thousand. Three or four years ago it began to dawn on the world in general—the world, that is to say, who cares about such things—that North- western Canada was a desirable country, that its people were doing well, that its lands were almost unequalled, that its climate was healthy and bearable, and that its future as the granary of the world was a certainty. American settlers began to come in from the adjoining States, at first slowly, and then in considerable numbers, not waifs and strays, but men mostly of means and experience. This fact and others began once again to revive the old interest both in Eastern Canada and Great Britain—though I do not mean by this that it had ever actually ceased—but the spectacle of shrewd, hard-headed American farmers with money flocking in there was enough to make a lukewarm world reconsider their point of view, and this they have done effectually. Good times in the United States, with the concomitant results in Canada generally, and yet more, two or three good wheat harvests, have all combined to give the stimulus to the North-West for which it had been so long and patiently waiting. Winnipeg, being without a rival and set in the very gateway of the country, has reflected all these good things in its own advance and prosperity. The capital of the North-West has now a population of from forty to fifty thousand, and is quite a handsome city, though built on a site that has absolutely nothing to recommend it in the way of beauty. The Red River and the Assiniboine, it is true, form their junction here, and, though both considerable streams, are sluggish, muddy and unattractive, and flow between high banks; moreover, though valuable as waterways for the canoes of the old fur traders, for purposes of modern navigation and modern tradeSHIPPING CATTLE AT WINNIPEG. [To face p. 251.WINNIPEG. 251 the two rivers are of small account But Winnipeg has really made the best of its situation. When I first saw it soon after the boom it struck me, as it did everyone, particularly the holders of moribund outlying town lots, as a singularly ugly place, apart from the fact that the main streets were in wet weather a slough of black clay, a foot or so deep, with an uneven bottom. Now, however, its buildings of grey or red stone or red and white brick are solid and handsome, its streets the widest I ever saw, and beautifully laid with asphalt, and traversed, I need not say, by a well-equipped electric car service. Indeed, these admirable roadways extend themselves for quite a long way out from the busier parts of the city, and enable the bicycle to be utilised by Winnipeggers for purposes of rapid transport to an extent unapproached in any other Canadian city. The City Hall is not only an imposing building, but stands in a spacious and imposing square, where a tall column commemorative of Canadian soldiers fallen in battle is a conspicuous object. The Colleges of St. John's, Manitoba, and Wesley, representing Anglican, Presbyterian, and Wesleyan education in its most advanced stage, and the still newer building of the University of Manitoba, to which all are affiliated, fill the eye worthily in various parts of the city, and yet more imposing are the build- ings where the provincial Parliament is housed. But I do not think it will profit us to catalogue further the buildings of which the citizen of Winnipeg is so justly proud. It will be sufficient to say that, thanks in part to the bright, clear atmosphere, there is a sparkle and snap and colour about the place that is wholly pleasing. Everyone that I know who lives there now is con- tented with the place; some are enthusiastic. I could not truthfully have made this statement a few years back. I have seen it recently both in fine summer weather, and again when the sleighs are chiming cheerily along the wide main street, and the crisp, dry snow is sparkling in the December sun, and either condition suits it equally well. The shops are excellent, their wares well arranged and well displayed. Every- where the great chartered banks—those of Montreal, of Com- merce, of Hamilton, of Ottawa, the Merchants, the Imperial, the Dominion—are conspicuous, well housed in substantial and252 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. often tasteful piles of red or grey stone, worthy of the finest banking system in America. The combined capital of. the banks operating from Winnipeg is some fifty million dollars. The churches, as may be supposed, in a prosperous western city where the various sects indulge in friendly rivalry in matters decorative, are no whit behind the secular buildings, and the old and not ill-founded notion in England that the buildings of new countries, particularly western ones, must be vulgar or tasteless, is utterly out of date. Indeed, now that the East and West—the Old World and the New—are brought so close together, causes that made for this have ceased to be; but in old countries, and among people who never leave them, logic does not always operate on prejudices, and they die hard. In one thing Winnipeg is curiously deficient, and that is in hotels worthy of it. Except where the Canadian Pacific has come to the rescue the whole North-West still retains much of the crude- ness of former years in this respect. The company had at one time a fine hotel in Winnipeg, but it was burned down, though shortly, I believe, to be replaced. In other respects, apart from cleanliness, cooking and accommodation, which are very in- different, the traveller from the east will note the change even in the best Winnipeg hotels. There will be a rougher-looking and a rougher-dressed element present than you would ever see in a similar house in Toronto or Montreal. Society in Winnipeg does not materially differ from that of these or other Canadian cities ; but in the best hotels you will rub against a con- siderable leaven of persons clad in garments not merely bucolic in style, but bearing the very flavour of the barnyard or the field. This is as it should be in the centre of a farming country, and I merely mention it as characteristic. The residential quarters of Winnipeg straggle out in all directions over the prairie between avenues bordered with well- kept turf and planted with young maples, but the choicest situations are along the high banks of the Assiniboine, and here, too, is the nearest approach to picturesqueness that this un- romanticaily situated city can show. The prosperous Winni- pegger, however, has so far housed himself with singular modesty.. Comfortable but rather small houses of wood orWINNIPEG. 253 white brick, with the usual shaded lawns, seem for the present to satisfy the aspirations of the great majority. Perhaps the servant terror hangs over the proposing builder of a palatial residence and the inevitable possibility of sometimes having to warm it and sweep it out himself checks architectural ambition. The poorest part of the city is the half-mile of main street that leads down to the station. Third-class traders and third-class shops, largely of wood, seem to have secured the entire channel of approach by which the visitor first enters the prairie capital, which is a pity. The station, too, leaves at present much to be desired. Many lines of railway run#in and out of it Even did they not, the mere passenger traffic of the C. P. R., whose through trains always stop here for from one to three hours, would keep it pretty lively for much of the day. But if Winnipeg possesses the most uncomfortable station to spend an hour or two at, for its importance in all Canada, it is in some respects much the most interesting ; for here the whole stream of immigration from Europe is precipitated daily, and treads the prairie soil and breathes the prairie air for the first time. English, Irish, Scotch, Upper Canadians, French-Canadians, Icelanders, Galicians, Hungarians, Mennonites, Doukhabors, Norwegians, Italians, all jostle one another on the wooden plat- form and mingle their various tongues and brogues, and the costumes of their various countries. This is more or les? perennial through the open season, but in autumn you have also the harvest hands on the war-path, who in these critical times of scarce labour are of many nationalities and kinds, ranging from Galicians to English public school boys. In addition to these motley throngs you have the traffic in and out of the busy capital of a busy province, and virtually of many busy provinces. Upon the whole, I know of no station in the world anything like so lively as Winnipeg, for its uncomfortably unpretentious size. For the student of human nature and national types, most of them, too, at the crucial moment of their lives, it is probably unique ; but as a haven wherein to spend a peaceful hour with a novel, for which Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, and the average Canadian stations offer sufficient advantages, Winnipeg cannot be recommended. Adjoining the station are the offices of the254 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Canadian Pacific and the Dominion land and emigration agencies. Here assistance of every kind is rendered to the land seeker or the labourer by officials conspicuous for their untiring heartiness in this useful work. The average Govern- ment job is looked upon in most countries, and doubtless in some Canadian departments, as a post where for a moderate but secure salary the officer gives moderate service, and if this takes the form of assisting the public he does it with leisurely and sometimes even haughty demeanour. But the Dominion Government are certainly not thus served in their western emigration departments. No one could help being struck, who came much in contact with these hard-worked officials, by their energy and good humour. The same may be said of the ser- vants of the C. P. R. from top to bottom, but then the employ^ of a great railroad may feel perhaps that he has to justify his position more conspicuously than the occupant of a Government berth. We ought not to leave Winnipeg without a glance at the three landmarks of its extremely romantic past—the stone gateway of old Fort Garry, the French suburb and church of St. Boniface, and the little Anglican cathedral church and old graveyard of St. John's. The first stands within a grass plot on the sight of the vanished fort, where the end of Main Street approaches the Assiniboine, a curious contrast to the intensely modern life that throbs around it. The old headquarters of the North-West Company, which for a long time was such a thorn in the side of Fort Garry and the Hudson Bay owners, stood not far off on the banks of the Red River. The site of Fort fa Gibraltar is now occupied by the quarters of the Winnipeg Rowing Club. The chief historian of all this North-West country, Dr. Bryce, and one of the oldest residents in Winnipeg, still presides over Manitoba College, and leads an active life in the city he remembers but a trading station, and his history of the Hudson Bay Company is a book that should be read by every- one going for pleasure or residence to the North-West. St. Boniface lies on the further bank of the Red River, connected by a toll bridge with the city, and is a considerable suburb, popu- lated mainly by French and half-breeds. Life, as may beFRENCH AMBITIONS. 255 imagined, runs much more tranquilly here than across the river. A modern church stands on the site of the old Catholic cathedral, burned down forty years ago, and a large and shady graveyard, where the bones of some generations of French, Half-breed, Scotch, and English Catholics repose. While walking here the hopes and ambitions that the French-Canadian Church cherished with regard to the North-West, not so many years ago, involuntarily recur to one. There was to be a new French nation, stretching from the Red River to the Rockies, possibly under the British flag, and tolerating no doubt the presence of Anglo-Saxons, but dominated by priests and bishops. To the practical Briton this simple faith, that the waters of modern progress, like those of the Red Sea, will part or stand still for the Roman Church to rear its semi-mediaeval social fabric on a thousand miles of fat plain and prairie, sounds childish nonsense. But it did not seem nonsense to the Roman Church twenty years ago, and the long fight over the " Manitoba School Question," a familiar heading even in the English Press at one time, was an earnest of now buried hopes. To the north of the city, and well outside it, a mile beyond the station and near the end of the street-car service, is the third relic of the past and really the most picturesque of all, namely, St. John's Cathedral. When I first remember this it stood in isolation on the prairie, and one could look across to the garish buildings of the brand-new city, just then in a depressed and repentant mood after the bursting of the boom. The contrast then was sharper, for now villas and other buildings, with their surrounding plantations, shut out the view of the now exultant and prosperous capital. The Cathedral itself disarms the smile that would naturally rise to the lips on confronting a little plain, oblong country church without spire or even belfry, by its curious title, to respect. It has been restored, but it dates back to the first half of the nineteenth pentury, just before the creation of the diocese of Rupert's Land, of which it became the headquarters. The large church- yard is pleasantly shaded with maple, ash and other trees, now quite lusty in their growth, and the adjoining episcopal residence has achieved a mellow and bowery look, quite unusual as yet upon the prairie. The whole precincts are far removed from the256 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. highway, retired in situation and peaceful in repose. In the churchyard, where the turf is old and green, there are numerous gravestones of the tough old Highlanders who served the Hudson Bay Company, that for time-worn appearance would be not out of keeping beneath the shadow of some old English country church tower. The action of the frost has probably endowed them thus prematurely with a Jacobean, or at least an early Georgian, aspect. Some rough, grey stone slabs have slipped from their supports on to the grass, and carry inscriptions already indecipherable. Others of later date tell of people who died fifty years ago, some of whom seem to have been born nearly a hundred years before that again, eloquent witnesses to the salubriousness of the Manitoba climate. In a corner of the enclosure is a monument to Mr. Norquay, the well-known and able half-breed Premier of the early eighties, whose iron grip when he shook your hand I can very well remember—an earnest, no doubt, of the general vigour of his character. In conclusion, it may be fairly said of Winnipeg that its tributary country, in a trading sense, can hardly be sur- passed by that of any city in the world. In brief, it is the distributing point for the entire North-West. Eastward it has an increasing business to the head of Lake Superior; northward it controls everything to the Arctic Circle; westward to the Rocky Mountains it has not even a potential rival. The natural tendency of the amateur, when he knows that the future of a city is assured, is to think of town lots or city property as an investment. It is perhaps hardly necessary to observe that future values which are almost certainties are more or less dis- counted. Good speculative investments there always are for men on the spot, but as a general thing, the values of property in cities that are fulfilling a practically certain destiny keep more than pace with its increase. One curious feature of Winnipeg, however, has always been the low price at which land has remained in its vicinity, outside its actual suburbs or the possibility of building values. This is the more curious as the city and neighbourhood stands on the typical black clay loam of the Red River Valley. There is a great deal of wet land, it is true, in the neighbourhood, as we shall note presently, butWINNIPEG, 257 really good farming land within ten or twenty miles of the city, though risen a good deal lately, does not seem to touch the price one would suppose the situation justified, and is cheaper than land of equal or inferior value in other portions of the province. Real estate agents naturally swarm in the city—an obvious Englishman, walking the streets with the air of a sight- seer, will probably be invited to buy town lots or farms more than once. But the Canadian estat§ agent is a reasonable and decorous person, and will not hunt the stranger about like his contemporary in a Western State. An intending investor, of the kind, that is to say, who intends putting out money at interest and returning to England, will find rates here very little higher than in Ontario. Eastern capital is now represented in every quarter of the North-West. In fact, for gilt-edged mort- gages, 5 to 6 per cent, interest, mainly perhaps the former, rules in Winnipeg. For investments in bonds, stocks or real estate, the stranger in Canada, who cannot remain long enough in the country himself, will always do well to follow the advice of someone of reputation and experience, and with ordinary introductions it is not difficult to gain access to men of this kind who have no personal axe to grind in delivering an opinion on current investments and speculations. Winnipeg, like other Canadian cities, enjoys itself thoroughly in its hours of ease—skating, ice-hockey, cricket, football, la- crosse, baseball, curling and golf, all have their votaries, and there are plenty of shooting men, who turn out every fall after the ducks and prairie chickens. The well-watered forest country, too, around the Lake of the Woods is a favourite resort for holiday makers in summer, and there the old Ontario sports of fishing, camping and canoeing, which do not flourish on the prairies, are freely indulged in. Agricultural shows of great merit are held there, accompanied by racing and various other attractions. The fair ground alone, at Winnipeg, is a witness to the importance of these events. In conclusion, I may mention that the province, like Ontario, has only one Chamber, a popu- larly elected one, in its Legislature, with a ministry responsible to it, and a Lieutenant-Governor presiding over all. Somewhat irrelevantly, perhaps, though an allusion to that C.258 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. excellent man can never be irrelevant in any part of Canada, the efforts of Dr. Barnardo, or rather his great achievements, seem to call for some notice. Barnardo boys and Barnardo girls sometimes turn out badly, but think of the material that he handles and the average result of his work! There seem to be some people who absolutely rejoice in the occasional difficulties or troubles that fall on such a man, as if his personality was a constant irritant to their own comparative unworthiness. Whatever may be the proportion of homeless waifs or worse that he turns into good citizens, it is impossible not to compare by reasonable and probably correct assumption the lives, aims and morals of his many critics with those of the admirable and single-minded philanthropist himself. The occasional complaint of Canadians that the Doctor's protiges include too large a proportion of an undesirable strain is at least logical; but the debt that England owes him, at any rate, is immense, and it is English fangs, I have noticed, that fasten on him when some disreputable parents, wTith hypocritical pro- fessions of sectarian conscientiousness, try to recover the services of a son or daughter rescued in childhood from them and trained up a respectable bread-winnerCITY HALL ANP MARKET, WINNIPEG. [To face p. 258,ON THE PRAIRIE. 259 CHAPTER XI. Among the readers of this book, there will doubtless be not a few who propose to make Canada their future home ; and in the serious mood natural to such a crisis of life, they may look for more exhaustive details, more minute topographical descriptions and statistics than they will find here. With all deference to any such expectations, I should like to say, in the first place, that the field for enterprise in British North America is geo- graphically so enormous that a work dealing with it in the fashion of a guide to emigrants would be reduced to a mere array of facts and figures, and become deterrent to the general reader, and all my hopes of gaining his attention or his favour would fall to the ground. Secondly, by the mere effort of sending a postcard, the seeker after exhaustive details con- nected with the various districts can get by return of post from the Dominion and railway agents, the most voluminous array of information on all these points—current prices of lands, average temperatures, progress of railroads, prices of articles live and dead, plans of railroads, Government and Company lands open to settlement with terms and conditions ; a thousand things, in short, which there is no occasion nowadays to embody in a work of this kind, except incidentally, and which, indeed, are to a great extent unsuitable for such, being liable to constant fluctuation. My modest aim is to deal with these matters as they come in our way from the point of view of an independent outsider, and also to discourse of others that should interest both stay-at-home readers as well as the prospective tourist and emigrant, but are outside the province of emigration literature. Now scarcely any of the agriculturally-inclined emigrants, as we have noticed, stay around Winnipeg. It is a sparsely- settled and unattractive neighbourhood for the capital of a s 2260 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. prosperous country, so we will take the C. P. R., and follow the fortunes of the great majority westward. It will be doubtless recognised that trains cannot run even on a great road like this with the frequency of the London and North-Western. Two each way per diem, a local train and the Imperial Limited (the coast train), going east and west respectively, is about all you could reasonably look for, when even small towns are fifty miles apart. On the branch rail- roads there will usually only be one train out and back in the day. Sometimes these cross and you cannot utilise them, and have to stop over a night. But in an agricultural country the main purpose is served, after all, when the produce is got out. Frequent passengers' trains, though always welcome, are not vital in such districts in their elementary stages. On running out of Winnipeg you enter immediately into the presence of the real anc} boundless prairie for the first time. Far away to north and south stretches the illimitable plain. There is here no ornate farming country, no villas and fancy farms, such as surround the ordinary North American city, for the prairie in almost its natural state runs right up to the city limits. The fact is that for thirty or forty miles westward, the land, though of the richest and deepest black loam, has no natural drainage, and is slightly waterlogged. This would have been easily rectified, and doubtless will be, but the paralysing hand of the speculator, who never seems to have quite got his price, is upon it as well. At any rate, for an hour or two after leaving the city in the month of September, the traveller would look in vain for those vast wheatfields and prosperous farmhouses he had heard and read so much of. The cutting and grazing of the prairie grass, as Nature made it, would seem almost the only industry for miles west of Winnipeg; haystacks and herds of milch cows alone dotting the wide expanse, with here and there a quite elementary dwelling or a rude barn. Now and again a modest farmhouse stands amid fifty or a hundred acres of wheat stubble, but for thirty or forty miles the eye ranges for the most part over tremendous sweeps, sprinkled only with these dark specks of haystacks and these wandering bunches of cattle. Reedy sloughs of brown water sometimes wash the railway track,PORTAGE-LA-PRAIRIE, [To face p. 261.PORTAGE-LA-PRAIRIE. 261 flocks of crows and blackbirds cross the skyline, and the big American lark springs from the prairie grass as the train rushes by, or a grouse whirrs away on rapid wing. Black " trails" or roads leap straight as an arrow across the great stretches of green and brown that, without being actually wild, are yet so curiously devoid of stir and life. In time, however, the scene wholly changes as we come within measurable distance of Portage-la-Prairie, for we are running into the oldest of the regular farming districts of the North-West, and even at this day perhaps the richest. The desultory hayfields, the boundless natural pastures, the makeshift looking homesteads give way to well-cultivated fields of wheat and oats, with their shocks standing thick upon the ground, and telling of thirty and sixty bushels an acre respectively, so far as shocks can tell anything. Here and there neat wire fences divide field from field ; near and far off patches of brilliant green mark the summer fallows which, covered with summer weeds, show out against the golden stubbles and the paler prairie with wonderful distinctness. Well-used roads, broad and deep-ditched on either side and fenced with wire, cross the track at intervals and fade into the distance. Substantial homesteads now press on one's notice, following each other in quick succession along either side of the railroad and dotting the plain ; roomy houses, sometimes of brick in the Ontario style, with a patent American windmill for pumping and other purposes alongside of them, and a large frame barn painted brown and picked out with white; while a thrifty planta- tion, perhaps fifteen or twenty years' old, surrounds the homestead and does away altogether with the bleak look that attaches so often to the less cared-for or newer places on the prairie. The district of Portage-la-Prairie is notable for its productive- ness, even in this productive country. A quarter of a century's cropping has not impaired to any appreciable degree its deep black soil, for the yield of 1902 was the heaviest on record. And before the land begins to run down, mixed farming and yard-fed stock will, no doubt, in such a district as this, have advanced enough to arrest any decline of fertility. Farms here are now worth from thirty to sixty dollars an acre, though carrying, of course, good buildings. Yet I myself know men who bought262 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. their land here at twenty-five cents. Portage has a population of about 5,000, being one of those ten or a dozen small towns of the North-West, more or less of a size, which punctuate the country as far as the Rockies. It is a well-known wheat market, with flouring mills and a few small manufactures. It is also something of a railroad centre, since besides the Minnedosa and Yorkton branch of the Canadian Pacific running north-west, the Canadian Northern, from which such great things are expected, strikes through it north-west by north for the Saskatchewan Valley, with a view to some day traversing the whole of that system westward and probably crossing the Rockies to the Pacific. Only a dozen miles to the north of Portage, too, is Lake Manitoba, and a short railway runs to its southern end, where are some of the best duck and goose shooting-grounds in the North-West. This great lake is over a hundred miles in length, and continues its course due north again in that of Winnipegosis, which is almost as large. Following the main line of the C. P. R., the great grain fields spread away to the verge of sight on either side of us, though it must not be supposed that they wholly lack detail or variety ; nor, again, that the country is often quite level. Towards the close of harvest, particularly, the far-spread- ing scene will often be extremely animated. Oats and wheat only afford an alternative in the foreground to be sure, and soon get merged together as they recede into the middle distance. But some fields are in the stack, while here and there a late patch is not yet cut. The green of the summer fallows, the tawny intervals of prairie pasture, the glisten of little lakes, the bright spots with which the more prosperous homesteads sprinkle the plain, the winding belts of woodland touched with the fires of autumn, where a river or stream winds its sluggish way, all go to make a pleasing and varied picture ; while here and there a small herd of milch cows or bullocks show that wheat, though king, is not the tyrant it is sometimes represented to be, even in Manitoba. Of all objects, however, at this time the steam threshers, which have well commenced operations, will be the most noticeable. Sometimes threshing from the shock, some- times, though not often, perhaps, till mid-October, from the stack, the white columns of smoke, the busy groups of menMiMiPik. J W' THE FIRST HOMESTEAD. [To face p. 263.PORTAGE-LA-PRAIRIE TO BRANDON. 263 and laden waggons hurrying towards them, may be seen at a dozen points at once. Often, too, the sparks have ignited the prairie or the stubble, and men may be seen busy fighting the fiend with anything they can lay hands on or running hasty furrows between the advancing line of fire and the stacks or stooks it threatens. Now and then, too, the cars will stop on a side- track to let a long freight train, laden with cattle from the Western ranches, rumble by. Many villages, too, will be seen budding into small towns; hotels, and agricultural implement warehouses being always the most prominent of their buildings, next only to the elevators, which dominate all. And now, again, tfre whole horizon will look as if the Ontario forests have over- taken us. But it will be only the course of a river, the Assiniboine in this case most likely, whose timbered banks, seven or eight miles away, shut out the further distance and encourage such delusions. Between Portage and Brandon, about halfway across the province of Manitoba, that is to say, the prairie flings itself up into a great waste of barren sandhills, sprinkled with pine and other stunted evergreens or ragged growths of willow and scrub oak. For ten or a dozen miles these semi-barren "bluffs," as the local dialect has it, assert themselves as if in violent protest against the not uncommon notion that the prairie is a kind of fertile billiard table. Little lakes lie in the hollows, fringed with foliage and prolific of reeds, into which frightened moorhens go scurrying as the cars rattle by. Long before getting to Brandon, too, the prairie may be said to take an upward step ; the heavier lands in the valley of the Red River and in the Portage district getting considerably lighter, and the contour of the country, from being almost a plain, developing a surface much more like the Wiltshire Downs and, let us say, Salisbury Plain, for those who know it. If the prairie were all a dead level, as it is sometimes erroneously described, it would be easy enough to picture. And if it were all bare it would be equally simple. But, as a matter of fact, a great deal of the Canadian North-West is hilly and very freely sprinkled with woodland, and, under certain lights and at certain times of the year, it very strongly resembles the Down counties of Southern England. Manitoba264 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. is not a large province as distances go in this country. It is barely 300 miles either in length or breadth. It is practically all occupied, and there are scarcely any free grants left. The Canadian Pacific has raised the price of its lands this past year from three to five dollars, and how much virgin prairie the Company have left in the older province is a matter for periodical literature, not for notice here. But the greater part of the province is good land, and can, no doubt, be fairly estimated in the raw state as not likely to exceed ten dollars an acre, except in favoured spots, for some time to come. Like Ontario, the whole North-West was laid out in sections of a mile square. Every purchaser treats the section as the unit, taking a whole, a quarter, or a half, as the case may demand, and no one in the North-West has farms of capricious acreages. South of the main line of the C. P. R. in the province of Manitoba is a strip varying from sixty to one hundred miles in width which marches with North Dakota, and is generally known as Southern Manitoba. This is mostly fine land, and is traversed by a southerly branch of the C. P. R. running west from Winnipeg. The "Homesteader" will generally pass through Manitoba nowadays and make for the Further West And though the question is quite sure to crop up again later, the intending emigrant may be reminded how much more profitable it is to pay ten dollars an acre for land near a railroad, if he can possibly raise the money, than to get it for nothing thirty miles away, particularly when grain is the prospective crop, and land can, as is the case here, be purchased on long-time payments. It has often struck me as remarkable that people who could certainly find £300, and much more, without difficulty, lay immense stress on the seeming privilege of acquiring 160 acres for nothing. The interest of ^300 we will call ^12 a year, and we are discussing the prospects of an able-bodied and perhaps educated human being who is proposing to put his life's work into the 160 acres. The tract costing ^300 is available to all markets, and has direct social and other benefits. The free grant is of necessity a long way off, and its communications may possibly be in a lap of the future. It has always seemed to me extraordinary that a man and his family, with a littleBRANDON. 265 means, should be so struck with the sound of free land that they should put themselves on the industrial level of a labourer without money—to whom, of course, it is a very great boon— and not see what an enormous advantage the power to buy land gives them over those who are compelled to homestead. Brandon, though with only as yet some 6,000 inhabitants, is at present the next most important town to Winnipeg, not only in Manitoba, but in the whole North-West. It distinguished itself much in the never-to-be-forgotten boom of 1882. The surrounding prairie was " pegged out" for many miles, and possibly the pegs might be found there yet. While it was still a town of tents mainly, and many of these occupied by persons with no practical views of life but to lead it in a merry fashion, a club-house was erected. A conceivable institution in a goldfield, but premature in a country where the money for luxuries had to be won from the soil, and those of the potential winners who were likely to patronise the club-house were very often young gentlemen with a thousand pounds, who had never handled a plough. The club- house, when the bubble burst, became an hotel. It is one yet, but entirely shorn of those glorious decorations that for some years after the boom gave it such distinction. It was and is a very moderately-sized house, and was started as an hotel by a good-natured, somewhat simple-minded Canadian, who, for reasons painfully obvious at the time, saw that the Englishmen of the neighbourhood were the most profitable element to cultivate. This ingenious person had gathered from books and the conversa- tion of the young sparks about him that fox-hunting was the noblest of sports. He determined, therefore, to have the walls of the public room frescoed with large-scale, coloured illustrations of an English fox-hunt. It was done on the quiet and as a pleasant surprise to his English patrons, and burst, so to speak, on their enraptured gaze with the reopening of the room. It had been the delight of the neighbourhood for a full year when I first saw it, and the survivors of the boom wanted something at that time to cheer them up. I do not think, however, that the well-meaning and enterprising landlord had even by then grasped the situation, or the reason why his efforts to please had been so amazingly successful, or why all the young Englishmen266 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. in the neighbourhood brought their friends to his picture- gallery, and of course had a drink, and perhaps even a meal or two, >nd made so uproariously merry over it. I can only remember two of the frescoes, and there were, I think, half a dozen. But of these two, the one represented a horse baulking suddenly at a fence, with its forefeet planted firmly against the bottom rail in a sufficiently natural attitude. The fence, it may be remarked, though the scene was presumably Leicester- shire, was of the ordinary American snake variety. In the background lofty snow-capped mountains looked down upon the chase. But the point of the illustration was the rider, who, attired in breeches and boots, red coat and huntsman's cap, was flying through space in the attitude of a man who is accustomed to leap through paper hoops, and, though at least thirty yards away, was still continuing his upward flight. The horse which had performed this marvellous trick was looking up at its late rider with one ear cocked and in evident satisfaction at its success. The final picture of the group was " the kill." In this masterpiece Mr. Reynard was comfortably seated on the branch of a pine tree regarding with leisurely composure the huntsman, who, with a couple of hounds, was standing in full war paint below, shaking a hunting whip at his mean-spirited quarry. Here, also, the scenery was Alpine. The humour of the situa- tion was greatly increased by the injured air of the landlord, who had supplied the rustic artist with the subjects, and with no little pride in the composition. He never could understand why English visitors went off into prolonged and hysterical fits of mirth the moment they crossed the threshold, and the longer they looked the louder they laughed. There was something almost pathetic in this simple-minded person's bewilderment. For his guests would break out periodically through the day in renewed bursts of mirth as their eyes lighted afresh on these realistic scenes from the Pytchley and the Quorn. These amazing hunting scenes covered the entire walls; you could not get away from them, and the humour of them stayed by you. They were certainly the funniest productions I have ever seen, having regard, of course, to the serious business purpose they had in view.BRANDON. 267 Brandon is now growing fast, and at least maintaining its position as a leading member of the provincial towns of the North-West. It has a long and well-built main street, with good stores, offices, and the usual branches of the chartered banks. There are numerous elevators, of course, as befits the chief provincial grain market of Manitoba. The town stands on the side of a hill, sloping down to the Assiniboine River, whose muddy but swift waters wend through flat, swampy meadows, thickly studded with willow, Cottonwood, and other small timber. Higher up the hill are long avenues, as in the other prairie towns, and frame residences in small gardens, which house the well-to-do classes of the town, while detached residences, standing alone in the suburbs, gradually fade away into the open prairie. Brandon is the centre of a great farming country. Almost everywhere and for a long distance around it the land is good. Much of it is lighter than the Portage land, and lighter, too, than a good deal of the soil in Southern Manitoba. But if it will not bear such persistent cropping with- out rest and help, it is at the same time proportionately easier worked. I was for some time in this district in 1884, and the change wrought in it since then is remarkable enough. It would weary the reader to relate how bare prairie land in the neighbour- hood of the town, then going at five dollars an acre, is now covered with improved farms worth thirty to forty dollars. All the farmers have done well in the last two or three years, and people with money to lend now complain that it is hard to get it out on that ever-favourite local investment, a 6 per cent, farm mortgage. There is a very fine Government experimental farm close to the town, and there is also a Government school for Indian boys and girls, part of whose training is to work on a farm attached. Some thirty miles to the north of Brandon, situated on two other parallel branches of the C. P. R., are the small towns of Minnedosa and Rapid City, centres of good districts. Thirty miles to the south, again, is Souris, a pretty little place of a thousand souls, on the Souris River, and connected both with Brandon and also Winnipeg by further branches of the C. P. R. There is no better land probably in the North-West than in the country round Souris. To268 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. one or other of these above-mentioned places a majority pro- bably of the people come who are going no further west than Manitoba, and are looking either for land or for work, and in nine cases out of ten the latter means farm work. A certain number of skilled mechanics, masons, carpenters, mill hands, or painters, are employed in these small towns. When times are brisk there is a good deal of work, but when business is slack there is almost none; but the farm work goes on through good times and through bad. And the good hand can get his twenty-five dollars a month for the summer months, and sometimes eighteen dollars for all the year round, with certainty, but he must be a good man to do this, not merely a willing and inexperienced one; and the winter, as a possible off- season, should be taken into more account than holiday corre- spondents would sometimes have their readers believe. It is by no means every farmer who wants a hand, even without wages, through the winter. There are a larger proportion of people who were born in the old country farming in Manitoba than in Ontario. Great numbers have come out at different times, though many have either gone home because they have not proved equal to the work or have inherited money; while still more perhaps have drifted into employment more suited to their temperament. One meets, however, all kinds of men who have made a success of prairie farming ; and those some- times from whom one would least have expected it have stuck out their fifteen or twenty years, turned their bare half-section into a well-looking farm with good house, buildings and fences, and have a lusty family growing up round them. The Ontario man and the Scotsman are much the most conspicuous among the British element who have persevered and succeeded, but among the others, gentlemen's sons, chemists, publicans, and members of all sorts of unlikely trades, have shown conclusively that farming is their mission. These prairie towns have no lack of entertainments. They have generally assembly rooms where travelling companies of actors or musicians perform frequently. There is usually, too, a club, where the better sort of males foregather to play whist, pool, or read the papers, or discuss the affairs of the nation.SPORT IN THE NORTH-WEST. 269 There is a considerable society, which does not allow the almost total absence of domestics to keep it nearly as dull as more or less similar communities in England who have an ample supply. Dances, musical clubs, Shakespeare readings, suppers, tennis parties flourish, with hockey both on land and ice, and curling, of course. Shooting comes in with the prairie chickens in August, and goes on with the ducks and wild geese in October, until the country freezes up. Sportsmen have to go further afield than in former days. This part of the country, like many others, is very thickly sprinkled with small natural ponds or sloughs (pronounced " sloos "). In the early days of the settle- ment all these used to be covered with ducks, and the surrounding prairie with chickens. Both are much scarcer now that all the available country is occupied with farms. The sloughs still attract a few ducks, and broods of prairie chickens are still hatched out on the farms. But for serious duck shooting sportsmen mainly go to remote places away from civilisation, where large lakes fringed with miles of marshy lagoon still attract enormous quantities of wild-fowl. Some people have shanties erected in favourite haunts, and go there year after year, keeping their canoes, decoys, and other shooting requisites on the spot. Others camp out. It is probably the finest wild-fowl shooting in the world, and as it may be had to perfection in great numbers of well-known places, as well as in all probability many more unknown spots, all the way from the Red River to the Rocky Mountains, it would be purposeless to attempt here an absurdly fractional list of them. The wild geese, which are mostly shot from pits sunk in the stubble fields, by the margin of lakes, are extraordinarily numerous at times.1 I think I am right in saying that a friend of mine, a well-known shot, killed nearly a hundred in one day to his own gun not very long ago. Sixty or seventy ducks to 1 When the Prince of Wales was in Canada two years ago, the honour of introducing him to this most characteristic of Canadian field sports was deputed to my friend Senator Kirchhoffer, of Brandon, probably the best-known exponent of the ar;t still handling a gun in the Dominion. The result of the two days' sport at the Senator's shooting lodge attracted much notice at the time in the English sporting papers.270 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. one gun in a single morning is not uncommon. In far away northern and north-eastern districts beyond the reach of settle- ment, and where timber is abundant, there is big game of various sorts, moose, elk, and deer. But we only have to do here with the prairies, and for the man of the gun, rather than the rifle, the prairies are a paradise. In new countries like this one finds grumblers always, but I never heard even the most unwilling exile say a word against the sport. Englishmen going abroad, whether to Canada or the States, and looking to sport as one of the many compensations for an isolated and perhaps rough life, are apt to forget that unless they are in some unusually primitive place, where game is handy and very abundant, a rare condition nowadays, sport requires more individual trouble than at home. I do not allude, of course, to the man of means who goes out for a hunting trip, and is prepared to pay reasonably for the staff of professionals he takes with him, but to the ordinary settler or business man who runs his own amusements. Nine sportsmen out of ten at home are either taken up to their birds or have them brought to their guns by other hands and other brains. In covert shooting and driving, of course, this is the case. Walking up partridges or grouse, with or without dogs, entails, of course, moderate exertion of an automatic kind for most of a party, and some exercise of reason or local experience by the host or his keepers, or both. And there, again, the bounds are abso- lutely fixed. Several hundred or thousand acres contain a greater or less amount of game, which has to be circumvented and killed by familiar and conventional methods. The greater part of it will be eventually killed by guns who stand or walk where they are told to, and have absolutely nothing else to do but rise from a comfortable bed, eat three extremely square meals a day, if not four, and shoot straight or crooked, according as their mood or their capacities allow them. All this is delightful, but the colonial settler who wants to enjoy the sport of the country does not find his path made thus smooth for him ; and, as a rule, it is only what might be called the really keen, the natural born sportsman, of those whose opportunities have been great or normal in the old country, that survive in North America, though Englishmen have alwaysSPORT. 271 ardent sporting intentions when they first come out. You will also find a good many who have the stuff in them, but had no opportunities at home, develop into successful sportsmen on the other side. The prairie chicken or grouse and the Virginia quail are the only two game birds other than wild-fowl and migrants of any consequence to the American sportsman, and to shoot either, setters or pointers are absolutely necessary, though north-western Canada is concerned only with the prairie grouse, its latitude being far above the quail limit. The ordinary sportsman has therefore to breed and to break his own dogs, to say nothing of having to keep his own guns clean and in order. He has, of course, to engineer his own shooting. Over a district as big, say, as an English county, and varying from both natural and artificial causes in its capacity for holding game, his scope may range, and his judgment and experience is called into play. And I am supposing, of course, the case of a man who wants to have good sport, and is not merely contented to potter about with a gun and have a few odd shots. A good deal of individual trouble and forethought is necessary to insure success in this sort of country, unless a man is rich enough to pay others to do it for him. But practically all the sportsmen on the prairies work out their own salvation, and this, of course, has to be done in time snatched from almost always busy lives. So, as I have said before, the man, whether in town or country, who keeps up his sport must be a really keen hand. There is no roughing it about chicken shooting, as the sportsman can always have a pony or " buckboard " along to carry what he wants, and if out of reach of home, farmhouse quarters are available; but still he has to do everything himself —find out his own beats, manage at least, and if he is a wise man, breed his own dogs, gather his own dead birds, and hunt his own runners. It is quite surprising how lukewarm under these conditions many people become who, under the ready- made conditions of English sport, have fired away several thousand cartridges a year, with matter-of-fact regularity and passable success, and have been accounted by themselves and their friends as fond of the gun. The prairie grouse do not retire before cultivation. On the contrary, like the American272 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. quail, they approve of it, though, of course, the stubble fields themselves afford scant lying for the birds, who seek refuge in thickets and long grass; and they can be best hunted for in what are known as "bluffs," rough and broken bits of prairie sprinkled with scrub wood here and there. But this is no place for a disquisition on chicken shooting, which is practically the same as grouse shooting over dogs, with a little woodland work thrown in. In conclusion, I may remark that there are two varieties of the bird on the prairie, the sharp-tailed and the square-tailed grouse; and it is held by one or two extremely good authorities of my acquaintance that the former was the original bird of the unsettled country, and has a tendency to retire before civilisation, but that its place is taken among the wheatfields by migrants from the south of the line, or the Minnesota variety. The provincial game laws now limit the daily bag to twenty-five birds per gun, a wise restriction ; for it will be conceded, I think, that twenty-five brace to two guns, the usual number to shoot together over dogs, is sufficient for all purposes of sport and enjoyment, and a still better law enacts that none whatever may be sold. Wild-fowl shooting entails, as a rule, more endurance and dis- comfort. Except for a favourably situated few, it means camp- ing out, and sometimes a good deal of exposure in cramped positions during the progress of the sport itself, and the October air can sometimes be extremely keen on the prairie, even at mid-day; while in duck shooting there is, of course, much early morning and late evening work. Sometimes, too, there is rain or an early flurry of snow, and where there is punting and paddling about, and much handling of decoys, the conditions are not favourable, to say the least of it, to a rheumatic subject. What Manitoba was a few years ago the remoter regions of Saskatchewan and Northern Alberta still are along their back lines of settlement, and furnish opportunities to the sportsman within easy reach of his own fireside. There are, of course, so far inland no woodcock, but there are a great many snipe in certain places. As to ground game, the jack rabbit and the cotton tail, both hares in nature and indigenous to certain parts of Manitoba and the whole North-West, are not worthy of moreSOURIS. 273 than bare mention here. Of fishing, there is little worthy of mention till you get to the trout regions bordering on the Rocky Mountains. With the almost unthinkable area of thinly-peopled country ahead of us, and all so much alike in general characteristics, I shall find myself dropping into mere bald topography, or bare statistics, or verbal descriptions of what accessible maps will tell so very much better, and doing the very things, even at the risk of criticism, I wish to avoid in this book, unless I concentrate myself somewhat. So, instead of describing the established and budding industries of Brandon, I propose to run down to a little growing prairie town not thirty miles from it, and in the heart of a typical agricultural country, and there procure in fancy a buggy, or a " rig," as here called, at a livery stable, and with a similar licence of imagination ask my reader to take a seat beside me while we take a look at a typical prairie district and gossip for a short space about things connected with prairie life. The prairie has great beauties of its own, but it cannot be said that the average prairie town appeals to the aesthetic senses. Yet occasionally the situation at least is picturesque, even if the architecture, which has much more serious things to think of, cannot afford to live up to its site. Souris is just such a place as this. A few years ago it was but a cluster of houses. It now possesses a fairly long street of solid buildings and a thousand inhabitants. It has no extraneous advantages, and is simply the product of a limited district of wheat-growers, and hence its interest. Now, some of the prairie rivers have a certain picturesqueness. They have cut deep into the soft soil for a hundred or two feet in places. Willow and alder, birch and ash, soft maple and cottonwood clothe the steep declivities and spread their branches over the stream, which is by no means always sluggish; indeed, it sometimes works itself into rapids, almost suggestive of Ontario or Lower Canada. And the town of Souris runs along a high ridge above just such a river as this. It has two hotels, where you may be reasonably comfortable at a dollar a day, and that rise to the dignity of sending a 'bus to the station; churches of each denomination, two or three branches G T274 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. of the great chartered banks, numerous stores, real estate and insurance agencies, very fine flouring mills, several elevators, Chinese laundries, and various private residences in its suburbs, whose gardens suggest tennis, croquet and the other trivialities that help life to run pleasantly and sociably in its less serious moments. The bigger places, of course, have all these things, and many more, but I am talking now rather of a village that has simply responded to the needs of an agricultural district. There is a little club, too, and I believe in winter there are festive functions, which, if more democratic than those of Winnipeg or Toronto, are none the less enjoyable. Travelling on the prairie upon the whole is good, and what that means in the settlement of a new country can only be properly appreciated by those who have lived in one where Nature is hostile to road-making. The gradients are gentle, save where they cross a deep-cut river valley. Macadam, out- side the towns, would be too expensive a luxury at present, and is not really needed. At the breaking up of the frost in spring, the black clay loam is deep and miry with traffic, but with the warm, dry weather it soon gets beaten down into a hard and fairly level state and remains so, with brief intervals of sticki- ness during summer showers, till the coming of winter again ; and through this season the travelling, whether on sleigh or wheels, is always good, for, contrary to a somewhat wide- spread delusion abroad, there is not over much snow lying on the prairies, in spite of the cold. Indeed, farmers would often be glad of more than they get. We will suppose it to be October, keen, crisp and bright as October days here generally are, as we cross the wooden bridge over the Souris, a tributary of the Assiniboine, pull up the steep hill on the further side, and climb up on the high, rolling prairie. The ruins of a former bridge, washed away by the spring floods of 1902, lie athwart the stream, and show what a river forty or fifty yards wide can do when it first bursts its wintry bands. A labouring man is fishing from the bank. He holds up a lanky little pike of perhaps two pounds weight to us, and gesticulates vigorously in very un-Anglo-Saxon fashion. He turns out to be one of the several thousand Galicians who areA DRIVE ON THE PRAIRIE. 275 working throughout the North-West, and on the whole are useful and bear a good character. When this country was first surveyed into townships and sections the roads were laid out too, and so generous a space given them that people now grumble, first, at the waste of land entailed, and, secondly, at the growth of weeds which flourish on either side of the track and scatter their seeds far and wide. In connection with this, by the way, it may be worth while noting that there are Government inspectors of weeds and thistles in the North-West, whose business it is to warn the owners of lands giving offence in this particular, and see that the nuisance is removed. Flowers bloom, too, more gratefully, but as rankly as the weeds by the prairie roadside, and at the edge of the wheat- fields. Besides the wild barley, the wild rye and the fireweed and thistle, the prairie roses creep and twine, and the haws blaze red amid the tangle, and the ubiquitous golden rod and prairie sunflower in the earlier autumn make a brilliant show. It is in the spring, however, that the prairie looks its gayest, when the wild crocuses cover great areas with a carpet of bright colour. And now the rolling prairie is all around us, a vast patch- work of colouring; sometimes as we top the ridge we can see for miles, and mark a score or two of homesteads catching the sunlight with their bright colours, and half as many threshers pouring their column of smoke into the keen, clear air. Some- times, however, as in the down countries of England, the long ridges compass us wholly about; the buildings on their summits, flanked by groups of circular stacks, showing against the sky, and the long sweeps of stubble, still golden and unbleached by serious frosts, of tawny prairie pastures, or of summer fallow, trending gently downward to the hollow, where some sluggish stream, dammed up into reedy ponds, winds amid meadowy strips of timothy or red top fresh from the mower's tooth.1 A small bunch of teal, perhaps, or a black duck breaks from the reeds at our approach, and scuds down the valley, for the wild duck of occupied Manitoba knows how to take care of himself nowadays as well as other ducks. Clouds of blackbirds burst 1 "Mower" and "Reaper" in transatlantic parlance indicate the machines not the wielders of scythe and sickle. T 2276 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. with a loud whirr of wings from the tangled growth by the stream and hover above the reed beds with a confidence that not even the most juvenile gunner ever troubles to abuse. A few buntings of various kinds, snow birds and so called snow birds, flit among the rushes, while the common moorhen splashes along the surface of the brown peat-coloured water. But for the most part one seems to be well lifted up amid that vast sweep of sky and rolling plain that most men and many women are apt in time to grow fond of. When I first saw this prairie country, its discomforts, many of which time and experience have cured, were prominent, if not uppermost, in the conversation of everyone, both in town and country. Now it is quite different. Most of the residents will tell you they would not live in the east, and there is no doubt whatever that with the present generation a feeling has arisen towards the prairie such as animates people brought up among mountains from the other point of view; a certain affection for it, or a feeling of dissatisfaction when they find themselves among more cramped surroundings. Indeed, this seems natural and inevitable, as well as fortunate, though there are certain others, mainly women, for whose nerves the prairie air is too keen and stimulating. There are some, too, who by temperament are unsympathetic with an open and comparatively treeless country. But most residents in the North-West, not soured by lack of success, and who are susceptible to influences of this kind, have, I think, fallen under its sway ; and you now rarely hear people talking, as fifteen or twenty years ago they used to talk, about isolation, dreariness, monotony, unbearable winters, and so forth. Indeed, you have only to look around, as the buggy travels at a good pace over the black, powdery dust which overlies the hard road bed, and the reason of this change of sentiment is not far to seek. Every half mile or so, where fifteen or twenty years ago a rude " shack" or humble framehouse stood among fifty acres of wheat and oat stubble, perhaps unfenced on the wide prairie, there is now a homestead that would not discredit the crack counties of Ontario. Wire fencing divides the home pastures from the road, and from the broad acres of tillage that sweep away to right and left and to rear of the buildings. TheseSUCCESSFUL SETTLERS. 277 homesteads are not so thick on the ground, to be sure, as in Ontario, for the farms are not usually less than a half-section (three hundred and twenty acres), and very often occupy a whole one ; but the buildings hereabouts are as good, and the people nowadays live as comfortably, as in the older provinces, and they will tell you themselves that they do not have to work nearly so hard. The houses are sometimes of brick, either white or red, sometimes of wood well painted, but in most cases ample for the needs of any family occupied in farming, what- ever may be their social stamp, and this last, in origin at least, will be found to vary much more on the prairie than in Ontario. The prairie farmhouse is now well warmed, well furnished with modern appliances, and surrounded with good vegetable gardens, though apples and large fruits have not yet succeeded very well. Many provident people have planted forest trees freely around their homesteads in past years, and taken time by the forelock. Yonder, for instance, is one of several homesteads belonging to an English family who came here from Kent about twenty years ago—farmers or hop-growers I think they were in the old country. Standing amid great undulating breadths of stubble and pasture and rich black fallow's, the house is now almost hidden by clumps and avenues of well-grown spruce, firs and soft maples. Many duplicates of so pleasant a sight may be seen on the prairie, and those who neglected to thus shelter and adorn their places are now acting on the principle of " better late than never," and following their more provident neighbours' example. The barn, with byre and stabling, all under one roof, is universally good, and though built on somewhat different lines to those of Ontario, is no whit behind the edifices of which that province is so justly proud. The artistic soul might perhaps complain of their remarkable uniformity in shape, size, and even colouring, being nearly all painted a dark brown picked out with white ; but it would be absurd to subject the prairie homestead to criticism of this kind. The man or woman of feeling will find much that is aesthetically satisfying in the prairie landscape, if they look for it aright, and these settlers have passed through times that called for vigorous qualities since they acquired land here in the early 'eighties at three or four dollars an acre.278 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Two railroads now meet at Souris, one from Winnipeg direct and one from Brandon. For years the settlers had to haul their grain thirty miles to the latter market. They were mostly, as elsewhere in Manitoba, people of small capital, and had to start from small beginnings. As previously indicated, they had to meet conditions which were new to everyone's experience, and the elements, while this country was in the making, were certainly more unkind in every way than they have been since it was made. Here, for instance, is a family that is a type of those settlers who believed in the country and stuck to it through good times and bad. They own between them a section and a half, nearly a thousand acres. Their property lies off the main road, though that is of little conse- quence, for " trails," or side roads, run in every direction over the prairie, and at most seasons of the year can be traversed as easily as the main highways. Indeed, for that matter, you can^get about anywhere with a buggy or buckboard when the grain is cut, though wire fencing is progressing at a rate that will soon put an end to these more desultory excursions. There are two or three extremely comfortable homesteads on the aforesaid property, with a married son in each. The old gentleman, the original pioneer, takes his ease as he should do, and no doubt the results of his own bygone labours, and that of his boys who stuck by him, must be a spectacle calculated to immensely sweeten his declining years. They are busy thresh- ing at this moment the produce of about four hundred acres of wheat—which in so good a year in the best class of Manitoban land, such as this is, though cropped for many seasons, will go twenty-five bushels an acre. The estate in this case has a thresher of its own, and one of the sons has learnt to run the engine^ They are threshing from the shock, and waggons are busy running up the loads of wheat. The expedition of the western thresher and its " outfit" would be a revelation to many, I think. The straw is not raked away from beneath, but is broken up by the machine into comparatively short strips and fired out of a funnel with great force, and accumulates at some distance into a steadily-growing heap. There is no feeding done in these newer contrivances, but the sheaves areTHRESHING—MANITOBA. [To jacep. 278.SIZE OF FARMS IN MANITOBA. pitched into a hopper from the waggon and go right into the machine. Lastly, the grain is carried direct from the box through tubes into movable granaries, in cases where farmers own these conveniences, thus saving bags and the labour of handling and tying them. From the granaries the wheat is shifted into waggons and carried direct to the elevator at the nearest town or station and shot into the receiver. On a farm of this kind there.will be a considerable breadth of oats as well, which yield fifty or sixty bushels to the acre, and what are not used for stock sell at twenty-five to thirty cents, against the fifty to sixty which wheat usually fetches. The popular size for a single holding in Manitoba is a half- section, or three hundred and twenty acres. A general con- sensus of opinion puts this as the right amount of land for an average man to purchase for his own occupation. A person may make a living on a quarter-section, but under present conditions of cultivation there is scarcely scope for much more. It is only company prospectuses that put every acre of a farm into wheat and show thirty bushels " at a conservative estimate " every year. Of course, a labouring man, with little or no capital, who can nevertheless scrape enough together to acquire a quarter-section and can grow fifteen hundred bushels of wheat on an average, is doing extremely well for himself. After paying all working expenses, he may have five or six hundred dollars in cash, only a part of which, with the help of his garden, his pigs, and a cow or two, will be required for keeping his family. But I am alluding rather to the man with five hundred or one thousand pounds capital. A half-section is relatively more profitable in such a case, and the initial payment is in future operations much more than justified. A second team of horses and a hired hand can then very likely be used to advantage, while the brains and energy that are calculated to make one hundred and sixty acres pay are still more profitably engaged on twice the acreage. Moreover, there is no immediate hurry about bringing prairie land into cultivation. If fenced in it will make good pasture till there is opportunity to break it. Taxes are light, and by the time the owner is ready to extend his operations he has his own land, bought cheap originally, to go to work on, and he is not280 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. hemmed in by other farmers whom he has to wait the oppor- tunity to buy out at a much higher price. The well-to-do Manitoban farmer now considers himself an object for envy by his brother agriculturists, and would abso- lutely resent the impressions formed in old days, and not without foundation, that he was a pioneer struggling with the drawbacks of a rigorous climate and cut off from all the joys of life. I have given an idea, I hope, of how he and his animals are housed. Of course, he works extremely hard at certain seasons of the year. The moment the land is fit to go on to with the break-up of the frost, a slightly varying date, as in Ontario, but seldom before the month of April, he has to " get a hustle on." Part of his prairie land was ploughed in the fall, part was summer fallow, but in any case there is much ploughing and re-ploughing to be done. He may use either a double-furrowed or a gang plough on which he sits, or the ordinary swing plough of familiar knowledge. But hustle though he certainly does, his land at least is smooth and requires no clearing, and sitting on his plough and turning over his three to four acres a day, he may fairly claim to have an easier time than his contemporaries tramping in the furrow. When the land has all been harrowed and the wheat and oats sown—for barley is not widely grown1 —the prairie farmer has no great pressure on him till September, in which month the harvest seriously commences. He has no maize to plant, except a little for fodder perhaps, nor clover to seed upon his grain: nor yet turnips nor marigolds of any conse- quence. There is hay to be cut, not only the prairie grass in spots where it grows long around the sloughs or in low places, but most farmers will have a timothy meadow, for the wild grass is apt to deteriorate with constant cutting and grazing. The grass on Manitoba prairies is mostly short upon the uplands, and grazes out in time if fenced in and heavily stocked. It should be said, however, that now summer fallowing is so constantly practised the farmer has a good deal of ploughing to do after his grain is sown. Fall or autumn wheat, which is the main crop in Ontario and Europe, is impracticable in the North-West. I 1 In round figures there are 2,503,000 acres in wheat in the North-West, 800,000 in oats, 300,000 in barley, and 500,000 under summer fallow.THE PROBLEM OF CONTINUOUS CROPPING. 281 have heard something recently of it having been tried here and there with success, but there is not usually enough snow on the prairies to protect it from the intense frost, even if there were time for it to get a good start in the autumn. Of course, the question that rises to every stranger's lips, and one by no means unconsidered by the people it most concerns, is to what extent can these prairie lands, rich as they are, be continuously cropped ? There are soils of varying texture and depth and quality among the good lands of Manitoba. Speak - ing generally, none of them have received the least assistance but the mere rest given by summer fallowing. The outsider, and above all the man who has never been a farmer, invariably echoes the not very original suggestion that farmyard manure would be a good thing, and would prove a solution of what appears at present something of a problem. He will also mildly and naturally deprecate the burning of the straw, and deplore the bonfires of it which redden the sky in all directions when the autumn nights lengthen. It is quite true that people are going more into mixed farming even in Manitoba, but the particular attraction to the small capitalist there is the large acreage of wheat a single man with modern implements can raise. This same individual is not prepared to keep and feed in yards and raise winter food for many beasts, and how much land will even forty or fifty loads of manure cover ? Five acres, say. And what is five acres only moderately dressed out of the hundred that such a farmer will put in wheat alone ? He expects, and probably will get, twenty, perhaps twenty-five, bushels. With one assistant, son or hired man, the forking, hauling, and spread- ing of fifty loads (a big estimate, by the way), with use of team, will cut into a lot of valuable time in spring, for in winter the manure pile will be frozen and immovable. Woufd it mean ten bushels an acre more ? I doubt it very much. Suppose it did; there are two thousand and fifty bushels instead of two thousand. Would that twenty-five dollars pay the farmer for his labour under the circumstances here existing ? I think not; he thinks not, at any rate, and he ought to know. More- over, the conditions of the North-West are peculiar; some of that manure would go to straw, not grain, and nobody wants282 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. straw out there. It is not a little perplexing, too, to the advocates of good farming to see the country produce in the year 1902, after nearly thirty years of continuous cropping, the largest yield on record per acre. This is certainly a facer for the enlightened farmer, and perhaps an unfortunate encouragement to the careless and shortsighted, for there can be no doubt whatever that no land can stand eternal cropping ; and, indeed, there are plenty of the lighter lands of the province that have given warning some time ago that there is a limit to their endurance, a warning which the wise have taken and treated them more considerately. Clover, of course, would go a long way to solving the whole problem, clover not merely being a rest, but a remarkable restorative, to worn lands, and the best preservative of the fertility of all lands of anything known to man. Its long roots draw up nourishment from below, its leaves attract it from the air. Unfortunately clover does not flourish in Manitoba. Till recently it was a recognised axiom that it would not face the frost on the thinly or half covered prairies, though timothy has been grown from the earliest settlement. It is not safe nowadays to generalise, and I have certainly seen specimens of clover grown in the province, and quite possibly the experimental farms have produced some hardy variety ; but I have seen none growing myself in travelling through the country this past year, nor have I met anyone using it. Supposing clover to be not avail- able, the ploughing under of green crops will certainly be the resource of the wheat farmer. It is a recognised method for restoring depleted lands in the middle and southern States, and a most effectual one. I have not only seen it in operation frequently myself, but have seen also the after-effects produced, though it is so well-known a remedy that such testimony is really not of any consequence. Ultimately, no doubt, when farms get small and sub-divided, though that time, I believe, is a long way off, the ordinary methods of farming, where straw and manure are in proportion to the acreage, will assert themselves. But it is foolish to talk this sort of thing to a man owning a half- section of first-class wheat land. Mixed farming is a common catchword and sounds very wise, but it will be a long timeHARVESTING. [To face p. 283.CONDITIONS FAVOURABLE TO WHEAT. 283 before the average Manitoba farmer has inclination, time, or the winter keep to yard enough stock to materially fertilise a hundred and fifty acres of grain. It does not always follow that the wheat sown immediately the land is workable, short though the season is, turns out the best. All over Canada the passing of winter and the opening of summer—for spring is short enough—holds in its hand unpleasant surprises and a fluctuating temperature. Once the season sets in, however, everything in Manitoba grows like wildfire. The deep frozen soil, below the dry pan where the wheat is lying, supplies a constant fund of exuding moisture to the young plant. The heat of the sun, judged by a North American standard, is benignant rather than fierce, a moderation which wheat appreciates as well as man. Moreover, the great length of the days in this northern climate materially helps to neutralise the short growing season and to produce the best wheat in the world. In no part of North America does wheat yield so steadily and suffer so little from the ills that elsewhere it is heir to. There have, of course, been bad years: land that should produce twenty-five bushels normally and thirty in a great year may drop to twelve or fifteen. But in the north-western States, such as Iowa and Nebraska, and even in Minnesota and Dakota, all. of which are regarded as fine wheat-producing States, crops sometimes fail absolutely. I could quote many curious instances of the unaccountable tricks that the wheat crop plays its growers in these States, from the personal experiences of friends who have suffered from it, if the United States, and not Canada, were my theme. In the middle Seaboard States I have seen year after year thousands of acres of wheat solemnly sown, reaped, threshed and marketed that would not average, nor be expected to average, ten bushels an acre! The further north you go in America the better the wheat, and the line seems only limited by that at which a reasonably comfortable existence can be led by human beings and by the caprices of late and early frosts. A good many young Englishmen of the public school type settled in the neighbourhood of Souris, in former years, and bought farms. It is a pity they have nearly all cleared .out, for284 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. their lands, worth ten dollars an acre in those days, would be worth twenty to thirty in these, and they would have had several good seasons. But there seems ever to be a restlessness about this type of immigrant, and even the steady, well-meaning fellows begin with an enthusiasm that too often flickers out. Of course, they have often had no training for the life. They are given money to buy land too early. They are sometimes " stuck" with bad places at high prices, but this is not so common in Manitoba, as the general level of land is much the same in a district, and any variations there may be are so much discussed that the simplest young man, after a year in a neigh- bourhood, could hardly get very badly hurt, either in price or in quality of soil. But there are other ways in which he gets astray, and I am not merely quoting my own opinion and experience, but more particularly those of Englishmen who have stuck to the country and done well. He is swayed in the selec- tion of what he conceives to be his home for life by the most trivial causes. He can buy, we will suppose, a farm, or could have done so, at fifteen dollars an acre, within three miles of a town and station—a great advantage for wheat-growers—but he has an old schoolfellow perchance, or a youth who came out on board ship with him, living eight miles from town, and as there is a farm at the same price to be sold adjoining this temporarily magnetic acquaintance he throws practical advantages to the winds, or does not realise them, and writes a glowing description of the remoter place and the immense advantages of being near "his pal," and finally squats there. Perhaps the situation is pretty and the shooting is good, which would be quite permissible for a man of the same class who had three hundred pounds a year in Consols and a thousand pounds to play with. But in this case the thousand is presumably the gentleman settler's all, and he looks at the pleasant, not the profitable aspect of the investment. In a year he has quarrelled, perhaps, with his neighbour, or the latter may have taken to drink or gone away, and he is eight miles away from market instead of three. Of course there are many brilliant exceptions. There are also many hopeless " ne'er-do-weels." I am speaking, however, of the decent, average young fellow who starts with good intentions,THE EARLY FROST "TERROR." 285 but is swayed by every wind, and who, moreover, is without the trading, business instinct that may not be pretty but is badly needed for success in farming. It is a great pity that people of this class in England will not recognise that it takes rather a level-headed fellow, or at least one with more than average character, to get on. It is true that some young fellows, who dislike any sedentary pursuit at home, have outdoor instincts of a practical kind and a good head, and do well. A man brought up as a gentleman has more difficulties to contend with, moral and otherwise, in colonial farming than the emigrant of a different class, and it takes a relatively better man. The brothers of a family who win normal success in the ordinary grooves of English business or professional life may be no whit superior to the one who has emigrated and presumably failed in brains or energy ; but the former have pursued a path hedged in on all sides by familiar custom and tradition, from which they can scarcely stray. The colonist, on the contrary, who will be alluded to as "in the colonies or somewhere," has had to face strange circumstances which many, to be sure, might have surmounted, but which would probably have bowled over his successful home-staying brothers as effectually as they did him. Sometimes in the course of a long drive on the prairie you will come across a field of wheat that has been " hailed"— perhaps more than a field. To hailstorms of great violence the prairie farmer is always liable, though the risk spread over so vast an area—for these storms are local—is very slight, and can be insured against for a small sum. Nor do they merely thresh the grain prematurely, but they beat the entire crop into the ground. Sometimes, too, you will see a piece of frozen wheat, late sown and caught in the " milk" by autumn frost. The early frosts, generally due in the first week of September, used to be the terror of Manitoba. I have been there in former days as the sympathetic guest of farming friends at that critical moment, when everybody woke early, if they went to sleep at all, and paid anxious visits to the thermometer. These inflic- tions have been far less frequent in recent years. The extension of cultivation and the drainage ensuing from it are no doubt mitigating agents; and then, again, when the dreaded temperature286 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. is reached, the wheat is usually in a more advanced condition than of old, and consequently more proof against damage. Nor can one too often remind European readers that the cause which is making the Canadian North-West the granary of the world is not merely the fertility of the soil, but the peculiar conditions of light and heat that obtain north of the forty-ninth parallel, which constitutes the international boundary line. Solar light as well as heat is a leading factor in the perfecting of a wheat crop. Throughout June and July there are, in this country, from one to two hours more light every day than in Iowa and Nebraska. The heat is of a more temperate kind, and the nights in Manitoba are always cool. Nor, again, is it merely the steadiness of the yield, but the high quality of the grain, that distinguishes the No. I hard wheat of the North-West. It is a beautiful sight just before harvest to see the strong, level, healthy appearance of these vast stretches of grain—clean below and uniform above—and going, in a good year, from twenty-five to thirty bushels an acre. Of course, we all know that there is nothing remarkable to English ears in such a yield, since four quarters is the unit on which the average English farmer bases his calculations, but that is not the point. The latter grows his crop every fourth, fifth, or sixth year after costly preparation, while the method of the prairie farmer and its cost have been sufficiently indicated. The virgin land was bought at, say, five to ten dollars an acre reasonably near a railroad, and he may crop it for a generation, at any rate, without spending anything upon the soil itself. I have said nothing of yields going up to thirty-five and forty bushels an acre, which in certain places and in very good seasons are often realised. It would tempt me to recall how often in the palmy days of British wheat-growing and the first two years of the 'seventies I had seen six to seven quarters, and on more than one occasion eight (sixty-four bushels) threshed out in the crack districts of East Lothian. Nor, have I sufficiently dwelt, perhaps, on the fact that even in Manitoba good crops are not a certainty. Still, I think one may safely say that over the province generally the termA SOLVENT CONDITION. 287 bad as regards a crop would be used in a relative sense. Fifteen bushels, for instance, would be a comparative failure in Manitoba, whereas there are thousands of farmers in the United States who are well content with it. Every sensible man, however, is prepared to take the lean years with the fat ones, and a year of fifteen bushels preceded by a good one of twenty-five to thirty and followed by a normal of twenty, would justify every sane word that is said of Manitoba ; and I believe this illustration to be based on a most conservative estimate. Manitoban mis- fortunes of hail or frost we shall no doubt hear of again, and skill in farming and thoroughness of cultivation produce within limits as varying results in Manitoba as they do elsewhere. And no doubt, too, we shall hear as many woeful tales in British homes as have been heard for all time. Only some men, outside the regular agricultural classes, of which England proper contributes very few, make good agricultural colonists in the long run; and a considerable majority of those who leave England have no means of knowing, nor has anybody else, as to their ability to adapt themselves to a strange and to them not easy life. The country, not the individual, will receive most of the blame, due to the latter's inaptitude or inexperience, instability or intemperance, and in some cases, where the gentleman class is concerned, due rather to the recklessness of parents or relatives in precipitating youths into the thick of a strange life, for which they are utterly unequipped—physically, morally, or intellectually. Let us take this very region through which we are now in fancy driving. All the ills that ever befell Manitoba smote this as other districts—some even harder, for it languished in a long and unexpected isolation from railroads. Yet here, as we have seen, the " shacks " and humble homesteads and small areas of tillage have blossomed into flourishing and substantial farms, yielding no longer a bare livelihood to their owners, but liberal incomes, judged by their necessities. Mortgages have all been lifted, and the only complaint among farmers who have saved money, and lawyers or others who have money to put out, is that borrowers are scarce, even at an interest reduced from 8 and 10 to 6 per cent288 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. In former days there was plenty of demand for money at a high interest, but lenders, especially private ones, dreaded foreclosure and being saddled with unoccupied land. Nowadays it is a different matter, apart from the fact that land is more or less saleable. Many persons who have thus or through direct purchase become possessed of quarter or half sections find it quite profitable to rent them out on shares, receiving themselves a third of the crop as rent. There are always a certain number of working men, arrivals from Europe, Ontario, or native Manito- bans, who have either not the capital or the desire to purchase land at once. Moreover, farm buildings are not an absolute necessity to mere wheat-growing, though happily for the country this style of farming is a temporary, if profitable, expedient of a comparatively small number of owners. Wheat- growers' tenants on this share system take their whole outfit on to the land when the season opens and use rough shelters for themselves and their teams till the wheat is threshed or stacked. A few regular farmers, too, and owners of land in various parts of the province live in the local towns during the winter, and only occupy their homesteads during the working season. Labour is, of course, the great question of the future in Manitoba, and as it mainly resolves itself into a question of harvesting and threshing, and in a less degree of ploughing, it presents difficulties, inasmuch as these important operations demand an extra supply, that must find other means of support for the rest of the year, or at least for the winter. This is a big question, and one I am not prepared to venture upon here. This necessary labour has to be sought among new-comers or foreigners for the most part. Almost all who engage in it must find a permanent domicile in the country and combine it with some regular means of making a living. Quebec province is the only possible source of supplying temporary labour, as Ireland supplies England in harvest-time. But this is limited, and the cost of transportation, even when specially reduced, over a thousand miles and back makes a big hole in the most liberal store of harvest-money. But by this time the sun will have set on our prairie landscape,EVENING ON THE PRAIRIE. 289 and prairie sunsets are at all seasons gorgeous. A broad, low curtain of fiery red hangs in the west from a sky that elsewhere has lapsed into the leaden hues of twilight, and against these lingering fires of day, farms and wheat stacks away on the distant rolling skyline stand out in dark and strong relief. But all colour has faded from stubble, fallow and prairie, and smouldering straw heaps glow like livid coals at quite incalculable distances in the chill evening wind as the darkness deepens. We cross once more the deep ravine and the gurgling river, which in a month or two's time will be fast bound in its wintry trammels, and enter the lighted main street of the sanguine and prosperous little prairie town. C. vCHAPTER XII. I MUST not let the reader leave the province of Manitoba under the impression that it grows nothing for market but wheat. Quite a brisk dairying business, for one thing, is carried on in various parts. Over sixty creameries and cheese factories exist in convenient localities, and a Government school of dairy- ing, established now this many years in Winnipeg, attracts an increasing number of students and does excellent work. The natural prairie grasses make good summer pasture, while in the matter of winter keep, besides prairie and timothy hay, Indian corn fodder can be grown abundantly for that invaluable ally of the Canadian farmer the silo. There is also a large coal-bearing area in the province, and in its south-western corner mines have been long in operation, and fuel is reasonably cheap, which is natural enough, seeing how much of it there is and how easily it is worked and transported. The area of Manitoba is just about that of England, and the population is over a quarter of a million, and rapidly increasing. The greater part of it is fertile, and yet there is a vague sort of notion abroad that the province is " filled up." The fact is that though there is plenty of free land left it does not offer the same advantages or apparent advantages to the incomer as a home- stead in the still newer territories of the further west. There is a great deal of good railroad land still available, both to the north and south of the Canadian Pacific, at about five dollars an acre, and more or less within reach of transportation. But these statistics, after all, shift with every year. In view of the eternal tendency to rush westwards, it will be at least well to bear in mind that Manitoba is geographically the centre of the Dominion of Canada ; that there arc no richer lands anywhere in the North-West; that the rainfall, on the whole, is more con- sistent than in any other province, and that the winters are noCANADIAN DRUMMERS. 291 more severe than in other regions where wheat can be grown with equal certainty ; and, lastly, that the wheat crop of the province in 1901, though not quite so good as 1902 (the figures of which at this writing I have not by me), was fifty million bushels, averaging slightly over twenty-five bushels an acre. Manitoba at present depends mainly tupon Eastern Canada for its manufactured goods, but even as Ontario reduces the proportion of its imports from Europe by its own increasing production so will the North-West as time goes on supply itself with a growing fraction of what Ontario and Europe now send it. The drummers of Montreal and Toronto are now abnormally active throughout the whole North-West, and are everywhere in evidence, and would, at some seasons, seem almost to form on train and steamer the majority of one's fellow-passengers. At the country hotels they are greatly to the fore, while on lonely prairie trails they may be seen urging their buggies along with the briskness characteristic of men who drive other people's horses which they have hired by the day. They are mostly young men, conversant from necessity rather than from choice— for they are mainly town-bred boys from Eastern Canada—with all the shifts necessary to get about wild countries with expedi- tion, I have travelled and talked and eaten with scores of them, and mainly pleasant and intelligent fellows. Indeed, all are intelligent. They have to be, or they would soon be relegated to some more restricted sphere or to their own devices; but the intelligence of the majority is largely confined to pushing their own line of goods, and in this their sturdy energy fills one with admiration, though it does not perhaps conduce to sustained conversation of a general kind, beyond their own immediate adventures. I am quite sure anyone who saw much of these men, as of their antitheses the farmers, would have no fear for the future of Canada, though they might tire in time perhaps of their company. Most of them are native-born Anglo-Canadians—per- haps Scotch-Canadians would be more accurate, as North British blood and North British names certainly prevail among them. Cool, self-possessed, hard-headed men, between five-and-twenty and five-and-thirty for the most part, they give you the notion, and usually the correct one, that this is only a temporary phase u 2292 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. in their lives, and that even when they are not themselves the relatives or junior partners of wholesale merchants, they will eventually use their experience to set up in wholesale or retail businesses of their own. I do not imagine that many of these smart young men propose to end their commercial careers after the manner of the rosy-faced elderly gentlemen one is familiar with, seated among a collection of mysterious packages and much tobacco smoke in the corner of an English third-class carriage. The typical Canadian drummer would usually come from what 1 suppose one must call the middle classes of the country. He is, however, as a rule exceedingly smart in the matter of attire, his linen is spotless, his clothes well-cut and up-to-date, his habits particular ; and the general dressing-rooms of Pullman cars are no slight test of these matters. He is apt to be flamboyant, and has almost always the strident voice with the Americanised accent that marks his class and his generation, and is so curiously different from the speech of the middle-aged men and women of another type in Canada and those under their influence. Indeed, it is different probably in many cases to the voice and inflections of their own fathers and mothers, and I venture to think by no means an improvement. For that matter, Canadians of discrimination from the Atlantic to the Pacific use much stronger language on this subject than there is any occasion for here or that I would venture upon. There is a uniformity about them, too. As a caste they strike one as stereotyped to a degree that you would only find in England perhaps in the latter-day public school boy, though wholly, of course, in a different style. One is naturally apt to think that in a new country there is more variety in habit and manners, more tolerance of originality. But Canadians, young men particularly, who know England well, have often remarked to me on the greater latitude and tolerance that exists among Englishmen of the same class, and how many verge on eccentricity or even step over its border line without regard to criticism, and at the same time create so very little? The modern Canadian has much more fear of being thought odd in speech, habits and opinions, and this tends in the risingCANADIAN DRUMMERS. 293 generation to a certain monotony in type, so far as matters outside business are concerned, though his bringing-up makes him at the same time nimbler-minded and more resourceful in certain emergencies than his English counterpart. The intel- lectual ardour of the Scotch, which so often flourishes among them under the most discouraging circumstances, seems to have dfed out in their Canadian descendants or have been absorbed in material or commercial energy. Relatively speaking, it leads to nothing in Canada, that is to say among the prosperous class we are discussing, so one stimulant to good reading is removed. Still the literature of the drummer on his travels is deplorable., and a Pullman car gives really admirable opportunities for reading of any kind. He is a steadfast person, however, and has a very clear notion of his aim in life, which is to " get there," without the all-con- suming passion for that one result too common over the border. Indeed, the Canadian drummer is usually a sportsman or an athlete. In his off-days in remote prairie or backwoods settle- ments he is generally ready for a crack at the ducks or a try for the trout; while the football, hockey, la crosse, baseball or aquatic contests, which draw crowds in all the Canadian cities, are the burden of his frequent discourse, and as often as not in the capacity of an old combatant. Still, business comes so obviously first in the thoughts of all these brisk young men that it is nothing but a pleasure to hear that they can be equally strenuous in their play and interested in that of others. Nor is the almost total absence of paper racing and the study of the quoted odds which extracts sovereigns and half-crowns from the pockets of middle-class British youth a matter for regret. There are a few race meetings in Canada, but they merely amuse the local public for a day or two, and permanently interest but a handful of devotees. And all this comment apnpos of a class that, judged from an English standpoint, are of small account, might be thought disproportionate. But this is not the case in Canada. The drummer in his varying degrees is a very important person and a very characteristic type. Turning, however, to business matters, the eastern drummer as time goes on will find more competition in the west itself.294 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Apart from industries that are immediately connected with its special productions, such as flour and oatmeal mills, slaughter yards and cold storages for meat export trade, and meat- packing factories, Winnipeg already manufactures boilers and machinery of all sorts, cigars, soap, grain bags, saddlery, biscuits and confectionery, tents and mattresses, brews beer, binds books, carves marble, makes bricks (with a painful liking for the white variety), builds carriages and waggons, and does various other things that do not call for enumeration here. The smaller towns, too, are emulating the example of the capital as rapidly as their capacity and their markets warrant. On running westward by the Canadian Pacific from Brandon, there is another sixty miles of rolling prairie, sprinkled with clumps of trees and cut every half-dozen miles or so by streams—though on the train you do not see them all— flowing between steep-wooded banks to meet the Assiniboine to the north or its tributary, the Souris, to the south. To describe this stretch of country would be only to repeat what we saw between Portage and Brandon—a vast wheat district, only varying, or seeming to vary, in its stage of progression by local conditions, which stimulated settlement in some spots rather than in others. But hour after hour and mile after mile the same alternations of landscape and the same objects meet the sight. Here rolling downs, there almost level plains with the same breadths of stubble, furrowed into black ribs already by gang-ploughs and quick-walking, stalwart teams; the same clumps of stacks, and green patches of summer fallow not yet bleached by frost, and tawny stretches of prairie, sprinkled here and there with stock ; the smoke and stir of steam threshers, the varied homesteads, humble or substantial, of brick or wood, the late stooks still dimpling the stubbles ; the brown reedy ponds, the flocks of crows and blackbirds, the occasional string of duck or wild geese cleaving the air, the still rarer vision of a fast-scudding prairie grouse. All these things glide by on either side of us throughout the western part of Manitoba and far into the neighbouring territory of Assiniboia. The townlets of Griswold, Routledge, Virden are passed, and at Moosemin, a quite important little place, you are out ofPRAIRIE VILLAGES. 295 Manitoban legislation, and in the vast domain of the Territories which reach hence to the Rocky Mountains and from the American border to the North Pole. All these little towns look alike from the outside, though their subtle differences and depths of jealousy and rivalry, who but those that own stores, mills, or town lots in them may tell of. Indeed, the prairie, though admirable from a practical point of view, does not lend itself to originality or art in town building. Later on, when the town gets large and wealthy and has accomplished much tree-planting and grass- sowing and decorative architecture, things are different. But in their elementary stages not much more than space, cleanliness, and fresh paint can be hoped for in the way of artistic attrac- tiveness, and if some small measure of this were accomplished the row of hideous but indispensable brown-painted elevators towering skywards in a line would crush out all sense of it at once. At all these small towns the Government have agents and offices, whither the labourer seeking work, or the land-buyer seeking land, can get particulars of the tributary country. At all of them each denomination has its church, and, indeed, two common features of the prairie landscape I have omitted to mention—I hope not because as structures they are usually so much more solid than artistic—are the country churches and the Government schools. The passing wayfarer by rail or road will realise how much thicker the country is settled than it sometimes looks to be when he stumbles on a big square brick building with a hundred comfortably-dressed children playing on the prairie around it. The four territories of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Athabasca, all larger in area than Manitoba, have their political capital at Regina pending the time when a sufficient population will entitle them to provincial honours, either in part or whole. This is not likely to be far distant, as they are already begin- ning to knock at the door for admission. Regina, too, is the headquarters of that admirable body the North-West Mounted Police. Travellers on the Canadian Pacific will notice some forty296 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. miles short of Regina, near Qu'Appelle, a long Stretch of country—almost half of it scrub woods of poplar, birch, cottonwood, pine and willow, full of ponds, where mixed farming on a small scale is in vogue. As a matter of fact however, Eastern Assiniboia is virtually an extension of Manitoba, with somewhat lighter soil as a whole, and a slightly decreasing rainfall. There are more small bunches of stock kept than is the rule in Manitoba. North of the Canadian Pacific, towards the Qu'Appelle River, which runs eastward and parallel with it, and the two railroads which traverse it, there are lands which claim to be as inexhaustively fertile as the famous Portage plains. At Indian Head there is a Government experimental farm and a fine well-settled, wealthy country. Between this place and Regina, even from the line, the traveller will see the most illimitable stretches of wheat land that his eyes have yet rested on, and the most level in surface. Here, if anywhere, he might believe the trite North-Western legend of the ploughman who starts out in the morning with his dinner which he eats at the end of his first furrow, accomplishing the return journey by nightfall. Settle- ment is going into Western Assiniboia at a great rate. In a province bigger than England and a population of seventy or eighty thousand, it may be well imagined that there is plenty of room. Several railroads already thread the country, and others are under construction. The choice of locality is so great, and the area to select from so immense, that one may well under- stand how a straw will blow the immigrant with a little means in one direction or another, a friend or an acquaintance, a chance word, a bit of passing advice. It will be well, however, for him to take his time and listen to what people have to say before settling himself. The relative virtues of various districts will form the burden of half the conversations he will hear in the course of weeks, and though the already planted settler will seldom admit that he might have done better, still the observant person with reasonable patience will surely avoid any serious error. Here, as in Manitoba, it would be futile to indicate the drift of movements and the change in local conditions, which shift so continuously as to belong to the domain of periodical literature.PRAIRIE SCENE, ASSINIBOIA, [To facep. 297.MENNONITES. 29 7 But Eastern Assiniboia is a favourite region for the planting of colonies, as well as for the enterprise of individuals. Large settlements of Mennonites have flourished there, as in Manitoba, for ten, fifteen and twenty years. They are absolutely successful and, if possessed of the virtue of frugality, to an extent that our friend the drummer will proclaim a vice ; still a community that brings great areas of wild land into cultivation and peoples a solitude with thriving villages, and never complains, may be forgiven if its wants are few and it tries to supply those by primitive and domestic manufacture. In a limited country the Mennonites' failings in this particular might be a just grievance and a drawback, but if the reader will tax his imagination for a moment and think of the area to be populated, he will smile at the notion of such hypercriticism being applied to a community who are sober, industrious, peaceable and virtuous above the common. The Mennonites have been in the North-West more than a quarter of a century, and are only now beginning to give way in some sort to modern influences. Even if it takes another two generations to make Canadians of them, what matters it ? In the meantime they are far better pioneers than a great many of those English-speaking emigrants that Canada is not unnaturally striving mainly to attract will eventually prove. The same remarks may be applied to those entertaining people the Doukhobors, about whom there has been such a pother in the past year. I was myself in the North-West during the late excitement, and the whole country rang with the tale of their famous march to Winnipeg. About eighty miles north of Indian Head, across the Yorkton branch of the Canadian Pacific, in the Swan River Valley, there are some fifteen hundred of these primitive but harmless souls occupying thirteen villages. They, like the others now in Canada, came for the most part some four years ago from the eastern shores of the Black Sea. They were Russian subjects, and being Quakers in principle, sought refuge in Canada to avoid military service. They were brought to the North-West by subscriptions raised among the Society of Friends in England and the United States, with some assistance from the Canadian Government now in power, not more though, I think, than would298 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. be extended to any communities of emigrants thus situated But in the dearth of serious political differences, and conse- quently of party cries, the antics of the Doukhobors in 1902 were hurled at the head of the Government, and for a month or so half-hearted discussions on tariff and tu quoques on corrupt political practices gave way in ordinary company to a much more animated conflict between the pro- and the #;^z-Doukhobors. The sea captain who did the actual transportation of these harmless and once down-trodden folk, some five thousand in all, has frequently described to me the strange scenes that were enacted on the shores of the Black Sea where he took them on board his ship, the brutality of the Russian officials who superintended the exodus, the long-suffering gentleness of the exiles themselves, the harrowing separation in some cases ot families. This officer, who has probably carried as many emigrants of various nationalities across the Atlantic as any commander living, is loud in praise of these particular folk, their virtue, their decency, their cleanliness. However, it is as settlers they appeal to us here, and in this capacity they have some virtues at least that the Anglo-Saxon might envy, even if they developed eccentricities which caused a nine-days'wonder and gave politicians something to talk about in the vacation. I have never been $ble to visit the Swan River valley myself, but from the many who have 1 have gathered enough informa- tion to fill the rest of this chapter if need be. To be brief, however—these people, who were given lands some three years ago by the Dominion Government, were furnished with stock and other necessaries by the Quakers of the United States. Last year they had nearly six thousand acres under crops of various kinds, all saved and threshed out early, and their barns were full to bursting, though they had no modern machinery of any kind. In architecture, as in other instances, they are as yet absolutely insensible to Western influences. Their houses, built on either side of a wide street, are of unsawn timbers covered with clay, painted white and ornamented with yellow dados. The roof tops project and form verandahs ornamented with carved woodwork. The yards in front of the house are spread with sand, swept and watered once or twice aTHE DOUKHOBORS. 299 day. The interiors are all whitewashed and spotlessly clean, and mostly consist of three or four rooms. They intend when they become more prosperous to replace these exotic-looking buildings with larger ones of stone. Their system is communistic, each village tilling its land in common. Crops go into a common store-house, money into a common fund, which is responsible even for private debts. But industry is a religion, and simplicity a normal condition, so debt is almost unknown and Doukhobor credit is high with the town merchants. As a customer, however, the Doukhobor, like the Mennonite, does not commend himself to the Anglo-Saxon trader, for he makes everything he possibly can at home. The women work the old spinning-wheels, using their own wool and flax for cloth and linen, and are admirable with the needle. When they take a rare holiday and want a little thorough dissipation they make straw baskets as presents for their friends. The men are skilled in all handiwork, carving, carpentry and masonry. The women, in such time as they may have to spare, share in the field labour of the men, not with any sense of drudgery but with a light heart and a feeling of sociability. There seems to be no ill-treatment, no quarrel- ling among them. At threshing time the women sit on the sheaves engaged on fancy work, with the children playing around them. Others help the men to make a huge circle, all using their flails and singing, while in another place horses are trampling out the grain in prehistoric fashion, and all virtually in sight of the latest harvesting and threshing outfits, manned by the North-Western type of Anglo-Saxon. Was there ever in the world such a contrast of men, manners and customs—such a strange blending of the East and the West ? But this will change in time, when the Doukhobors acquire money enough to buy machinery. Their morals, unfortunately, will be no doubt less patriarchal. Cleanliness of person is a leading canon of the Doukhobor faith. A public bath-house is an accessory of every village and is used daily. In the summer months outdoor bathing is freely indulged in, and the Anglo-Saxon is just the very man to be most scandalised by the spectacle of both sexes bathing together as they came into the world. The extra- ordinary simplicity and gentleness of the Doukhobors* character,300 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. their conspicuous morality, weigh nothing with him—West- minster or Winnipeg, it is all the same. No doubt the Doukhobors will in time develop a proper modesty in this respect and will re-adjust their morals in other respects to the Anglo-Saxon level. The Doukhobor does not indulge in ceremonious or costly weddings. The bridal couple merely make a declaration before their elders ; but still, if the husband beat his wife, his life is made no longer worth living, by the community, though such public examples are, I believe, seldom required. Their religion is practically the Bible, but the Bible as handed down and circulated orally. Whatever their creed, their practice is calculated to make most of us feel moral worms, and to hear them condemned by an average politician is quite delightful. But no doubt they will improve, as I see in the papers they are to have schools of their own, and will achieve our standard of life and morals, and possibly develop into successful drummers and enterprising real estate agents. Hitherto the parent has imparted what instruction is thought necessary. They are said to be generous and charitable to their English-speaking neighbours when the victims of flood, frost or fire. Above all, there seems to be no self-consciousness in the practice of such virtues as the Doukhobors possess. What appear deeds of heroic self- abnegation to us progressives are to them a mere matter of duty, and neither reward nor praise is looked for. Hospitality to the stranger, which resents compensation as an insult, is also a cardinal virtue. On the whole, I think we may write them down as outside our comprehension, but it would be a thousand pities to keep them out of the country. I wonder if the hetero- geneous colonies of Britishers, who are being planted in communities, will lead such strenuous, temperate, uncomplaining and blameless lives, and produce as much. I do not envy the conductor of the personally-conducted Briton on a large scale, but let us hope for the best. But every rose has its thorn, and that of the Doukhobor—if it may be called a thorn—is an intemperance of religious zeal which set all Canada astir. This intemperance is not normal, and apparently requires occasional kindling from some far-awayTHE MARCH OF THE DOUKHOBORS. 301 Oriental source, but the firebrands turned up last year and persuaded a thousand or so out of the five thousand actually settled in the country that they should get rid of all their live stock, as being a constant temptation to people who, I should have noted, are strict vegetarians, and partly that it is against the Divine law to work animals as beasts of burden. A portion of the live stock, therefore, which the kindly Quakers of America had given to these unsophisticated co-sec- tarians on the Swan River, was turned loose, and thus wandering, and no doubt wondering what the matter was, caused something of a sensation. Men and women then took the place of horses and oxen in the Doukhobor ploughs, harrows, and carts. This caused a considerable outcry among the neighbouring settlers, whose sense of rural economy was outraged. Still, the trouble might have blown over if a crusade, stimulated by strange doctrines detrimental to the welfare of a new country, had not set in. Over the details of this march towards Winnipeg we must not linger, but some eight or nine hundred men, accompanied by numbers of their women and children, started out in the begin- ning of November, having filled their pockets with apples and little more. The head-lines of the Press announced the pilgrimage in characteristic and humorous fashion—"TheDouk- hobors fill up with apples and start out to convert Winnipeg." After a few days of more or less hardship, the women and children were despatched home again by dint of a judicious mixture of force and persuasion. But the men tramped on over the fast wintering prairie in solid ranks, twenty deep, singing strange hymns. The authorities intervened, begged and prayed them to turn back, warning them through interpreters of the madness of their enterprise. It was no use. They had a mission to conquer the world for Jesus, Who neither smoked (they told those who poked fun at them), drank whisky, nor yet committed murder and theft. The first snowstorms fell, but the fanatics still tramped on, a harmless, peaceful, incomprehensible phalanx, sleeping in sheds, railway trucks or on the open prairie, and buying in the towns such provisions as were abso- lutely necessary. I believe their unselfishness towards one another during these trying if superfluous hardships was a302 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. marvel to see. To shorten a long and strange story, one too in which pathos and humour are curiously mixed, the Mounted Police at length took them seriously in hand and more or less forcibly deposited them in railway cars and took them home. Active resistance was, of course, against their creed, but what could be effected short of this the Doukhobors did, forming themselves into groups somewhat of the nature of Rugby foot- ball scrimmages, out of which melees each man had to be extracted singly by the stalwart members of the North-Western Mounted Police and loaded on to the car, till the rest, seeing the case was absolutely hopeless, gave way under protest and went peaceably on board the train. So ended this remarkable pilgrimage, during which some people, mainly Conservatives, said it was scandalous of the Government to fill up the North- West with foreigners and lunatics, while others, mainly Liberals, said this was only a temporary ebullition under the influence of some fanatics from abroad, that only a fraction of the Doukho- bors were involved in it, and that their sterling virtues far outweighed what was, after all, only a practical and temporary disturbance. These seemed to me the more reasonable views of the matter, and are apparently justified by the latest news from the Douk- hobor settlements, which reports them not merely as restored to their normal sanity and industry but as inclined to abandon the communistic system of farming and to divide their lands into ordinary freeholds. The cattle and horses which these simple souls had turned loose in their temporary craze were collected by the authorities and sold for the benefit of those who had owned them. A new and better prophet seems to have arrived recently at the Swan River and successfully laid the ghost of these strange phantasies, of which we shall probably see and hear nothing more. At Saltcoates too, in Eastern Assiniboia, on the Yorkton branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway, is another colony, and a more recent one, which has a peculiar interest, namely, the Welsh Patagonians. It will be remembered that many years ago a community of Welshmen, not unreasonably possessed of the idea that they could get the benefits of a new country andTHE WELSH COLONY. 303 still preserve to their children's children born in it their Cymric tongue and nationality, settled in Patagonia. Their hopes seem to have been partially at least justified so far as their own efforts were concerned, but the vagaries of the Argentine Government produced a longing in the heart of the Welsh exiles to be once more under the British flag, even at the risk of seeing their native tongue give way to one of the many varieties of Saesneg spoken on the North-Western prairies. So there they are at Saltcoates, having removed thence almost in a body from Pata- gonia vid Liverpool, where they were lionised and feasted for a few days and despatched to happier climes with the especial benediction of Mr. Chamberlain. As ready-made colonists on the best of land, their future, I should imagine, need give their friends in Wales no further concern. And we shall no doubt shortly hear of Eisteddfods in Eastern Assiniboia, in which the discovery of America by Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd, and his settlement there, three centuries before Columbus, will, I trust, be duly celebrated. Having said this much of settlement by colony ancient and modern, I should like before we pull up at Regina, and by way of encouragement to male settlers, and still more because the scene of the exploit was not a hundred miles distant from the territorial capital, to relate the performances of two lone females, a mother and daughter, who, robbed by death of their natural protector, are running a ranch by their own unassisted efforts. My authority is a well-known medical man, who inspects the locality in the Government service and knows these courageous ladies well. They are Americans, of good education, and, the doctor says, of refinement and good looks as well. The husband died over two years ago and left them stranded on a small ranch with some cattle and horses, on which a chattel mortgage had been laid. The mother and daughter then decided to run the place them- selves, and, in their own words, as they had to do the work of men they adopted the clothes of men. Last summer they milked fifteen cows, filled the contract for supplying the North-West Mounted Police of the district with butter, and had a large surplus for sale. They had also two hundred and seventy-five head of cattle and forty horses. They cut and stacked without304 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. help a hundred tons of hay, branded sixty-five calves, and built an addition to their house, the lumber and shingles for which they hauled themselves from the railroad, seventy miles distant. They also fenced in their garden, an acre in extent. They can rope a steer or ride a horse, says the doctor, as well as their male neighbours. They intend to live like this until they have paid off the debt on their stock, when they will continue ranching but will hire labour. One of the most all-round accomplished ranchmen between Winnipeg and the Pacific, an Englishman of the public- school type and a man of the world generally, holds very strong views on the part that women play, and yet more could play, if given a freer hand in a settler's life. Alluding particularly to settlers of his own class from the old country, he thinks that the women, whether wives or sisters, when they do come may be a strong factor in business success, and that they have more ballast and sense than the average men of their kind and could be consulted with advantage on outdoor matters more often than they are, provided of course that they have the strength and elasticity to stand a western life at all. This, from a bachelor of high repute in all rural business and a long experience, may be worth setting down here. As fruit and dairy or poultry farmers there is not the faintest doubt that many women of education have the germ of success within them, if not the experience. And if they could sometimes persuade their husbands and brothers to work under their direction, a greater measure of success might fall to the younger sons. Unhappily, domestic cares falling, as a matter of course, to the woman, she does not have a chance to show her mettle in the field. Regina has only some three thousand people, but it is a great distributing point. It stands unrelieved upon the flat prairie and makes no pretence to ornateness, but only to the more substantial glories of elevators, mills, stores, and budding factories. It is the headquarters of the Mounted Police, whose nine hundred men are scattered over the country from the Red River to the Rockies, and the residence of the Lieutenant- Governor of the Territories. Hence too starts northward theAMERICAN LAND COMPANIES. 305 important branch of the Canadian Pacific to Prince Albert and the centre of the district of Saskatchewan, so called from those two great rivers which, draining its whole length from west to east and uniting near Prince Albert, pour their waters into Lake Winnipeg. The Portage branch of the C. P. R., and also the well-known Canadian Northern, are making their way too from the east into the heart of the province. It is at Regina more particularly that one comes face to face with one of the great facts of North-Western development, that of American immigration. For the country to the northward, both in Assiniboia and beyond into Saskatchewan, being as yet sparsely settled, has proved most attractive to the American land companies who mainly organise the movement, purchasing in the first instance large blocks of land and then dividing them. Some twenty miles north of Regina the Saskatchewan Land Company, with headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota, own a block of land, roughly speaking, a hundred miles by seventy in extent, or to be literal, own every other section in it. For the surveys of these countries resemble a chessboard on the maps—the white squares representing the Government sections (six hundred and forty acres), which are open to homesteaders only, and cannot be sold for money. The company buy the alternate squares, usually coloured red, over the space above indicated, from the railway, at (let us say) three to five dollars an acre. They then use all their energies to retail these lands at seven to eight dollars to immigrant farmers from the United States. Immense efforts are made'to boom the land, and experienced agents are sent throughout the districts which are expected to produce a good supply of buyers. The advanced retail price is fair and equitable. Individuals could not get it at the price paid for a great tract by the company, and if they did they would be solitary atoms in a still unsettled wilderness. The company take the risk of reselling their land, and spend a further sum in doing so. Moreover, the settler who has bought his quarter, half or whole section from the company, finds himself very frequently adjoining a block of Government free land, which he can annex to his purchase at the rate of one hundred and sixty acres per grown male member of his family. The homestead306 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. conditions of partial residence and improvement offer no difficulty to the man who owns and farms the adjoining land, and these incoming Americans seem to have no objection to taking the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, which is the further condition of a title to Government land when the three-year probation is up. Frequently the large companies sell off blocks of their purchase to smaller ones, but I do not think I must take up space with the methods of the American land companies in the Canadian North-West. Nor need I indicate their several localities, for west of Manitoba, which as a longer developed province was less available, they may be found operating in almost all directions. It will be a suitable opportunity here, however, to say something of a movement which is quite the most curious and interesting, as well as the most important, of the various phases of North-Western development, for reasons which will, I think, appear. For years, nay for generations, the United States sucked Canada of much of her increase and much of her most vigorous blood. Till a few years ago the notion of American farmers coming to settle in Canada would have been scouted as a joke. The boot was wholly on the other leg. But two strong and sufficiently obvious causes have made for this remarkable change. One is, that all the free and cheap-priced virgin soils of the western States of good quality have been occupied. There are vast spaces still unsettled, but the shrewd and experienced farmer will not give his time and attention to second or third class land when he can do better, and most of these American immigrants are free agents in this particular, not men driven out by bad times or pressure. The second cause is the development of the Canadian North-West in the matter of railroads, its proven capacity for growing and getting to market the best wheat crops in North America, and its abundance of cheap land now accessible to markets. Though Americans began to come in a few years ago, it is only in the last three years that the influx has achieved any large proportions, while the future possibilities of the movement may be greater still. But the present is all we are concerned with here. It is not only the quantity but even more the quality of these Americans thatA. MIXEp FARM ON THE PRAIRIE, [To face p. 307,AMERICAN SETTLERS. 307 invests this business with such importance. A few Canadians in the west and still more in the east profess alarm for the future of the British connection in view of this growing influx, but that is another matter which will come up later. For the practical needs of the country, never in her short history has she received such valuable settlers. Among the makers of the North-West the Ontario farmer as a class stands immeasur- ably ahead of the rest, but the Ontario farmer was new to prairie farming and prairie conditions, and as a rule he had very little money. These Americans, however, have, as a class, every industrial and economic virtue of the Ontario farmer, and have been prairie farming all their lives, and furthermore have far more money to start with than the others had. Lastly, any Canadian on the spot will admit them to be possessed of a peculiar mixture of verve, buoyancy and enterprise, an inde- finable kind of combination that is not found in quite the same degree even among His Majesty's industrious and energetic subjects in the Canadian North-West. That poor men of energy should flow from the States into the Canadian west will seem natural enough after what I have said, but the greater number of these people are well off, and the reader may perhaps wonder how they come to be, or being so, should wish to begin life afresh on the wild prairie. To dispose of the last question first, it must be remembered that the prairie in these days of railroads is no longer wild and lonely in the old sense, more particularly to people who settle in large colonies, and least of all to men of means who thoroughly understand prairie farming, can build good barns and houses, and go to work on a good scale right away. The secret of the money, or, rather, the source of it, is also interesting. Now, most of these people come from the western States of Minnesota, the Dakotas or Iowa, a minority from Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, and elsewhere. Speak- ing broadly, they come from the belt of country that in the 'seventies or early 'eighties was the " Far West," and was then settled as the Canadian West is now being settled, on free grants or cheap lands. Those settlers are now middle-aged or elderly men, with families grown or growing up around them. The farms they gave nothing or next to nothing for as bare prairie are now x 2308 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. worth forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy dollars an acre, and the usual area will be a half-section, three hundred and twenty acres. This increase of value is not only on account of the buildings, fences, and the numerous improvements consequent on long occu- pation, but on account also of the great increase of population and wealth in their neighbourhood. Moreover, things are very prosperous just now in the States, and prices are high, and the sale of land, which sometimes is very dull, is brisk—an occasion which wise men seize. The Iowa farmer, to take a commdn example, with his two or three sons, cannot spread out of his three hundred and twenty acres, as he is surrounded by neighbours in like position with equally valuable farms. His own farm, though built on, fenced, and beautified, produces no more, perhaps, being rich prairie, than it did when he first broke it up as a young man, probably not so much. And it certainly produces nothing like the yield of small grain that land across the Canadian border docs. It will be readily seen, then, how much a man thus situated gains by converting such a place into ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand dollars in cash, and securing twice or three times the amount of still better land by purchase and homesteading for a third of. the money, and having a comparatively large capital still in hand, or left on mortgage. He has then a farm for each of his sons, and the increase of value he has witnessed in Iowa must, in all human probability, take place in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan or Alberta. A strong affection for locality rarely weighs in the scale with a Western American. Breaking fresh prairie is no novelty or hardship to him. Indeed, the excitement of the move, with its prospects, has probably some actual attraction. As to trans- ferring his residence to the shelter of the British flag, and perhaps his actual allegiance to it, this tickles the ears of onlookers immensely, but I do not think it troubles the person mostly concerned very much. In the first place, it is possible he may be a Canadian born or the son of one, for thousands of Canadians in former days went to the Western States, having then no region of their own ready for them. But even if a true American, he is not likely to have a "revolutionary ancestor," but is probably of mixed strain, German, Scandinavian, English orAMERICAN SETTLERS. 309 Irish, with a nineteenth century advent only on the Western Continent. This, I think, is a fair average sample of the American settler in the Canadian North-West. Some have much more money, some much less, but as a class they are extremely substantial, and when Capital has the knowledge and experience behind it that these men have, it becomes doubly significant. I travelled at different times with hundreds of them and talked with scores, all land buyers, actual or potential. I sat betimes with the agents of the Government or Canadian Pacific Railway in the land offices where newcomers off the train from the States were making their first enquiries, and I have seen some of them already settled on their farms. These breezy individuals do not, as a rule, wait for their confidence to be invited, and are accessible, to a degree, in train or hotel. Many, of course, are young men who have become possessed very likely of the family farm in Dakota or Minnesota, and are tempted to sell at what is its high-water mark of value, and invest only a part of the money in more productive land here. Some, again, will be representing a group of neighbours or relatives and spying out the country. The European immigrant with capital is always despatched with the time-honoured and no doubt sage counsel to secrete the fact of his substance with sleepless vigilance, and to pose as a poor but honest man, whose livelihood now and always depended upon the sweat of his brow, till experience enabled him to burst with safety upon his new friends in the light of a bloated capitalist and the possessor of one or more thousand pounds. Sound advice as this is for the average tenderfoot, and very rarely observed, by the way, the tenderfoot being human, I have known it carried to ludicrous lengths, and much superfluous and profitless discomfort induced by posing in this character. But the Western American has no such tremors, and will define his exact financial situation to the whole company of an hotel office or a railroad car, if they care to listen, with a confidence bespeak- ing his complete ability to take care of himself. The British emigrant again is inoculated with a holy terror of real estate agents, and dodges them as he would the emissaries of the devil,3io CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. to fall sometimes into the hands of some "thundering decent chap,"—an old University or Army man, possibly—who goes through him in shady haunts that a real estate agent in local practice could not afford even to be seen in. The American has no fear of this much-abused profession; he regards him as what he is, a necessary and presumably respectable factor in the transfer of land, beats up his quarters and examines his lists, and, if he ultimately buys a farm that is upon them, he does not hold the agent responsible for the whole of his future life— even to the drinking of too much whiskey, should it come to that. Nor does he regard the regulation percentage paid by the vendor as somehow filched out of his own pocket, but as a normal business transaction, without which the exchange of land could not exist. There are plenty of unscrupulous people in the real estate business, as in others, but you rarely hear a Canadian or an American talking about the trade after the hysterical fashion so common among English settlers or new arrivals. I never myself came across any of the personally-conducted parties of American land viewers under the guidance of the officials of the various American syndicates. Since this book was being prepared for the Press, however, humorous accounts have come to hand concerning the way in which these parties are guarded from any possible contact with the local profession. Special trains are chartered, and during necessary sojourns in Winnipeg, Regina, or elsewhere, special quarters are engaged for the potential selectors of the syndicate's lands, and a strict guard jkept over their goings out and their comings in, and a vigilant watch against the local enemy, who might beguile them away by tales of more tempting pastures or more prolific wheat lands. I note, moreover, by the latest Government statistics, that 37,000 Americans have gone into the North-West in the year ending June, 1903, against 35,000 British and the same number of foreigners. These are the largest figures chronicled since the country was opened. None of the many Americans whose acquaintance I myself made expressed the least objection to living under the British flag. Other things seemed to them so much more important, and, of course, they really are, seeing how slight the difference isAMERICAN AND CANADIAN FARMERS. 311 between the conditions of life on either side, and that nationality, devoid of any race significance, amounts really to so very little where common interests are involved to the average working man. If these men were New Englanders of old colonial stocks, there would be more in it, but being what they are, they will mostly, beyond a doubt, become good Canadians in a generation. That, at any rate, is the opinion of most Western Canadians. The American settler finds virtually the same laws obtaining here as in Iowa or Minnesota, only better administered, as he often admits. As he does not belong to the rowdy pistol-shooting element, he is naively pleased and surprised to find himself in a country where a man who deliberately kills another is hung to a dead certainty. Some of them were almost incredulous such a thing could be, though they wholly approved of it, not being, as I have said, of the assassin class themselves. They are moreover much interested in education, and will be quite sure to do their part in all local questions. Indeed, the Mounted Police in their red tunics, cantering over the prairie or boarding the train as passengers, were about the only objects that seemed to strike them as really novel and strange. The mere feeling that there were individuals in the country who could command their actions in arbitrary fashion if need be, and at the same time absolutely protect them, must be a queer sensation to a Western American, whose personal security is dependent wholly on the peaceful disposition and common sense of his neighbours, and whose very judges have not infrequently been themselves assassins, and think nothing of it. As a matter of fact, there is so little outward difference between a Western American and a North-Western Ontario-bred Canadian of the respectable farming class, that I have often listened to them talking together, and felt quite confident that a New Yorker or Virginian could not distinguish one from the other, much less an Englishman. Indeed, in speech and appearance they are practically the same, yet one knows there are certain differences of outlook, and that the Canadian Westerner, though every bit as good a man in definable, and perhaps better things, has not quite the breadth and dash, if one may use such terms about farmers, as his Western American neighbour. He certainly has312 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. not the self-possession, for I have been more than once entertained by hearing one of the latter engage the attention of an entire railway car full of miscellaneous people by a conversation originally started with those sitting close around him. Of course, this has its absurd side. Writers in American maga- zines afflicted with spread-eagleism enlarge on the Americanisa- tion of the Canadian North-West. Men who scarcely know wheat from oats, who have never crossed the Canadian border, draw upon their vivid imagination for a forecast of what the American settlers in Canada will do and how they will sap the loyalty of the Canadians. Statistics are quoted without any pretence to even approximate accuracy. The Manitoban wheat farmer is pictured by these cockney scribblers in New York or Chicago as a sort of French habitant, standing amazed at the American farmer who is bursting on his vision with a two-storied frame house and a brand-new self-binder, and the blessings of annexation to be thrown in some day when he is "educated up to it" As a reverse picture to this, though not exactly pertinent, was an astounding account of the Canadian military forces, as seen by an eyewitness, and related in three columns of a Southern newspaper which I read the other day in America. The writer said that there were half a million dead shots in Canada, all with their secret orders for a prompt invasion of the United States in case of war, and that the slaughter they would create would make the South African War seem child's play. All these men could hit the bull's-eye every shot at five hundred yards. The entire population were absorbed in rifle shooting, and took their position in life from the number of consecutive bull's-eyes they could make. Boys of fourteen and men of sixty carried the lives of scores of sleek, unsuspicious, inoffensive American citizens in their cartridge pouches. Matches, said this imaginative jour- nalist, could not be completed in Canada, for the marksmen went on making bull's-eyes till the sun set on their provoking auto- matic accuracy, and all these were not regular soldiers, but lawyers, tradesmen, clerks and farmers. The warning columns were interspersed with terrific "scare-heads," and Canada was depicted as hurling these half-million dead shots—who, by theAMERICAN JOURNALISTS ON CANADA. 313 way, drilled all the spare time they had over from rifle shooting —with irresistible swiftness on the ill-prepared Americans, sweeping roughriders and regulars like flies from their path, and dictating humiliating terms of peace to the great American people at Washington. Now all this was perfectly serious, though how much the author expected his readers to believe of it, and how much he believed himself, is another matter. That all these things can be gravely printed are evidence of the extraordinary darkness of the average American concerning Canada and everything in it. As regards rifle shooting, the condition of that useful pastime in Canada stands very much as it does in England, a few members of each volunteer regiment practising it with an ordinary average of skill, and, as in the Old Country, with a little more enthusiasm since the South African War,CHAPTER XIII. Forty miles west of Regina is Moosejaw, a little town of over two thousand people, that no stretch of local enthusiasm could call attractive. It is a railroad centre, however, and the Soo line from St. Paul's, the favourite route of American immigrants, runs in here. So the traveller will sometimes have an unsought opportunity of making a prolonged examination of the ugliest little town on the prairies, so far as my experience goes. Its original name was The-Creek-where-the-white-man- mended-a-cart-with-a-moose-jawbone, but this cumbrous appella- tion was shaken off long before the railroad reached it, as may be readily believed. Here, speaking approximately, you pass out of Eastern into Western Assiniboia, or, to be more explicit, out of the grain belt into the ranching country. All the way here from Manitoba, the rainfall graduallydecreases, though the Regina country, with its big crops, in a normal year tells its own tale of sufficient moisture; but there is admittedly more risk of drought even there than at Brandon or Portage. After Moosejaw, how- ever, you are virtually in a ranching country and inside the semi-arid belt Bunches of cattle or horses begin to show on the bleak, rolling plains. Homesteads wax scarce, and often exhibit the disregard of personal comfort not unusual among ranchmen. For miles, perhaps, there is no sign of man or beast, so wide are the ranges and so far scattered the haunts of those in charge of them. The Canadian Land and Ranch Company operates at various points throughout this country, and very largely in sheep, for which South-Western Assiniboia is a notable district: but you would have to ride or drive immense distances over the face of the country and cover vast solitudes in any actual inspection. As a mere traveller in the train, however, it is an extremely striking run from Moosejaw to Medicine Hat, the next place of importance—two hundred andSHEEP RANCHE AND IRRIGATION DITCH. [To face p. 314.PRAIRIE FIRES. 315 fifty miles beyond. You have passed into another land ; crops and stacks have vanished; the sad, rolling plain, sometimes culminating in distant hills, sometimes sweeping away into infinite distance, is as Nature made it. No more ploughs, no more threshing outfits, no black roads traversed by buggies or waggons, no snug farm- houses to speak of, no varied colouring but that which cloud and sunshine makes on the never-ending, grassy sweeps. The breaks in this solitude, and you may see for ten, fifteen or twenty miles in the clear autumn air, are not worth considering, they seem so few; and, for the first time since leaving Winnipeg, a traveller who had not left the line might feel that sense of awe which a vast expanse containing no suggestion of human life conveys. This was once a great buffalo country. The trails by which they travelled in their hundreds of thousands and for countless ages till thirty years ago are yet distinct upon the prairie. Alkali shows its milky tints plainly in the ponds or half-dry marshes. Lakes, many of them miles long and many white with alkali, glimmer in the middle distance, and strings of wild- fowl, geese or ducks wing their way to haunts, peradventure beyond the reach of sportsmen. Now and again, but not often, for they are lost in the space, a band of cattle or horses show like small dots upon the plain. Thus, for a hundred and fifty miles or more, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, you pursue a track whose mysterious lone- liness even the sociable and cheerful interior of a Pullman car does not diminish. I was once privileged to see nearly the whole of this country on fire. For most of an afternoon and the first half of the night we were passing through burning prairie without intermission. I must hasten to say, however, that the grass here is quite short, that the flame is not more than two or three feet high on the uplands, and the only damage it can do is to the pasture it consumes, which takes two or three years to recover. Fireguards (strips of ploughed land) follow the rail- road on either side throughout this wild country, while every ranch or station is similarly protected. But I shall not soon forget the gorgeous spectacle which these miles of burning prairie presented when night fell. Why these fires were thus raging in every direction for over a hundred miles I do not316 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. know, for so much injury is done by them that the Government appoints regular officers all over Canada, both in the woods and on the prairies, to watch, give warning and take precautions generally. Still, a lighted match or the camp-fire of an irre- sponsible wayfarer has been known again and again to destroy leagues of country and to ruin hundreds of people. On this occasion, the trails of fire traced themselves in wriggling lines to distances far remote, throwing up sheets of flame and driving sparks whenever they reached a patch of long grass or a thicket of stunted willows, while distant hills, covered with ranker growth, probably scrub woodland, were burning furiously and glowed like hot coals. Prairie and sky had been both obliterated by night, against whose black curtain these lines of flame following for miles the contour of a rolling, invisible country, made an impressive spectacle from the car window. The whole run from Winnipeg and the Red River is a steady rise, or a mounting, rather, of long steps. Western Assinitoia is with Alberta the third and last step to the foot of the mountains. Throughout it the rainfall is too light for any sure dependence, while, as the pasture is good and the influence of the Chinooks felt through the winter, it is more generally a stock and, particularly, a sheep country, Shropshires and Southdowns being the chief breeds, and about two thousand the usual number in a flock. These winter well on the prairie and require no artificial feed. The elevation of Western Assiniboia is well over two thousand feet, and the influence of the warm Chinook winds, which blow periodically through the winter from the Rockies over Southern Alberta, is felt distinctly as far into this province as Moosejaw—scientific people will tell you, much further. Here, too, as I have said, was a great resort of the buffalo during the years prior to their extermination. These old monarchs of the prairie are now already beginning to assume the role of prehistoric animals with the present generation. And to those of us only in middle life, and perhaps unconscious of much decrease in activity, it seems strange to remember that among our friends and contemporaries in age, even if the privilege was denied to us, we knew many who hunted buffalo in this very country. Indeed, as I amBUFFALO RUNNING. 3i7 writing this chapter, mere accident brings under the same roof a friend who hunted in this region as early as 1868, for two or three years, with the regular buffalo-runners, and has virtually lived in the country ever since, to wax prosperous on broad acres that have gone in his locality from twenty-five cents to twenty-five dollars an acre. The party he hunted with, in the years 1868 and 1869, were about a hundred in number, and it was a purely commercial affair. Buffalo, curiously enough, were thicker at that period than ever before, the wave of settle- ment pressing through the North-Western States of the Union had driven them by thousands to seek refuge among their fellows in the solitudes beyond the Canadian border, and swelled the normal supply there to great proportions. One has to make a mental effort to realise the vastness of these herds as one reads and hears of them. They were not like shy bunches of big game, a few dozen or so who vanished panic-stricken out of sight. The buffalo did not shift much for a few casual horse- men. Perhaps he realised that as the latter could always run him down if he chose, it was not worth while. At any rate, I have heard again and again from eyewitnesses that they have ridden from sunrise till sunset practically through a continuous herd of buffalo, a herd broken, of course, into groups and sprinkled over the plain, but always present in great numbers. The friend above-mentioned, however, recalls the method of his hundred associates, a usual one at that day, but doubtless unfamiliar to many now. For, having ridden up to a herd, they would form into long line and gallop after and into them. No shot was fired, however, till all the weaklings—the very old bulls and cows —had dropped behind the horsemen, when the leader gave the signal by firing his rifle. Then the slaughter began, after the manner of a pursuit; each man singling out beast after beast and giving it a bullet at a few feet distant—never stopping to see if it fell, but riding on and firing shot after shot into others, till the order to halt was sent forward. Then even the hardened hunter sometimes sickened and felt some pity as the work of slaughtering the wounded and dying proceeded. Some of the unfortunate animals still lumbered slowly along, bleeding and snorting,^ some dragged their hindquarters; some stung to318 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. impotent fury, with just enough strength left to charge the hunter, whose horse was trained to avoid the impact; while others were stretched lifeless or helpless on the plain. Robes had by then become the main object of pursuit, though worth at that time, I think, less than ten dollars apiece. A buffalo robe is now worth two hundred! In the old Indian and half-breed days the buffalo had been hunted chiefly for its meat, and the supply was far greater than the demand. The robes had been useful and saleable, but within limits. But when these came into general demand as the best known protection for rich and poor against the North American winter cold, particularly in driving; simultaneously with improved weapons and a readier access to the western plains, the days of the buffalo were numbered. In the Western States expeditions were fitted out for their slaughter by merchants and tradesmen. Millions, speaking literally, were killed, and many of these so wantonly and in such weather that their corpses, some with the very hides on, which were the raison detre of their slaughter, could be seen festering in the sun on the plains of Nebraska and Dakota. Three or four years, incredible though it seems, was sufficient for the complete extinction of the species. The years 1877 or 1878 saw the last one vanish from the surface of the United States, and I do not think the Canadian North-West held any much longer. For years their bones whitened the plains, and even yet are collected and crushed for fertilizer. Their trails, however, will not be so easily extinguished. Far away in the extreme north, beyond civilisation and the Mackenzie River, a timber buffalo still exists and is killed by the Indians who hunt in those remote latitudes. The only genuine buffalo remaining in Canada are two small lots in captivity—the one near Winnipeg, the other, as we shall see, at Banff. Still, one must remember that cattle, horses, and sheep have taken the place of the original denizen of the plains, who had to go, and, perhaps, the ruthless fashion in which he was wiped out is, after all, more dramatic than really important. Here, at Dunmore Junction, the southern branch of the Canadian Pacific leaves the main line and sweeps away through the extreme south of Alberta into the mining districts ofTHE REBELLION OF 1885. 319 the Rockies to Nelson, Rossland and other growing hives of industry, thence to strike north again to the main line at Revelstoke. Here, too, at intervals on the lonely stretches, which for four hundred miles encompass the line from Moosejaw to Medicine Hat and Calgary, you will see apparitions quite uncharacteristic of Manitoba. Sometimes a solitary stockman on a broncho, cantering with collie dogs across the waste, will come for a moment into view. Then again bunches of cattle coralled in yards and knots of horsemen hovering outside, give significance to some lonely station house. The white tents of Indians, Cree* or Blackfoot, indicate the neighbourhood of the large reserva- tions which are still assigned to them, and round about both men and squaws may be seen, mounted on their ponies and still tricked out in almost their pristine gaudiness. And, speaking of Indians, it was due north of Medicine Hat, away on the North Saskatchewan, that the last rebellion in Canada, that of 1885, took place. The half-breeds of Sas- katchewan, naturally inimical to settlement, broke out in revolt and invited the notorious Louis Riel of 1870, whose life had then been spared and who had since lived in Montana, to come over and lead them. Worse still, they incited many of the Indians to join them, while the others were only kept quiet with the utmost difficulty. The settlers and the mounted police were cooped up and besieged at Battleford, Edmonton, Prince Albert, and one or two other places, and several isolated groups were massacred. Some two thousand formidable warriors were in the field in March, and there was no help nearer than Eastern Canada, connection with which was not yet completed, east of Port Arthur, by the Canadian Pacific Railway. With great and creditable despatch, however, several thousand volunteers, all of course unused to fighting, were sent to the Saskatchewan, and after several engagements and the loss of about one hundred and fifty of the troops in killed and wounded, the rebellion was quashed. Riel, neither deserving nor getting any further mercy, was this time hung with several others. It was a critical period, however, not merely because the two thousand or so rebels on the war path were accomplished prairie warriors and fine shots,320 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY while the bulk of the Canadians were from the East, and practically citizen soldiers like the Queen's Westminsters or the Blankshire Yeomanry; but because all the Indians of the North West had been wrought up to a pitch of excitement, that in the event of a severe check to the Canadian troops might have resulted in a general rising, and the whole frontier had to be patrolled. Things have moved with rapid strides since those days. Such an outbreak now would be absolutely impossible, even if the conditions which caused it had not long ceased to exist. Even Pullman cars have their unavoidable drawbacks. Un- trained or half-trained children, who are much more frequent in Canada than in England, being perhaps the most serious. One makes infinite allowance, of course, for the trial that a two, three or four day journey must be to the juvenile temperament, and as much more for the parents of a brood in transition. Prolonged squalling of children who are old enough to walk about means deficient elementary training, so good judges tell me. Still, the mischief is done before the doting or weak-minded parents board the train, and the public must suffer in patience for their lack of parental sagacity. But there are ways of plaguing fellow- passengers which a lusty family between three and ten years seem well to understand that are inexcusable, and conduce in no sort of way to their healthy recreation. In all countries, easily headed by the United States in this particular, there are parents who under these circumstances, and to the unsympathetic eye of the long-suffering stranger, seem to be virtually lunatics, and when they are at large in a Pullman car there is no escape but the smoke room, which may not be convenient and for a lady is impossible. The Ethiopian custodian of the sleeping car is in most ways a useful and handy man, but you could hardly expect him to be a disciplinarian. I once, however, saw him turn on a woman who knitted persistently and serenely while her four prodigies ran races in the gangway, varied by steeplechases over the seats. She was travelling from Montreal to Calgary, and the prospect before her travelling companions was serious. Even the coloured gentleman could not stand this, and after several fruitless warnings the whole brood suddenly disappeared. I think he must have put them out on to the prairie. At any[To face p. 321.CALGARY. 321 rate, there was no other " sleeper " on the train, and we none of us ever fathomed the mystery or cared to, being so full of gratitude to our preserver. Calgary differs in most respects from all the other little growing towns to the east of it. I am not alluding, of course, to its architecture but its situation and environment. Lying on the banks of a broad river that has the features and character of a huge mountain stream, cold, clear and tumbling upon a rocky bed ; girdled with swelling hills, through which other mountain- born streams come breaking their way, and with the distant, though lofty background of the Rocky Mountains, snow-peaked and savage of outline, cutting the sky, the little capital of the north-west ranching country is quite unique. We are now over three thousand feet above the sea, having risen more than two- thirds of that distance since leaving Winnipeg. The autumn air is crisp and exhilarating; the foliage along the streams, willow, poplar and cotton wood, is red or gold ; the rolling downs above are tawny from the first night frosts, and the waters green rather than amber in their transparency as becomes those that rise amid snowy mountains. Calgary contains about five thousand people and is growing rapidly. It has many fine blocks built of a grey stone quarried in the neighbourhood, which is singularly soft to work and obligingly hardens with time. The shops too are good and their wares reasonable. The chartered banks are represented of course in strength. There are two or three fair hotels, though like all prairie hotels they are too much the resort in the evenings of a roughish element, afflicted with superfluous saliva, who are apt to occupy the best seats around the stove in the public rooms on the strength of an occasional trip around the corner to the bar. Two dollars to two dollars fifty cents are the terms of the best hotels. The disposal of these evening loafers or the provision of a second room for the better class of patrons and guests is badly needed from Winnipeg (inclusive) to the foot of the mountains. Everywhere cooking is bad, upstairs attendance capricious or nil. Hotel life is distinctly inferior to that of Eastern Canada at the same rates. There are exceptions, but the Canadian does not somehow shine as a hotel-keeper. C. Y322 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. He is altogether behind the American of like trade in his desire to please, and in that suavity which is the secret of hotel-keeping, and miles behind the man of the southern states in like situation. Nor are prosperous times like the present improving to his manners. Perhaps the Scotch affinity comes in again, for if competition were possible in North Britain the Scotch hotel-keeper I am told would have to reform or clear out. The above are not the grumblings of a travelling Briton, but the pretty general opinion I think of discriminating Canadians, nor of course do they apply to the great first-class houses, whose very contrasts in these particulars emphasise the failings of the others. The residential streets of Calgary run straggling out on to the narrow plain between river and hills, bristling with those neatly painted residences, frame for the most part, that characterise the outskirts of all prairie towns. The town itself stands in an angle where the Elbow River, also a daughter of the Rockies and of like character to the Bow, joins the greater stream. Indeed, Calgary has presumed too much on the forbearance of the latter, and has been severely punished for it in its lower quarters by more than one ravaging flood. Across the Bow, which is spanned by a fine waggon bridge, is a considerable settlement almost wholly German and built by Germans of the labour- ing class, where the only representative of British Canada is the Bishop of Saskatchewan, who has his residence there, whence he controls a diocese as large as about three European countries. Calgary has the usual saw and flour mills, creameries, brewery, abattoir and cold storage depots to be found in all such places, and like the rest is lighted by electricity. There is also a large and attractive barracks for the mounted police, this being the next most important station to the depot at Regina. The first thing, however, that anyone arriving from the East at Calgary, should proceed to do, is to climb one of the heights above the town,, a trifling ascent of four or five hundred feet. The Rockies are visible far to the eastward of this, as will appear obvious the moment you view them from Calgary, but night, or weather, or a score of things, may perchance reserve the first sight of them for many a traveller till he sniffs theTHE ROCKIES FROM CALGARY. 323 keen air, and beholds this matchless spectacle from the bluffs above the Bow. Here, at any rate, I had mine, nor shall I easily forget it. It was not I suppose a very clear morning, for though one could see for miles innumerable over the ranching country rolling westward in broken fashion, and the valley of the Bow with the impetuous river curving grandly through it between its woody banks, there was no very definite horizon. I had always known that you could see the Rockies from Calgary, but somehow or other, being also aware of the distance, had pictured some faint almost low line of heights on the horizon. To be frank, I was more eagerly scanning the physical features of the foreground, and the more immediate background of cattle ranges, and by some temporary aberration, had let the Rockies pass entirely for the time out of my thoughts—when I was startled by seeing what for the moment suggested a patch of white cloud, not just over the horizon, but far up in the sky. But the cloud stayed there, and in a few minutes, due no doubt to some far-away atmo- spheric changes, the mountains with their snow-capped peaks, or rather what is more awe-inspiring, their snow-striped, craggy fang-like summits, rose like a wall behind the seventy miles of tumbling prairie land and changed the whole outlook. And thus in normal weather, or indeed even much clearer than they looked on that day, the Rockies appear to almost every ranch- man of Alberta, and the populace of almost every town and village. A familiar story tells how a newly-arrived English- man set out to walk to them after breakfast, expecting to get home to dinner, but having travelled for some hours without apparently reducing the distance, he met a native who told him they were yet sixty miles off; whereat the Britisher retraced his steps in much amazement and chagrin. The fol- lowing day he was walking with a friend over a ranch in the neighbourhood, and encountering a small brook the native pro- ceeded to pull his boots off and roll up his trousers for the purpose of crossing it. In the meantime, he was surprised to see his newly-arrived English friend stripping off all his clothes as if for a bath. On protesting, the other replied—continuing to undress—that he had been fooled once with distances in Y 2324 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. this country, and, judging by his experience of the day before, he had a good long swim in prospect, and did not intend to get left again. Calgary is the centre and distributing point of the northern half of southern Alberta, which last division roughly covers the drier portion of the province. Nearly parallel with the Rockies, and starting from Calgary the Calgary and Edmonton, or the C. and E., Railroad, runs due north to Edmonton, at present its northern terminus, one hundred and eighty miles. Southward from Calgary, on the same parallel, another branch runs to Macleod (one hundred miles) on the Crow's Nest branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway. All through southern Alberta, the bunch grass, which cures itself and turns to hay on the ground, is of the finest quality, and here was the favourite wintering region of the buffalo, shelter being plentiful among the foot hills of the mountains, while the tempering influences of the warm Chinook winds—though of course intermittent—still afford welcome periods of relief to the winter cold. The dry, clear cold, more or less resembling that of Manitoba, must be regarded as the normal condition of winter, the Chinooks as frequent reliefs to it. I came through the mountains down to Calgary one morning late in last November just after an extraordinary cold snap for the time of year had covered the country with snow, and sent the thermometer down to fifteen below zero. As we reached the town a Chinook was blowing, warm and balmy, and with the help of the sun, licking up the snow from the prairies with such rapidity you could almost see it going I have seen a photograph in a friend's house in Calgary of a tennis party on Christmas Day, with men and women sitting about in flannels and light costumes. The influence of the Chinook reaches as far north as Red Deer, speaking approxi- mately, a station about half way to Edmonton, and some eighty or ninety miles off, a point much patronised by American immigrants. Southward, of course, it extends to the inter- national boundary line. To the south of Calgary, however, it has more influence than over the northern hundred miles of its zone. Calgary, speaking generally as one has so con- tinually to do in the face of these immense distances and thinlyON THE ELBOW RIVER NEAR CALGARY. [To face p. 325.PHYSICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL ALBERTA. 325 scattered miscellaneous populations, is.the centre of the smaller ranchman's country, as Macleod, about a hundred miles to the south, is that of the larger ones—though there are scores of ex- ceptions, of course, to either rule. And again, when one speaks of this country as the dry belt, the expression is to some extent relative. I have seen very good grain growing around Calgary and to the south of it, but it requires a wet year, and its cultivation is only to be essayed in connection with stock raising and not as a mainstay. In the Macleod neighbourhood, which is still drier, irrigation is resorted to—the many waters which pour down from the Rockies giving ready facilities for watering the plains below. The Government have already some thousands of acres under irrigation and lands to sell at ten to fifteen dollars, but much vaster schemes to be carried out in both Western Assineboia and Southern Alberta are regarded as only a question of time The geography of Alberta, physical and economical, is pretty clearly defined from the point of view of the immigrant, and there is little doubt but that this most westerly territory is at present his favourite stamping ground. The reason for this is fairly obvious. The winters are in most parts milder than in the wheat provinces. It is the best region for stock farming on a large and small scale—though perhaps it is in the district of Northern Alberta and about Edmonton where grain growing and stock raising are, of all parts of the West, most happily combined. From the American border and the forty-ninth parallel running due north to the fifty-fifth, the province is a broad strip, nearly the length of England—starting with a width of a hundred miles which it gradually increases as the mountains trend to the North- West. A railway runs right up its centre, from Macleod to Calgary, there cutting, as we have shown, the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway, and travelling northwards to Edmon- ton. The stations which freely punctuate this two hundred and sixty miles of road, tap respectively every kind of country that the settler is looking for. South of Calgary, and more particu- larly as you approach Macleod, the prairie is wide sweeping, treeless and downlike, and the herds of horses, cattle or sheep.326 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY that range them are in great bands, and belong usually to large owners or companies. Here, too, the real foot hills of the Rockies press closer, and in their hollows the ranchmen are thickly- squatted. Going north of Calgary we find signs of mixed farm- ing and smaller occupation, till at Red Deer (seventy miles) you pass out of the furthest influence of the Chinook, the rainfall at the same time increasing, and run up into the Edmonton country, where the climate all round becomes virtually Manitoban, the soil as productive of grain, but the grass, water and park-like nature of the country more suitable than that of Manitoba for stock farming. Edmonton, beyond a doubt is the most popular centre just now in the whole Canadian North-West to the average immigrant, whether from Europe or the United States —and at all the stations on the way up settlement is increasing, railway land is rising, and homestead lands are being pressed further and further back. Still the area of a country like this, which is virtually all fertile, will swallow up thousands, and yet leave room for hundreds of thousands more. Get off at a way station on the Edmonton line—Olds, Innisfail, or Red Deer— and drive round, and what will you see ? The Rockies will be there still, though a hundred miles away, sharp, and rugged as the tooth of a mower, dominant, high in the sky even at this tremendous distance, and patched with snow. The prairie, how- elver, is no longer smooth and down like, but mottled with varying growths and diverse hues. Acres of short willow, wolf willow mixed with rose briars, and other growths which the settler, at any rate, has not yet found time to classify, share the landscape with the prairie grasses and bunchy thickets of wood- lands. There is nothing, however, to interfere with the free spacious outlook which is the charm of this whole North-West. Shadow and sunshine chase one another over a surface more mottled and more broken, but just as boundless, unless indeed those grim sentinels of snow and rock shining so far away may be called bounds. Hundreds of haystacks are sprinkled over the plain, looking like black pimples on the still, green meadows they have been cut from—for cattle here need some feeding in winter. Here and there, a homestead more often of the elementary kind erected by the first settler, gives out its homely whitewash to aA YANKEE FARMER. 327 kiss of the sunlight, or sometimes a good farmhouse and barn worthy of Manitoba or Ontario, stand by the black, powdery, unfenced road. I have one in my mind just now, the owner being one of the many hundred Americans who have shown a predilection for this part of the country. We drove one day to his house, round which a herd of sixty or seventy shorthorns, three-year-old steers worth forty dollars, and some very fine calves worth nearly half that, were brushing through the low thickets of willows, and pulling at the patches of timothy which had been sown for mowing in the home lot. The old gentleman —who, my host told me, had been three years in the country, was from Nebraska, and was reputed to be worth at least forty thousand dollars—in a big straw hat and flannel shirt looked the very type of a hard-bitten New England or Ontario farmer. He was driving a waggon on one of those secondary jobs, unconnected with hay or harvest, with which a farming life is replete. Neither his dollars nor his ripe measure of years, how- ever, seemed to entitle him to abate the stern energy with which he had won success, for he was sending his team along the rutty farm track and sitting the hard, jolting waggon seat with the matter-of-fact indifference of a backwoods Ontario farmer. I could see, moreover, though he was on friendly terms with my host, that he greatly grudged the three minutes of conversation we exchanged. He gave it as his opinion that this particular section of Alberta was " God's Country"—an ancient and favourite catchword with our American cousins—and then went off at a hand canter for his next load of rails, to try and over- take the time he had lost in chaffering with us. Yet, this sprightly old gentleman had no posterity to work for, and was simply a creature of habit—the sort of habit, however, which has subdued a continent, and a useful one for the aspiring prairie settler, who may have posterity, to cultivate. The object of the settler in Alberta is to get a free range for his stock, and for this reason a quarter-section, whether pur- chased or homesteaded, is much more often all sufficient than in a grain country, where it defines the limit of his operations. For on a quarter-section he can erect his house and buildings, and can venture such grain as he wants, or cut his prairie or328 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. artificially sown hay. It is the outside range that mainly matters to him—and though the man of large capital will buy a section or more, as the price is a flea-bite to what he is investing in stock, the small man is not cramped by the smaller freehold as he might be in a grain country.1 Light brush, two, three or four feet high, grows in great patches on fthe prairie in these latitudes. Indeed, whatever springs from this deep black vegetable mould seems to riot in its fertility. Much of this willow scrub is so short and soft as to require no clearing, but can be whirled under with a breaking plough, as you would turn under a green crop for fertilizer. The cattle running on the ranges here, too, as everywhere else, are of the finest breeds. Shorthorns, Herefords and Aberdeens have been the varieties which have competed with each other for first place in the eyes of the stockmen. There is not the slightest doubt, however, but that in this long and thorough trial shorthorns have come out on top. You will, I think, see ten at least big-framed, loose-coated, thrifty Durhams, rich coloured roans and reds, but with the wide latitudes of marking, which shorthorn orthodoxy allows, for one Hereford with his loud, unmistakable, stereotyped pattern, or for one Aberdeen or Galloway. The Hereford, hardy rustler that he is for all his meek expression and stocky frame, is I believe regaining the favour that he had in some sort lost. But the shorthorn has been proven to give more weight as well as more milk, with no offset to this glaring advantage that I ever heard of, particularly now that cattle are better taken care of than they used to be, and it is no longer, as in the early days of North- western ranching, a mere question of the survival of the fittest— a competition in which the Hereford would certainly come out first. But hay is put up everywhere now, the ranchman having ample leisure to save it; whether in Northern Alberta, where it is more or less necessary, or in the southern sections, where it 1 The open ranges belong to the Dominion Government. Twenty acres to a beast is the general estimate of capacity, though the old Government leases were based on ten. The business of ranching on the open ranges, however, will in time be destroyed by the inflow of small settlers who fence in the watering-places, and in many other ways are detrimental to an industry only compatible with a scant population.HORSE RANCHE NEAR CALGARY. [To face p. 329.HORSE RAISING. 329 is only a wise precaution in case of special circumstances or climatic emergencies. The shorthorn, too, though not such a good dairy cow as the Ayrshire or the Holstein, both of which are a good deal used in the dairy farms that are already fairly numerous throughout Alberta, is the best milker of the other breeds,1 and justifies the world's opinion of him as the best all-round animal of the bovine race. The practice of de- horning is very often followed in the North-West, though it is one from which humanity somewhat recoils. Speaking of hardiness, it is not, I think, generally realised in England, where the ordinary well-bred horse represents an animal who on the whole does a minimum of work for a maximum of food and attention, and suffers deplorably from any irregularity in board, lodging and attendance—that the same horse, naturally reared, will live and even come fat out of conditions of storm, tempest and pasture that would destroy the hardiest cattle. Still, with motor traffic likely to develop beyond present recognition, the horse breeder may have enemies to face in the not remote future, the possibility of which no sane man could brush away from his mind. In Alberta horses are frequently raised with cattle. So far as the proportions of the two throughout the province are concerned, there are just four times as many registered brands for cattle as there are for horses, which may be some sort of guide. Of course Alberta, with its high dry climate, its pure streams and its cured bunch grass pasture, is an ideal horse country, and every kind of animal finds its fancier among the breeders. Clydes and shire horses have many votaries, and fetch as three-year-olds from seventy-five to a hundred dollars. Lighter horses of all kinds fetch at the same age from forty to fifty dollars. But horse raising is a big question, with many sides and various markets which are constantly shifting in demand. Moreover, we do not eat horses, though there is in the south- western states a district where they are actually raised for butcher's meat and shipped to Belgium or France. It would be idle to waste space on the different views one hears from 1 What effect the recent tests of milk in England, which, in the matter of tuber- culosis, have been so much against the shorthorn, will have remains to be seen.330 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. different men engaged in the business out West. Anyone about to engage in it would be foolish indeed not to spend a year at least in previous investigation. I do think horse breeding, too, requires some little natural gift, and that men are rather born than trained to success in it, just as they are to success in poultry or dogs, though there is no trade in which amateurs so overrate themselves. Young English- men about to emigrate are apt to express a predilection for horse ranching, imbued doubtless by visions of one long con- tinuous gallop across country. There are a few young English- men, and far more Irishmen, eminently cut out to be happy and successful as horse breeders. This is not because they are fond of riding, which amounts to nothing, but because they have an inherited gift for horseflesh which is a wholly different matter, an eye to see, and the passion for dealing in it, which, when removed from the artificialities of English horse life, the stud-grooms, the dealers, the vet.'s warranties, and all the rest of it, and brought into first-hand and self-reliant action, often develops into a genius that commands success. But for the average man, cattle or sheep are the safest outlook, for they are more attuned to the average man's genius, and, moreover, they are necessary as human food and will not be affected by caprice or science. Young Englishmen, the younger-son sort, are as a rule a greater success as stock raisers than as mixed farmers. The percentage of failure has been less in Alberta with this class than in Manitoba, always putting aside the mere idle and dissipated, who would fail anywhere, though even in Alberta the record is far from satisfactory. Calgary at one time had a name for bar- room roystering, which resounded across the Atlantic and was a byword to anyone at all in touch with Canada. Young English- men with a few hundred pounds invested in small ranches, unhinged by their first serious ownership of horseflesh and of a short-lived banking account, spent half their days in town, masquerading in exaggerated cowboy dress, playing billiards and acquiring a liking for whiskey, or playing cricket and polo; admirable pastimes the latter, but unprofitable to a struggling person who has to live upon the interest of a thousand pounds and make that interest by attention and assiduity.BRANDING A STEER. \To face p. 331. CATTLE RANCHING. 33i As elsewhere in the North-West, time, the dispeller.of all fallacies, has long separated the sheep from the goats. The former, a sad minority I fear, remain, but all the fitter and the better, and a more glowing example to the youth of their kind who are going out now than were the old gangs. As a matter of fact, the young Englishman element is no longer very noticeable to the ordinary sojourner in Calgary. The ranchman's club seems mainly the haunt of bank clerks and the young townsmen of the better class, and perhaps this is just as well. Clubs and polo are all very well for an Australian squatter with fifty thousand pounds in his business, which would not be worth following if it could not afford him such luxuries. For the English ranchmen of Wyoming in former days, who had their thousands at stake, a club in town was reasonable. There are English ranchmen scattered about Alberta, more, perhaps, in the neighbourhood of Macleod, who might fairly indulge so far and more if they cared to. But for young fellows whose all is represented by a hundred head of cattle and a shack on a quarter-section, the less they see of towns and clubs for five or six years the better ; and by that time the charms of playing bad pool on a worse table, or standing drinks to strangers, or painting the town red, will have vanished. Let us hope the present influx of emigrants will not resuscitate this kind of thing. Many really industrious stockmen, how- ever, with good capital, who came to Alberta in former years did not succeed. There was much to be learnt in climate and management, just as the very best new-comers to Manitoba had to buy experience, of which others as well as themselves after- wards reaped the benefit. Railway facilities, too, were bad, and prices low. Cattle ranching has now been reduced to a fairly steady, as well as a profitable business. There are no hurri- canes, no pestilences, no insect enemies of stock in Alberta. The wolves are killed down, the wily coyote, whom you might take for a lost sheep dog, wandering betimes across the prairie, is no longer worth counting in the matter of calves or lambs. Nor has any disease ever appeared to threaten the stock owner with serious apprehension. It is certainly the most attractive business for the settler, and upon the whole I should say the most profit- able. It requires, it is true, rather more money than starting332 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. wheat growing on the lowest rung of the ladder with a free grant, or on railway land paid by instalments. For a breeding herd of cattle, if only fifty head, would cost some fifteen hundred dollars, while the quarter-section and necessary impedimenta and other inevitable expenses would consume half that much. But for stock farming, of course the more capital within limits the better. The same attention will watch three hundred head as will watch one ; and though prices must fluctuate, it does not seem, in the present condition of the world, as if the awful slumps that used to paralyse the American west could well recur. Railway facilities, cold storage, well-bred stock and the increase of the meat-eating population of the world, seems to provide against anything worse than a normal fluctuation, and this the stock farmer, supported by his good years, should readily withstand. Calgary is not only the most picturesquely situated town in the North-West, but affords the most picturesque spectacle in its streets. From any of its windows the stranger would see at once that he was in a ranching country. An interest in horses, which in the grain countries or old Canada is of a conventional and subdued kind, shows in a score of ways here, and the influence of European individuality in the matter is more asserted. Traps of all sorts come in from the country ; gigs, dogcarts, sulkies, pony phaetons, driven often by ladies from neighbouring or distant ranches, besides, of course, the ordinary buggies and Jersey waggons of everyday Canadian life. Horsemen are numerous and of all varieties. The exaggerated cowboy, whether genuine or a poseur from across the Atlantic, is rarely seen nowadays, but the English hunting seat has been left behind with the lawyers and bankers of Toronto. Here you have the Texan saddle, the toe-cap stirrup, and the long, straight seat. A soft brown felt hat with a wide, stiff brim, flannel shirt and red silk handkerchief knotted on the neck, and breeches or trousers tucked into boots, represents the most extreme form of desperado to be now seen in Calgary. But then there is no use in being a desperado in Alberta, for it is against the law even to carry a six-shooter, and if you used it effectually with malice you would be hung to a certainty. No friendly judge and jury would intervene, nor would the assassin's " friends " rally round himAN INDIAN POW-WOW. [To face p. 333.MOUNTED POLICE. 333 with money, influence, sympathy and intimidation, as in Montana or Texas. He would have no more show in Alberta than in Sussex, and that he did not escape, the Mounted Police would take care, if they had to follow him to Mexico. These useful troopers, in their felt hats and red tunics and yellow-striped dragoon trousers, are constantly careering through the streets of Calgary, having, as already noted, large barracks in the town. Indians are plentiful, for there are reserves both of the Stoneys and the Blackfeet tribe in the neighbourhood, and they are frequently in town on pleasure or business bent, riding their " cayuses," those tough Indian ponies, diabolic sometimes in the acrobatic feats they will perform when they want to get rid of a man and a saddle, but wondrous tough and useful. The men will wear their fringed leather gaiters and mocassins, and the squaws, riding crossways also, will be tricked out in ample garments of rainbow hues and incongruous blends. Reverting again to the Mounted Police, they are an institution against which no single element in the Dominion ever breathes a word. The country is proud, and justly proud of them ; the United States envies, or most certainly should envy, them when they reflect upon the state of law and order and security of life on their side of the border and on ours. And as they have the privilege of following a criminal across the border, the Dakota or Montana bully holds them in pious dread. Horse thieves and obstreperous Indians are their main care, for the terror 01 their name has put murder or violence virtually out of the category of offences even in this huge country, as big as England, France, and Spain, and policed by nine hundred men. On the American side there are no custodians of the law save cavalry stations at long intervals, clumsy and inefficient avengers of the deeds of blood that are so common and so tolerated. A typical story is told of how the United States cavalry, having, with some unusual display of energy, captured a refugee from Canadian justice, sent word to the Government to forward an escort for him. So a sergeant and a trooper set out to ride the fifty miles of Montana prairie to the point where the prisoner was to be delivered. Here they found a whole troop of cavalry drawn up in line, with the prisoner in charge, whose officers334 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. demanded impatiently of the two policemen where their escort was. The sergeant replied laconically that two men were con- sidered sufficient for a job like this, and having received their prisoner, the couple rode off, one on either side of him, on the long journey home, to the surprise and enlightenment of the military. The life of these hardy troopers is very often a solitary one. In singles-and couples they are scattered about the terri- tories, a beat being assigned to each man. To show their assiduity, they have to make a tour of the ranchmen in this district and go through the formula of asking each whether they have " any complaints." The latter then signs the paper as an evidence of having been duly visited. Quite a large portion of the corps are the sons of gentlemen, both English and Canadian, particularly the former. The trooper is enlisted for seven years, and the pay is fifty cents a day, slightly increasing, and his keep. The barracks at Regina, Calgary, and Macleod have large, airy dormitories, comfortable libraries, sitting rooms, billiard rooms, etc., with athletic grounds attached. There is small chance, however, of a young man arriving at a commission in the force by merit, as these are given direct, and are not inseparable from political interest. It is sometimes said that what is often called the most efficient and most useful body of mounted men in the world is not officered nowadays upon the same high level. Stock and grain are not the sole production of this great foot- hill territory. Dairying is already keeping abreast of the limited demand of the small towns, and butter is being shipped through the Rockies to the pleasure resorts and mining camps of British Columbia. All vegetables grow profusely. Flax, as in Manitoba, is cultivated with success. Nearly the whole country is underlaid with coal, which is worked at some points and delivered cheap along the lines of railroad, and cheaper still at the pit's mouth. Many settlers, indeed, dig their own coal. American immigration is setting heavily into this belt, more particularly along the line between Calgary and Edmonton, though considerable activity is being shown towards Macleod and to the south of it. I met numbers of hard-headed ranchmen and farmers from Montana and Dakota. Some had bought several townships for themselvesAMONG THE BIG RANCHES. 335 or friends, or on speculation. Others had already settled on farms or ranches of their own. I met one man near Macleod who had bought a half-section there for five dollars an acre and had homesteaded with his son the other two quarters. He had been there two years, and was in good spirits. He had originally come from Kansas, on the fringe of the Oklohama country, and had sold his farm there for forty dollars an acre. He witnessed the great rush into Oklohama on that memorable day a dozen years ago, when a gun was fired at noon and thirty thousand people, who had been drawn up in a line in camp for a greater or less number of days, raced into the open territory in a mob and pegged out their locations. He was debarred himself, having taken up land outside previously, but he told me he went and camped on a bluff for three or four days in full view of the scene of action on purpose to see the fun. It may be remem- bered that Oklohama was Indian territory, whose rights were com- pounded for by the United States Government, and this strange method taken of throwing it open to settlement at a certain hour of a certain day. The breakaway of this vast mass he declared he will never forget, as at the appointed signal they rushed helter-skelter across the plain, some mounted, some in buggies, others on foot. There was trouble of course, the weak were often thrust off the quarter-sections they had chosen by the strong who took a fancy to them, and five or six men were shot in melees. A few had crept in the night before against the rules, and pre-empted good locations, hoping to escape notice in the crowd. Three of these were caught and hung to cottonwood trees, and on their breasts was pinned the notice, " A little too soon." No one should miss going to Macleod. It is a striking trip of some six hours, and the slow pace at which these cross-lines crawl over the prairie is no drawback to the visitor, for there is much to look at. Prosperous little villages surround most of the stations, and ranch houses stand perched here and there upon the high ridges. You will see lakes swarming with wild- fowl, clear streams, where trout abound, flowing over pebbly bottoms and fringed with willows and alders, sweeps of broken country patched with scrub and bits of tillage, and covered to the remote horizon with haystacks. Then come the great,336 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. smooth, rolling downs, where in the autumn you will probably see more than one " round-up " in full swing ; hundreds of cattle, shorthorns mainly, but sprinkled with Aberdeens and Herefords, dimpling the plain in thick clusters of moving bands, while horsemen will be careering about or standing on bluffs against the skyline like equestrian statues, ready to head off stragglers. The ranges for cattle in South Alberta are immense. Strays sometimes wander away over the American border down into Montana. The honour of stockmen in these matters is punc- tilious, and in rules concerning the protection of their business there are no Americans and no Canadians. The brands upon both sides are registered and known. The officers or members of the association take charge of all strays found at the " round- ups," verify their brands by the register, and notify the owners wherever they may be, who, on payment of a small fee, get them back again. Though nearer the Rockies as you approach Macleod the mountains themselves are not visible, for the lofty foot-hills that shut them out. Numerous streams cross the line or meander alongside of it. Sheeps* Creek, High River, the Little Bow, clear, rippling waters, by whose banks willow and ash, birch and poplar, find ample nourishment and form charming sylvan scenes amid the wide waste of prairie. Trout are indigenous in all of them and rise freely to the fly, though the nearer the mountains the angler follows them the better the sport. The brook trout of the eastern slopes of the Rockies, though not differing greatly in appearance from the fontinalis of Eastern Canada and rising as freely to the fly, is a far inferior fish on the table. While the former, as we noticed in an earlier chapter, cuts redder in flesh than the pinkest of our British trout and is beautifully sweet and firm, the other is almost colourless, with a flavour to correspond. There is a sad-looking lake near Cayley, about half-way between Calgary and Macleod, a long, narrow sheet of water, unfringed by reeds or scrub and lapping the foot of smooth, swelling hills that form part of a vast and famous stock range. The railroad skirts it for its whole length, perhaps two miles, and the stranger will there see in October ducks floating and upon the wing in numbers that, I will ventureMACLEOD. 337 to say, unless his experiences have been exceptional, he would have deemed impossible—above all, at the edge of a railroad track and amid pastures whence cattle are shipped direct to Europe. To speak of them as in their thousands seems hope- lessly inadequate, while to venture further is vague. On one occasion I skirted the shores of this lake at the twelve or fifteen miles an hour rate, which is quite common on the newer laid prairie roads about nightfall, just at the moment that a brilliant full moon was rising over the high ridges that looked down upon it The effect was beautiful to a degree—the background of solitary uplands, dim and shadowy, the broad band of glittering moonlight parting across the middle of the dark waters of this lonely lake. But added to the impressive nature of the scene was the extraordinary spectacle of these countless wild-fowl, stirred into movement by the noise of the train, passing and repassing the narrow belt of moonlight just as insects, invisible elsewhere, seem to fill with winged life some slanting sunbeam. Macleod itself stands bare, naked and unadorned, on a plain below the foothills, while the Old Man River runs swiftly past it. Owing to some former misunderstandings with the railroad it is a mile and a half from the station. This, at least, is the reputed distance. Since I had to run the whole of it the last time I was there, as one only could run to catch a tri-weekly train, it seemed to me a great deal more. But this is irrelevant. Macleod, as a little town of two or three thousand people, has nothing to boast of whatever in the way of style. Neither handsome residences nor business blocks adorn it, unless the police barracks may be mentioned, which are on a par with those of Calgary. There are one or two wide streets, lined with unobtrusive frame houses, mainly inhabited, I should imagine, for business reasons ; ample breathing space and the whole prairie to expand over should a boom ever strike it, and no more stir than in a little Welsh market town on any off-day. But, like the latter, Macleod is not so unimportant as it looks, though it has but one or two third-class hotels, where for fifty cents you may dine off sole- leather steak, pork and beans, flat apple pie, and various scraps of vegetable, congealing on the usual abominable little dishes.338 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. A vast amount of money has changed hands, and does still change hands in this sleepy-looking, unpretentious little place, being as it is the main gathering spot of the larger ranchmen in Alberta, and their banking centre, to say nothing of the smaller men who, of later years, have come in, to the former's great disgust. Indeed, according to these, the days of big ranches are over, and the homesteader or buyer of railway land, with his build- ing and fencing and his small bunch of stock, though better in the end for the country, is distinctly a nuisance to the great stock owners. A good deal of money has been made here in former years, and a good deal lost. The " younger son," who used to come to districts like this, as to Wyoming or Texas, and in earlier days to Australia, with five or ten thousand pounds, and boldly throw himself into a really wild life with the hope, and the reasonable hope, of making enough money in a few years to enable him to return to the old country, seems scarcely nowadays to exist. There are a few shrewd young men of this class scattered among the foot-hills, who began with good capital and have reached, or are approaching, this goal. But, so far as I know and from what I can hear on all sides in Canada, the young fellows who now go out are only too often short of the modest capital needed to get on in a small way. There is a dim memory among their parents of contemporaries who went to the colonies and made fortunes, but often on a capital of ten thousand pounds, and they expect their sons with five hundred to do the same. The small man who emigrates without future prospects at home must, in common sense, look forward to spending his life in the colony. Probably he would in any case want to remain there, which is just as well. Many, however, of the well-to-do younger sons of old days lost their money, being sometimes unfortunate, but more often pro- bably unfit for the business from temperament or unsteadiness. Ranching countries, too, have always been a favourite field for joint stock companies. Those operating now in the Canadian West are, I fancy, doing well. They are Canadian concerns, probably run on business principles, and we may be quite certain that their managers are not selected because they are relatives of stockholders, nor yet, as they say in the West, " forA ROUND-UP ON A HORSE RANCHE. [To jace p. 338.INCAPABLE MANAGERS. 339 the good of their health." In the British ranching companies in former days, and even still in other industries started by British capital in Canada, the manager is apt to be selected,' not for his experience, but on the strength of some connection. English companies of all kinds, and many private ventures of absentees, have failed, or at least got into needless difficul- ties, from such misguided and mistaken action. Infinite pains may be taken to form a company, admirable land or plant is procured, everything that can conduce towards success is prepared, and then the whole delicate machinery is put in the charge of a manager because he is a relative or friend : an utter stranger, very likely, to the country, a greenhorn to the work, an amateur and full of the confidence of ignorance in everything but his own incapacity. On this unfortunate ten- dency hangs the tale of woe belonging to scores of collective enterprises both in Canada and the States. I have been often asked in Canada whether English companies operating there were promoted for the purpose of providing berths for incompe- tent persons in England—the incompetency, of course, in some cases being merely lack of experience, which, however, is just as bad for owners and shareholders. If any reader thinks I have exaggerated the frequency of these self-courted disasters, let him ask the opinion of the first Canadian business man of general experience, or the first Englishman of long residence in Canada who has been reasonably in touch with the affairs of the country, that he meets. I do not think the future of this great North-West can very well be exaggerated. For it is the home of the necessities, not the luxuries, of man, where beef, mutton, and pork, wheat, oats, and the main vegetables can all be produced of the highest quality and in the greatest abundance; where the northern races, nay, even Italians and Galicians for that matter, can thrive and flourish in an atmosphere conducive to their native vigour and even stimulating to it. In the tentative period of North-Western development much used to be made of the cold; but here we have lusty youths, already arrived at man's estate, born in the country ; a second generation, giving evi- dence in their persons and their energy that it is the fitting z 2340 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY* nursery of a strenuous race. As to the summers, they are for obvious reasons about the best in the whole of North America. Lord Selkirk, when he brought his small bunch of emigrants to the Red River in 1811, said that some day there would be thirty millions of people between there and the Rockies. He was a prophet crying in the wilderness then, but who now would venture to say why there should not be fifty or a hundred millions ? There are very few sections of the United States that ever had such a prospect as the Canadian North- West. Most of the southern States have immense areas of poor or rugged land. They produce their single semi-tropical pro- duct, tobacco, cotton, rice, or sugar, in quantities that enable only- one farmer in twenty to make more than a bare living; their cereals, their stock, would seem absolutely pitiful in yield and quality compared to the grain and the cattle of the Canadian North-West. Their people are nothing like so lusty nor nearly so energetic. Their climate is hot, often enervating and some- times positively unhealthy; their means of communication by road, as a whole, far inferior. On the other hand, the most prosperous of the western and mid-western States, Iowa, Ohio, the Dakotas and Nebraska, have strong affinities to the Canadian North-West. They do not pretend to grow such wheat or oats. Maize, speaking broadly, is their standing crop, and may be set against the former. In no single vital point had these splendid States in their beginnings an advantage over their British neigh- bours. The winters stop work for quite as long, whatever disadvantage that may be. The summers are much hotter ; the climate gives a slightly lower average of health. In the facilities for building railroads and getting about by sleigh and waggon there is nothing to choose, all being prairie countries. But these States are already running into their millions, and furnish the best of arguments for the future of the yet more fertile provinces to the north of them. Huge areas in Assiniboia, Alberta, and the foot-hills of the Rockies are underlaid with coal and minerals of all kinds, awaiting the day when they are needed. Above all, the northern limit of the farming belt and of comfortable human settlement has been infinitely extended by a better knowledge ofPROSPECTS OF THE NORTH-WEST. the country. Edmonton, hitherto a sort of northern Ultima Thule, will become a distributing point for vast regions far to the North and North-West, even to the fertile levels of the Peace River, where wheat is now known to grow as surely and as strongly as in Manitoba itself. Abundant water power, ample timber, an almost universally fat, fertile and extremely smooth-lying soil over a region half as big as Europe confronts us here. People some- times have a notion that these sort of physical conditions are common to all virgin countries, but where else in such an area do you get this?—Australia? South Africa? Certainly not. Very little of the United States could have been so highly classified. The bogey of a low thermometer still occupies the croaker, but as we see, a generation has now grown up under these desperate conditions which thrives under them quite as much as the people who get mud or sleet, mist or rain, instead. There will always be those who constitutionally dislike cold weather.and they will not be found in the North-West, but this will make no difference whatever to its development. Bad seasons must be looked for among the good. Disappoint- ments in a land to which thousands of inexperienced people are resorting for a livelihood will be numerous, but " overdone " is a word that can never be applied to a country that grows grain and stock and possesses water power, coal, timber and minerals. Peaches, oranges, and grapes might be overdone ; this situation is conceivable in tobacco or cotton or sugar ; but a country that supplies all the prime necessities cannot possibly have too many people. But when thousands are going into a farming life without knowledge or experience of what-it means, it is quite certain that for the next few years, the emigrant with a little money will be always able to pick up partly improved farms from the incapable, the impatient, the disenchanted, or those who have started with too little money, at a much lower price relatively than he could buy land, build on it, and break it himself. For those who have the very moderate means required and the capacities to use such properly, there will be great opportunities of this kind in the near future, though that is, of course, a very old story and a very old axiom all over the North American West. Still I cannot recall any great tide of emigra-342 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. tion in the past containing of necessity such a large element who will probably discover that prairie farming is not suited to their genius, their taste, their stock of energy, or their pocket, and particularly after a lean year, though I do not believe even this trial will be necessary to shift a great many South Britons to more congenial spheres of industry or otherwise. And then, as I have said, there will be innumerable opportunities for the wise man on the spot to buy a going concern at a great saving to himself. And in regard to those developments of the great country to the northward, whether the Grand Trunk or the Canadian Northern, or both, eventually traverse it and passing through or near Edmonton pierce the mountains to the Pacific, we may fairly look, nay, even some of the middle-aged among us will surely see, enormous changes.INDIAN CAMP, ALBERTA. [!Tofacsp. 343.INTO THE ROCKIES. 343 CHAPTER XIV. From Calgary to the lofty gap by which the Canadian Pacific Railroad actually enters the Rockies at an altitude of 4,200 feet is about sixty miles. The way thither lies over the rolling and gradually ascending foot-hills occupied mainly by ranchmen of moderate substance who own the section or part of a section which carries their house buildings and fenced-in paddocks or tillage, and run from one to four or five hundred head of cattle or horses on the open ranges. It is a strange transition this for anyone who has been wandering for weeks or months upon the level and sunlit prairies to be lifted up in two or three hours and placed in the very shadow of these grim and awful heights. Perhaps it is even more impres- sive should you leave Calgary in the dark, hear the rivers of the foot-hills, the Kananaskis and the Bow, roaring far beneath, and rise as daylight dawns through mysterious masses of brown uplands, to find yourself at break of day in the very company of the mountains, and beyond the furthest haunt of the dwellers on the slopes below, or the very range of their beasts. It would almost seem in the dim light as if the prairie after its calm and billowy sleep had been lashed up into hugh brown waves against the snowy steeps which shut it off from the Pacific. In our ascent we have passed Cochrane, a well-known ranching centre, and Morley, where is the reserve of the Stoney Indians, once the bravest of their kind and now the most industrious. Precipitous masses of pale grey limestone rise on all sides of us to the height of eight or nine thousand feet, their summits stern, hard, and bare, taking on every form of rugged and fan- tastic grandeur; while isolated peaks and serrated ridges follow one another in rapid succession ^nd cut the skyline far above our heads. It is late October, and early snows have placed a gap of virgin white upon the crests an$ shoulders of the higher344 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. peaks, and settled in long powdery strips upon the transverse ledges which break the awful steepness of the mountain sides. Filling the narrow valley is a dense sea of spruce and pine woods which struggle painfully up the lower slopes of the mountain, dwindling and scattering as they find the rigours of the ascent too great for them. Beside the railroad, and between walls of tall, spindling spruce firs, the Bow River, blue-green from its glacial origin, splashes upon rocks or swirls in broad pools, upon which the long pines throw still longer shadows, and the fiery leaves of stray poplars or maples shiver and gleam again in the moving amethyst mirror. In October in the Rockies, any day, nay, any hour may bring fresh surprises—a blue sky give way to whirling mists, a cold grey day to the balm and blue of Indian summer. One may well understand, too, in the very presence of these ferocious crags why the distant views of them from the plains below, eighty or a hundred miles away, present those uncanny outlines which surprise people used to the decorous, symmetrical peaks of Eastern America or even of Switzerland. We pass Canmore and Anthracite, two small settlements in the waste, devoted wholly to the mining of excellent hard . coal; of some importance now, and doubtless in the future to be much more so, but scarcely noticeable to the passing stranger in this alpine solitude. At Canmore the famous peaks of the Three Sisters tower some nine thousand feet upon our left, and as we run on towards Banff the many-crested ridge of equal altitude, known as Rundle Mountain, overlooks us for several miles, till before the mighty bulk of the Cascade Mountain the railway swings sharply to the west and enters the comparatively spacious opening in which lies the chief resort and abiding place of visitors to the Rockies. Banff, as will be gathered, though in the very heart of the mountains, is in fact at the very eastern edge of that continuous alpine desolation which, distinguished as the Rockies and the Selkirks, is more than two hundred miles in breadth, and even then merges into other chains that are only less rugged and majestic. Banff is likely to remain the favourite resort in all this tremendous wilderness, not merely because it is the mostTHE THREE SISTERS, CANMORE. [To face p. 344.BANFF. 345 accessible from the East, but because there is plenty of space around it in which to move without actually climbing mountains, and at the same time without sacrificing a particle of the grandeur that close intimacy with them gives. On the contrary, the moun- tains which surround the basin in which Banff lies, though not quite so high as some in the Selkirks, display themselves to singular advantage and afford a greater variety of scene than is possible where you are sunk in a single deep and narrow valley, however awesome may be the uplook from it. And this of course means that at Banff there is ample room for accommodating visitors, though building is kept strictly within bounds, the Canadian Pacific having absolute control of what is in reality a small spot in the middle of the National Park, a region some hundred miles square which can never be desecrated or in any way robbed of its pristine glories. This punch-bowl or amphitheatre, where lie the scattered houses of what is purely a pleasure and health resort, gives three or four miles each way of comparatively level country without ascending the valleys which run into it, and through this the clear green waters of the Bow leap, flash, or slumber with infinite variety of mood. Here well-made roads wind for many miles through pine woods or open pastures, over which the less vigorous or less enterprising can drive or even cycle in the perpetual presence of these eternal steeps. And there are endless paths, of course, where the pedestrian may wander by the banks of flashing waters or in the gloom of sombre woods. There are two hotels, the larger one belonging to the Canadian Pacific Railway, beautifully perched above the junction of the Bow and Spray rivers, a mile beyond the village, and the Sanatarium, which caters more especially for those who come to use the sulphur waters, of which more anon ; but like its greater and more aristocratic neighbour of the Canadian Pacific Company, it is full all the summer season with visitors bent mainly on pleasure. The latter had unfortunately closed for the winter during the few days we spent at Banff in the autumn of last year, and a great silence reigned in its spacious halls and corri- dors, broken only by the thunderous roar of the Bow, which forms a mighty cataract down below in the valley. A large new wing was being added to raise the accommodation of this famous346 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. house to over two hundred guests. For the wealthy there are suites of rooms at various prices; for the ordinary, but perhaps equally happy, tourist a sufficient bedroom nearer the skies, with all the culinary and other advantages of a first-class hotel, can be had for three dollars a day. Hitherto the hotel has closed about October ist. Casual travellers who elect to take the meteorological chances of the Rockies after that date, which may as often as not be favourable, will find reasonably comfort- able quarters and living at about two dollars a day at the Sana- tarium hbtel. The village consists of a few neat and sometimes quite tasteful frame houses, scattered along either side of the road to the station among the thinned-out fir woods, an excellent museum with a really fine collection of the ornithology and fauna of the Rockies, and a couple of churches. The views of the surrounding mountains are everywhere most beautiful, but the outlook from the roomy platform verandah of the Canadian Pacific hotel is peculiarly striking. For three hundred feet beneath the Bow and the Spray rivers unite their blue-green waters, the former at the foot of the great cataract alluded to above, the latter after miles of ceaseless rapids, in one huge pool. Thence travelling eastwards they display a broad shim- mering band of silver amid dense bordering woodlands, overhung on one side by the pale grey and pink precipices of Rundle Mountain, nearly five thousand feet above, and on the other by the more modest but bold pine-clad bluffs of Tunnel Mountain, which spring nearly a thousand feet from the valley level. There is fly-fishing here in plenty for the followers of what is mistakenly called the gentle art by those who have never faced rapid waters and slippery rocks all day in waders and brogues, or navigated a boat along the windward shore of a rough lake; and there is spinning for big trout from boats in neighbouring lakes for anglers who care for this inferior form of trouting. There is riding on ponies along mountain trails, driving and cycling over a tolerable radius, and even tennis and croquet. As you stroll in the wood the tree grouse flutters across your path with the conscious security of being in Canada's National Park, of some ten thousand miles square, where casual shooting is not allowed, and the squirrel regards you with like confidence as he leapsFROM THE C.P.R. HOTEL, BANFF. [To face p. 346.AN UNSOPHISTICATED CLIMBER. 347 from bough to bough. The Bow River, for the most part so tumultuous, pauses here, before rushing downward to the cataract, in some half-mile of broad still water, where the shadows of poplars and willows in the remnants of their autumnal glory, fall side by side on the glassy surface with those of the tall, tapering spruce pines, and are stirred betimes into all colours of the kaleidoscope by the paddle of some lingering summer visitor. There is nothing in the appearance or environment of Banff to jar with the splendour of the mountain scene in whose lap it lies. There are neither coal mines, nor saw-mills, nor rude clearings, nor any sign of industrial life to strike a harsh note among the woods and waters. The absence of these things is of design, the whole country being dedicated to the eye and the senses, to health and pleasure, by the irrevocable deed of the Dominion Government. I should doubt if the permanent popu- lation is more than two hundred, and consists mainly of people engaged in furthering these ends. The huge mass of the Cascade Mountain with peaked summit, now capped with snow, over nine thousand feet in height, fills in the north. Above the line of evergreen forest which struggles so persistently up these western mountains wherever foothold offers, the naked rocks of pale grey or light ruddy brown rise pre- cipitously on every side but one, which, presenting no obstacle but fatigue to the mountaineer, makes it a popular climb for the hardier sort of visitor. The mountain takes its name from a thin stream which, spouting out of its breast, falls down the naked rock from steep to steep, like a silver thread, till it loses itself in the woods below. The adjoining mountain, somewhat poorly named Vermilion, is not quite so imposing, but as I have related the tale of the verdant Englishman who started to walk from Calgary to the Rockies, I will now tell how a young drummer from eastern Canada, equally unsophisticated in the kindred knowledge of mountain altitudes, left our hotel at Banff unbeknown to anyone but a travelling companion, who I imagine had a well secured five dollars against his getting to the top of the mountain with the ill-fitting name. About noon I found the young man sitting348 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. in the hall with his blistered feet upon a chair, his town boots wrenched to pieces lying by his side, and his clothes besmirched, a sadder but wiser person, and minus, no doubt, his five dollars. He pointed out the ledge to which in pain and grief—-and he was a strong youth—he had scrambled, apparently about a thousand feet from the summit. Here his nose began to bleed and his head to swim, for what he fancied from below was a light carpet of snow proved to be a foot or so in depth, and what looked like trifling and scattered bushes was a ckevaux de frise of scrub pines. Satisfied with depositing the bottle enclosing his card, that he was to have planted triumphantly on the summit, at this more modest altitude, he found his way down to the lower world again in the sorry plight described, and with his knowledge of the upper one vastly enlarged. Of Rundle and Sulphur mountains that confront the two just mentioned across the valley, the first appeals greatly to the imagination, being also naked and stern of aspect for a long distance before it culminates in three step-like peaks, which fall sheer upon the further side in tremendous precipices of pinkish grey rock, into the maze of evergreen woodland, through which the Bow is breaking its way towards its drop into the plains and cattle ranches around Calgary. Other mountains further off but less striking in outline complete the circle. Banff in summer must be a delightful spot for the naturalist, the mountaineer, the angler, or the great untabulated who, after all, are the majority of men and women. In October, when I made its acquaintance, almost every visitor but a few rheumatic invalids drinking the waters had fled. One saw it in its most sombre and awe-striking mood—for in winter when I have also beheld it, the uniformity of an all-pervading snow mantle is perhaps less effective. But in October one knows not what each day may bring forth, nor what possibilities of storm and tempest may burst of a sudden from those aerial peaks, nor what the clouds that come rolling over the desolate ridges may have in store. You may one day be strolling in balmy sun- shine through the forests, or loitering on the bridges above waters brilliant at once with the bright green of their own texture and of the red rocks reflected through them. On the next, theBOW RIVER AND C. P. R. HOTEL, BANFF. [ To jace p. 348.THE DEVIL'S LAKE. 349 world is all grey and cold, no lights nor shadows play upon the mountains, crag and precipice frown down at you in their unmitigated naked savagery, or come and go in the wrack of whirling clouds. I am inclined to think that this mood is more in keeping with the temper of the Rockies. I have vivid recol- lections of a drive on such a day to Lake Minnewanka, some eight miles from Banff, a narrow sheet of ice-cold water twenty miles long and overhung by barren mountains. It is a great resort of Banff visitors in summer time, and in its pellucid depths anglers troll for monster trout, for which the lake is celebrated. Emerging from the pine woods, two or three miles from Banff, we pursued a road of quite tolerable character, seeing its only mission in life was to penetrate a wilderness to the " Devil's. Lake," as locally called, through endless battalions of bare poles that were pine trees before a forest fire left them thus naked amid the scrub of poplar, birch and willow, whose yellow leaves were fluttering in a bitter wind. The day was grey but clear, and of such sort as sometimes suits the mood of savage scenery. Our horses, who had much more than recovered the normal spirits which the work of the tourist season had doubtless modified, and further stimulated by the keen air, gave our driver, a handsome Kentuckian, plenty to do as we rose and fell over the toes of the Cascade Mountain, whose grey precipices rose thousands of feet above our heads. We crossed the Devil's Canyon on a wooden bridge, and looked down on the pale blue river on its way from the lake to the Bow, raging between ruddy precipitous cliffs. We rattled on through spruce woods that no fire had scathed, and in due course were standing on the pebbly shore of the cold, clear waters of Minnewanka. The little guest- house, where anglers and boating parties had foregathered a month or two before, was now closed and deserted, and the boats drawn up to shelters on the lonely shore. We had the place to our- selves ; a great stretch of pellucid but leaden-hued water curling in the breeze, the long razor-backed summit of Mount Inglis- maldie rising like a wall on the one side, and other mountains no less wild, forbidding and precipitous on the other; Mount Peechee so named—and a pity more are not so—from an Indian chief, being the highest of them, and registered as over ten thousand350 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. feet. On the way home we turned aside at the foot of the Cas- cade Mountain, where flat grass paddocks, sprinkled with trees and thickets, stoutly fenced and covering some five hundred acres, contain nearly all that is left of the lordly buffalo—a score or so in number, and the special wards of the Canadian Govern- ment. Thus " cribb'd, cabined and confined," these brown, shaggy monarchs of the waste do not seem altogether happy or at home. Their environment of mountain and crag is all that the keenest imagination could desire, but if these stolid blocks of shaggy hair had their own way, one cannot help remembering that they would not be in these alpine solitudes but roaming the boundless plains of Alberta or Assiniboia, where luscious bunch grass is now champed by their degenerate successors, the Shorthorn and the Hereford. There is one old gentleman here of such fabulous age that he must assuredly have rolled along in his youth among the vast herds that then darkened the prairies, and made the earth shake with the thunder of their thousand hoofs. He now cultivates the otium cum dignitate with much success. There are also within the enclosure moose and elk in a half-tamed state, but of much inferior interest to the others, seeing that they still abound all over the Canadian solitudes in their natural state, and with the increasing stringency of game laws are in no danger of extermination. Wild goats are the chief quarry, perhaps of the sportsman in the Canadian Rockies, and though they are to be reached from Banff, centres further along the railroad and deeper in the mountains, which we shall pass in due course, would be preferred by the more serious sportsmen ; though for that matter no man who did not take goat shooting seriously would be likely to follow a pastime where the toil is immense and the rewards precarious. It would be ill forgetting, too, the hot sulphur springs which lie about a mile and a half from the village along a fine road through delightful woodlands. When the first surveys for the railroad were being made through here, some observant soul perceived steam issuing from the woods not far from the river side, and on investigation discovered that it came through a natural chimney in a dome-shaped roof of rock. Further search disclosed a circular well, several yards in diameter and THE LAST OF THE BUFFALO. [To face p. 350.ACROSS THE DIVIDE. 351 several feet deep, with no access to it but through the hole aboye. A bath-house has now been erected and a passage cut through, and connected with the same building is an open-air natural swimming-bath of warm sulphur water, which is greatly resorted to. The water is also carried by pipes from springs upon the mountain to the Sanatarium Hotel for the benefit of the patients there. But many people who are very far indeed from being invalids enjoy a plunge in the natural pool. The next place on one's journey through the Rockies where it is possible, and not only that, but extremely desirable to break the journey, is Field, some fifty miles beyond Banff. The whole route thither is one long vista of stern magnificence, walled in by mountains, whose crests of pale grey or ruddy brown, capped or streaked with snow where there is a lodging for it, follow one another in a long procession of fantastic outlines, or fall to the valley in terrific precipices, in some cases over four thousand feet of sheer descent. The skeletons of burnt forests sometimes mar the foreground, though some may think perhaps that they give a further touch of desolation to the weirdness of the crags above. We follow up the Bow River nearly to the Great Divide, where parting from it the railroad follows a trickling streamlet to the top of the pass, whose waters leap down on one side towards the Atlantic, on the other to the Pacific. Laggan, however, is left at the foot of the final ascent, and Laggan is the station for Lake Louise, two and a half miles distant, one of the famous " Lakes in the Clouds," where a chalet hotel during the season affords accommodation to a limited number of guests, and scenery of the most imposing order rewards their enterprise. At Laggan, too, the time goes back an hour in conformity with that of the Pacific slope. As we top the ridge we may catch a glimpse of distant glaciers, and are told of one not far away to the northward which not only pours streams into the Atlantic and Pacific, but sends a third flow of water into the Arctic Ocean. I do not think that a prudent person would make any protracted attempt at word-painting the Rockies, the influence they exercise on various minds must differ so widely. To352 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. some they are like one huge nightmare that they dream of for weeks after passing through them. Now the Rockies and Selkirks—for spectacular purposes one range, there being no break of civilisation—occupy a matter of some twelve hours in transit, the two coast ranges being much less formidable. But the number of peaks, precipices, crags, waterfalls and scenes of every kind, save those with which we associate some neighbourhood to man, that cross the vision is prodigious, and many people who go through cannot contrive to snatch a breathing space at Banff, Field, or Glacier, the three main and, indeed, only points for doing so. The rate of progress is neces- sarily slow, a fact for which the traveller will be thankful for one obvious reason, and for another equally good one when his eyes behold the terrific places over which the Canadian Pacific has carried its passengers for some eighteen years without, I believe, having yet ever damaged a hair of their heads or, at any rate, lost the life of one of them. As there is an observation car on all through-trains during the season, even the passing traveller who sets his mind to it can in the course of a long day carry away with him an impression of the Rockies that will last him for life. He is far more in the presence of this savage landscape than the ordinary traveller going through a merely beautiful country at the rate of thirty miles an hour, for very often the train does not venture on a fifth of that speed, and this is naturally apt to be the case where the outlook is most impressive and the situation the most sensational. To deny that there is a certain sameness in this whole tortured region of the earth's surface would be useless. When the constituents of a landscape are confined to pine woods, naked rock, ice, snow and water, your point of view is wholly different from that with which you look on Derwentwater or the Vale of Llangollen. To some people, as I have said, the Rockies are a nightmare. Perhaps no higher compliment could be paid to them. The man or woman who ventures on prolonged word- pictures while under their influence must be something lacking in the sense of reverence or proportion, and most certainly in that of the use and abuse of words. I am not going to catalogue the various peaks which can beFIELD. 353 sighted as you rise and fall upon the Great Divide, but the descent into the valley of the Kicking Horse—where across a huge and deep abyss of myriads of spindling fir tops, the icy summits of a group of stupendous mountains mount the sky— is one, perhaps, of those outstanding spectacles which remain with one longest. Now the name of the Kicking Horse River always appealed to me as so admirably suggestive of a torrent breaking its way through canyons, and even poetic in its Indian fashion. It is disappointing to find that it derives its realistic appellation, as is so often the case, from some trifling incident which in pioneering days occurred on its banks. Dropping down the gorge of the Kicking Horse, by tressels and through tunnels, it is almost a relief to roll out on to a long and narrow flat, a few hundred yards in width, where, jammed between two dominating giants, Mount Stephen and Mount Field, the village of that name with its delightful hotel, erected and run by the C. P. R. as a first-class house, invites the more leisurely traveller to break his journey. In a place like this even the most exacting of tourists would expect to find nothing more than a plain, square or oblong building, with the necessaries of life provided in suffi- ciency and reasonably cooked. But these mountain houses of the Canadian Pacific are much more than that. They are built in tasteful chalet style, while the interiors are furnished with comfort and decorated with taste. Big raftered ceilings, large, old- fashioned hearths where log fires gleam in the cold evenings, cosy corners and deep armchairs, prove welcome in autumn at any rate; while paintings, flowers, ferns and evergreens give a home- like touch to the living-rooms and corridors. Nor here do you have a score of ill-cooked, unrecognisable morsels congealing on as many wretched little platters, hurled down in front of you, dovetailing in with the half-finished or abandoned array of your next-door or opposite neighbour, by ultra-democratic waiters or waitressss. But you are treated under the assumption that you have a palate, and are not cajoled into barbaric methods by the thin subterfuge of a bewildering menu, but your dishes are well- cooked and served singly, as in a private house, by an ample staff of decorous waiters in white jackets. Field is kept open all the winter, as the trains stop for meals once or twice a day. A A354 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. I feel quite free to thus eulogise these C. P. R. establishments, not merely because they inspired me with a vain desire to spend a month or two at each of them, but because everybody I ever came across is of precisely the same way of thinking, and you meet people on this transcontinental route from every part of the world, and well fitted to be critics. We had the Mount Stephen house, however, on this occasion, almost to ourselves, though there was an Englishman or two in pursuit of big game—goat and sheep being plentiful in the neighbourhood. Mount Stephen and Mount Dennis rear their rocky cliffs and crests to a tremendous height immediately behind the hamlet. In front the pine-clad steeps of Mounts Field and Burgess slope upward with scarcely less abruptness, and like the others, develop, as they ascend, into naked peaks. A curious flat of shingle and sand fills the valley between, and through it in normal weather the Kicking Horse, in brief respite from its fury, ambles quietly along a winding course, though in flood time it laves the railroad on the one side and the mountain foot on the other with its swollen waters. Here we had some pleasant rambles in balmy October sunshine among the giant stems of the spruces, hemlocks and cedars, sometimes on the single road which is made for vehicles, sometimes on trails through the forest, where the wood grouse, the only game bird of these mountain solitudes, its mottled plumage and spotted back shining in the sun, surveyed us with infinite composure at the closest of quarters. We lingered, too, on a natural arch of pink limestone that, some three miles from the village, spans the ice-blue waters of the Kicking Horse, where they plunge into a whirling pool skirted with pale grey rocks. We looked down the vista in the woods opened out by this tempestuous stream, and saw rising far above the nearer tree tops the snow-capped peaks and the rosy ramparts of the Ottertail range. We tried to realise that to the north of where we actually stood there was nothing, absolutely nothing, for hundreds of miles but these appalling solitudes, peak upon peak, valley upon valley; unin- habited, untrodden, and varied only by lonely lakes, reflecting the shadows of the everlasting pines and of the eternal hills; and we were not explorers who court such situations, but quite MOUNT STEPHEN AND THE KICKING HORSE RIVER AT FIELD. [To face p. 355.A MATCHLESS SOLITUDE. 355 conventional travellers not long off a Pullman car and stopping at a luxurious hotel. Comparisons are frequently drawn between Switzerland and the Rockies. But in Switzerland that awe- inspiring sensation of infinity, which is always present in the mind as one gazes either north or south among these British Columbian mountains, has no parallel. Just over each snowy range life there is teeming in plain and valley, but here, to the northward at any rate, there is nothing but savage Nature and silence, and one tries in vain to form some bird's-eye plan, some vague picture of those never-ending steeps. There may be altogether some thirty or forty houses at Field, modest ones for the most part, and inhabited by railway employes and hands, whose families, I am told, observe social rules with the utmost decorum in this veritable oasis. There will also be a number of railway navvies, mostly Galicians or Italians, not " in society," but given rather to herding in sheds and disused freight-cars. They look happy, however, are well fed, and get good wages. We must not leave Field without mentioning its chief acces- sible attraction, to wit, Emerald Lake, some seven miles off behind Mount Burgess, where a ch&let has been erected by the railroad for the benefit of visitors, not only to the lake, but to the great Falls of Takakkaw—which take a sheer leap of twelve hundred feet—and to the Yoho valley. But as an unkind fate deprived me of seeing these wonders I will say nothing more about them except that ponies and pony trails are a popular method of getting about this perpendicular country among the sixty or seventy guests who summer in it. I am assured, too, that the trout fishing, both in streams and lakes here, is admirable, and I do not see from the look of them how it could well be otherwise. In the run down from Field to Golden the track follows the wild gorges and stormy rapids of .the Kicking Horse canyon, and performs prodigies of engineering feats in the way of tunnels, tressels and bridges. I confess it is a great comfort to have the clean record of the railroad in the mind as one creeps warily down this wonderful pass above the seething torrent of bright blue water, the ruddy rocks and snow-white gravel, and finally arrives at the western base of the Rockies proper, where A A z356 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. one sees something like meadows and cultivation at the large village of Golden. This last is a headquarters for mining folk, and here we strike the broad stream of the Columbia, flowing due north in eccentric fashion, only to turn south again on its way to the United States, and force the railroad to recross it beyond the Selkirks, which here unfold their long array of snowy peaks before us. But I must not forget to say that Golden opens out a passage by steamer up the Columbia River into a comparatively busy, though a wild enough, world of mining industry, in which the Kootenay Valley is the best-known name. It is a gold country chiefly, for British Columbia, whose territory, by the way, we entered at the crest of the " Great Divide" near Laggan, has immense gold-bearing areas. There is an American saying in regard to the disposition of this precious metal, that if the head of the rat is in Alaska and its tail in Montana, the body itself is in B. C. At Beavermouth, after running tor some twenty miles in the narrow valley between the Rockies and the Selkirks, amid forests of cedar and pine, we cross the Columbia and enter the Selkirks through the narrow canyon of the Beaver River, which widens presently, and our train, clinging to the face of the mountain, crawls for a dozen miles up a steep grade at the rate of nine or ten miles an hour. Far below us, a thousand feet at least, over miles of huge cedars and Douglas firs, the Beaver River, its tortuous, sluggish course impeded by fallen trees and old beaver dams, winds through a narrow valley, shaggy with flood- tormented forests. Beyond it another immense wall of green climbs the sky to storm-washed, rather than rugged summits, while our train, dragging heavily up towards the summit of the Selkirks, crosses in its path iron bridges thrown over ravines of terrific depth, where frantic little torrents are plunging down- wards to the vale a thousand feet below. This is in some ways the most interesting bit of the whole railroad. For a time the surmounting of the Selkirks, hitherto a terra incognita, and twenty years ago untrodden by white man's foot, baffled the engineers. Owing to the depth of the ravines and the fury of the torrents, it was a long time before any way was discovered byROGER'S PASS. 357 which the watershed could be crossed, till Major Rogers, a Goverment surveyor, hit upon the ravine of Bearcreek, which leads up between the thrusting shoulders of Mounts Tupper and Macdonald, and thus secured a passage for the railroad and a deserved immortality for himself. Then, again, there is more trouble from snow slides in the late winter and early spring upon these giddy terraces which just here bear the railroad for so many miles along the face of the mountain. Small gangs of men, Italians or other foreigners, are passed at intervals, significant of the need of official watch- fulness over a critical section of railroad. Again and again we dive into the dark recesses of heavily-timbered snow sheds, some near a quarter of a mile in length. On facing the ascent of Roger's Pass the speed drops to three or four miles an hour. Gulfs of fir and cedar yawn below; tremendous precipices tower above on either side, and you get a crick in the neck endeavouring to follow their naked buttresses up to the snowclad peaks and glaciers which many thousands of feet above cut the skyline. At the top of the pass (4,300 feet), it is no bad plan for a passenger who intends to break his journey at Glacier to leave the train and walk the rest of the way down upon the track. Now Glacier is the third of the three alpine hotels erected by the Company, and is only some three miles below the summit. It is a suggestion well worth adopting by those whose time is limited, for you are here among the monarchs of the Selkirks—of which Sir Donald (10,600 feet) is the chief, and as you stroll down at your leisure you can halt in the very presence of Mounts Tupper, Macdonald and Avalanche of the Hermit range, and Mounts Grizzly and Cheops, and feel the keen air from their icy summits blowing in your face. Glaciers are all about on either hand, and down before you, over another rolling ocean of pine and cedar boughs, the infant streams of the Illecillewaet are tumbling in a deep valley beneath the foot of the glacier-laden masses of Mount Ross. It was a wintry October evening just before sunset that we followed the suggestion made above. As the heights were all clearly visible, the gloom of the skies which hung over their icy summits and savage cliffs was by no means out of harmony with a scene that is nothing if not savage. On358 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the way down we came upon a man skinning a wild goat of unusual proportions near a shanty by the side of the track. He had shot it, he said, on the very summit of Mount Avalanche, and pointed out with the help of some surveyor's binoculars, the very crag from which he fired the fatal shot. He was cook to the camping party of an eminent surveyor who was just winding up a long season spent in verifying the heights of this portion of the Selkirks. The latter, indeed, abandoned his aerial haunts only that evening for the hotel at Glacier, and told me among other much more interesting things the true story of the goat, namely, that his camp-hunter had shot it, not the unveracious cook, whose part in the achievement was wholly confined to the operation we witnessed him engaged upon ! The Glacier house down in the valley is a hotel somewhat smaller than Field, and much smaller than Banff. Like Field, however, it is a favourite resort of the more serious mountaineers, for whose benefit a group of Swiss guides remains during the season in the mountains. Mr. Whymper of alpine fame, and Mr. Outram, have associated themselves with the severest and most successful climbing in this region, and to say that the scope for such adventure is illimitable is to use an inadequate phrase. Within half-an-hour's walk of the hotel, through fir woods, is the " Great Glacier " itself on the lower slopes of Mount Sir Donald, the most accessible of the larger glaciers. Among the few birds that winter in these wilds we noted curiously enough the water ousel, not quite identical in colouring with our little white-breasted friend of the Welsh and Devon- shire streams, but with the same habits of flitting from rock to rock, of splashing in the water, and occasionally singing with quite a tuneful note. I saw also several blue jays here, but birds are scarce in these sombre forests, and such as there are may well be lost in the wilderness of cedar, fir and hemlock gloom. Human nature is the same the world over, and you will find the summer visitor of months assuming airs of pro- prietorship in the secrets and beauties of their particular haunts among the Rockies just as you will find in Switzerland or the English lakes the visitor of weeks taking it out of the casual tourist in like proportion. The latter, I notice, isSNOW SLIDES. 359 taken to task by an enthusiastic lady in one of the visitors' books for saying there are no birds in the Rockies, and he is reminded that in summer thrushes, robins, phoebe birds, wood- peckers, Canadian warblers and crows are to be found, besides a few eagles. But the casual tourist, if taken to task, would probably reply with justice that he was not a specimen hunter, that there were not enough birds to be a comfort to him and to be a serious item in the surroundings—which is quite true. Snow sheds are ominously numerous all along the line in this section. When avalanches of snow come roaring down the mountain, they shake the then scanty inmates of the Glacier house in their very beds. And here, by the way, there is no settlement at all, the station and the hotel, whose flower garden, and fountain look strange in this wild land of sombre forest being almost the only buildings. When men are working on the line near the spot where snow slides, which have strong local partialities, are wont to occur, and at their active season, the precaution is taken of planting pickets up the mountain side to give warning to those below when an avalanche has started on its deadly course. Another precaution adopted on the C. P. R. shows at once the difficulties its officials have to encounter, and the vigilance with which they guard their trains. This consists of switch-tracks here and there on precipitous descents—so that in the event of a train proving too much for the brakes and getting out of hand, its driver can signal the men who are on guard there night and day to switch it off on to the side track, which is graded up a sharp incline, and thus bring it securely to a standstill. A three hours' run from Glacier down the noted valley of the Illecillewaet, where the track is forced into some wonderful loops and contortions by the refractory nature of the ground, brings us to Revelstoke. Here we again meet, and again cross, the Columbia River after its extraordinary detour to the north. It is now, however, nearly half a mile wide and with broad navigable current is running due south for the American border. Revelstoke, with a population of nearly two thousand, is a mining centre, and by way of the Columbia leads into the great Kootenay district, where a labyrinth of travelled routes by rail360 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. and water wind among the mountains and connect with the Crow's-Nest line of the Canadian Pacific. A glance at the map will show that while everything to the north of the rail- road is a virgin country, the belt to the southward of it, as far as the American border, is traversed by several arteries of rail and water. And within this country, in valleys as deep as those we have seen and beneath peaks as lofty, various mining towns cluster and the mining industry, so far as at present exploited, of British Columbia mainly lies. There is a world here unto itself whose intricacies it would be hopeless for us to touch upon, though not entirely given over to mines and mining, for farmers have followed wherever the narrow valleys or open bush lands give scope for farming or ranching. But British Columbia is twice as big as France, and so broken and intricate of surface as to baffle any attempt at brief descrip- tion. Speaking broadly, it consists of parallel ranges of moun- tains rolling like great waves from the prairies of Alberta to the Pacific, and leaving here and there in its troughs long narrow strips for agriculture and habitation; a sea of mountains laden with timber and full of mineral wealth, with strips and pockets of rich land lying here and there among it, some of them timbered, some prairie. It is so complex a country that you require to be some time in it, and to go about it a good deal, before it is possible to get its ramifications fixed in your mind. And even thus I am only bearing in mind that southern portion of the province which is at present open to occupation and in touch with the world. In short, the whole civilisation of British Columbia is confined to a belt across the bottom of the province about two hundred miles wide, of which the C. P. R. virtually forms the northern boundary, and this civilisation is sprinkled about in deep valleys, by the side of lakes or rivers, whose communications are dictated by Nature and forced along certain channels. Much of this high inland country has a winter nearly as cold as that of Alberta and with about the same slender rainfall. While down on the coast, as we shall see, there is a heavier rainfall than in North Wales, and a winter as warm as Devonshire. Immediately after crossing the Columbia and leaving theSICAMOUS. 361 Selkirks, we enter the Gold or Columbia range through a narrow pass, and running for some twenty miles through a valley filled by a succession of lakes, pull up at Sicamous Junction, where the long, narrow Shushwap lakes go straggling in all directions northwards. Sicamous is the junction for Vernon and the famous Okanagan Valley—perhaps the best known and most delightful agricultural section of the province. Here a railway runs for about forty-five miles due south along a valley, three or four miles wide, of well-cultivated farms, to the charming little town of Vernon, around which spread swelling hills, where herds of cattle graze on the bunch grass that cover them. As this Spallumcheene Valley and Okanagan country is typical of the interior farming lands of the province, and indeed, is frequently called the garden of British Columbia, I can hardly do better than conclude this chapter by some brief notice of it. This branch line from Sicamous Junction to Vernon, observing a normal speed of about twelve miles an hour, travels for the first few miles through a half-tamed shaggy country, skirting the banks of the narrow but beautiful lake of Mara, whose western shores are overshadowed by wooded mountains that rise perhaps two thousand feet above the water. And I may remark again it is futile and illogical for the traveller from the East or Europe to work himself into a fury about the slowness of railroads in these newly-opened countries, as I have sometimes heard him do. All this comes right in time. There are physical and social conditions to contend with in thinly populated new districts quite unlike those existing elsewhere. Nearly everyone is much more interested in being able to get their goods or pro- duce over the line than in getting about themselves at a particular rate of speed. Trains cannot run frequently for obvious reasons, and if there is freight at a certain station which takes half an hour to load, the local passenger resigns himself with sympathetic intelligence to the inevitable, and consoles himself with the memory of ante-railroad days and what teaming for fifty miles over muddy roads then meant. Furthermore, the road bed is very often rough for the first few years and not suitable for rapid travelling. At any rate, the visitor bent on seeing the country need not grudge such leisurely progress, for it gives him362 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. almost as lucid an idea of it as if he were on a stage coach or buggy. In some cases twelve miles an hour has yet more positive advantages, for as I was proceeding at this leisurely pace to Vernon, a maiden of fifteen fell off the train while going at normal speed soon after getting in at her country station; but was happily able to walk home, and turned up none the worse at the parental farmhouse, to the surprise, no doubt, of her friends and relatives. At Enderby, with a population of 1,500, we come into the beginning of the good country—low wooded hills on either side, and a narrow fertile valley between. We might almost be in Ontario again but for the more modest, though sufficient, scale of farmhouses and buildings. Fields of grain, hay, or vegetables, are all about us, for the rainfall here is adequate (twenty inches) without irrigation, and we even see once more the old snake fences. This thirty miles of country up to Vernon is much of it perhaps nearly as many years old, for the mining folk of British Columbia in the 'sixties settled quite freely on the more accessible lands of the province long before railroads were thought of and found their way in here. Farms now follow each other uninterruptedly, while another little market town, at Armstrong, where troops of drummers get in and out, testifies to the population and prosperity of the valley. The soil is a black clay loam and in former years was notable for wheat growing, equalling in yield the best of Manitoba, seventy-two bushels to the acre having been known here. Since the opening of the Kootenay mining country, however, though there is a ready market for it at the celebrated flouring mills of Enderby and Armstrong, wheat has given way somewhat to potatoes, hay and vegetables. Improved land throughout the valley is worth from forty to a hundred dollars an acre, the high rate of which will strike the visitor from Ontario as singular when he remembers that the finest farms of that central province come within those limits. Indeed, the values of land all over British Columbia are perplexing, and seem capricious even to those who are familiar with such things from the Atlantic to the eastern base of the Rockies. There are several reasons for this. The limitations of the agricultural and ranching lands in so mountainous a provinceTHE SPALLUMCHEENE VALLEY. 363 is one of them, another is the neighbourhood of mining centres which create a slightly inflated, yet easily glutted and somewhat precarious market. Then again, the extraordinary variation in climate, or perhaps I should say in rainfall, within a few miles is distracting. There are nearly twenty inches, for instance, at the lower end of this short valley, enough that is to say for ordinary farming, while about Vernon the precipitation is just half that and irrigation a matter of course. Even in the drier districts, however, grain crops are often ventured on, and sometimes do well, but that is not to the point, unless it may be of interest to mention that of late years, partly perhaps because they have been wet ones, a good deal of successful cultivation of lands in semi-arid belts has been achieved both in British Columbia and to the east of the mountains. Wild lands in the neighbourhood of Enderby, the best centre for land-seekers, as being within the rain belt, are worth from ten to fifteen dollars, and this country in its natural state is partly forest of cottonwood, willow, poplar, birch and various evergreens, and partly open down sprinkled in park- like fashion with clumps of cedar, fir and larch. Vernon, the terminus of the railroad, lies near the head of Okanagan Lake, which is navigated regularly throughout its seventy miles of length by steamers of the Canadian Pacific Railway to Penticton, not a great distance from the international boundary line. There are strips of agricultural country here, splitting the mountains that border the lake, or skirting its shores, but it is mainly a great mining and timber country of the typical British Columbian kind. We must not go further, however, than Vernon, which, with the Spallumcheene Valley and other districts round, is not merely the centre of a region unsurpassed for agricultural purposes in British Columbia, but one of the most charmingly-situated little towns in all the Dominion of Canada. Immigration, it is true, is not going, even into the favoured districts, in anything like the same volume that it is pouring on to the prairies. For the man without money, or with very little money, the scattered agricultural regions of this province do not offer so simple a solution as do the prairies. Labour is high, but then on big concerns, though they pay good wages —twenty-five to thirty dollars—they expect skilled men, and364 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. have no fancy for the amateur as a labourer. The men with small farms and fruit ranches hire help capriciously for brief periods when they want it, and though good men used to farm work could probably find a permanent job, it is hardly a country for the amateur without capital or prospects of it, and only a conviction that Providence has destined him for an "outdoor life." But immigration of men with small or moderate capital must flow with a steady tide into the Okanagan. Everything that comes out of the earth, from tobacco to oats, and from apples to apricots, and all that fatten upon it, do well in this favoured land. The contour of the country is delightful, and more homelike by nature than almost any part of the Dominion. Soft, swelling hills clad with bunch grass, and sometimes sprinkled with clumps of graceful trees rise to moderate heights; roomy valleys, level or gently undu- lating, lie between; beautiful lakes of crystal water, long and narrow with bright, pebbly beaches, thread the country, and are bordered by lofty and shapely ridges, on whose slopes grass and woodland alternate in pleasing fashion. The lakes of eastern Canada are beautiful, but they lie in the very grip of primeval forests. The lakes of the prairie are virtually bare, but in the Vernon and Okanagan country they approach more nearly to the type of Buttermere or Ulleswater. This is pre-eminently a country to live in. Whatever difference of opinion there may be concerning it practically, as compared with the prairies east of the mountains, no one would venture to deny that these favoured districts of British Columbia are the ideal country for a pleasant rural life, provided a man is fit to be a colonist at all. The climate is a mean between the cold of the prairies and the Devonian climate of the sea coast. The lowest tempera- ture officially recorded in the stations round Vernon in an average year is 130 ; the highest about 94° There is a good deal of snow in winter, but the climate is very dry and extraordinarily healthy—probably the best all-round climate in Canada, which is saying a great deal. Nowhere is there greater variety in the size of the farms. South and east of Vernon there are cattle ranches of thousands of acres, and there are fruit ranches of twenty. There are, moreover, a greater proportionTHE COLDSTREAM RANCH. 365 of old country people in and around Vernon than in any part of the Dominion. The mayor—and much respected mayor, too—of the town when I was there was an Englishman of good family, still quite young, but one of the leading business men of the place. The population is approaching two thousand, and Vernon, standing between railroad connection with the Canadian Pacific Railway at Sicamous and the head of navigation down the Okanagan Lake, is surely bound to grow, whether slowly or otherwise. The great feature of the neighbourhood is Lord Aberdeen's large ranch of some thirteen thousand acres at Coldstream, not merely because of the extensive scale on which things are there carried on, but because, as a centre of enterprise and good management, it is both an example and a help to the surrounding country. It practically fills for some miles the whole of a typical valley—a mile or so in width and of gently undulating or level surface, with steep pastures of bunch grass climbing the sides of the hills which wall it in, till they merge in the woods that crown their summits some thousand or fifteen hundred feet above. The buildings are numerous and ample, for many branches of farming are here followed upon a large scale. Hops and grain, cattle, sheep, pigs, and even poultry, are bred and raised with a rigid eye to the best varieties and the most profitable methods. But apples are perhaps the most striking feature of the estate, the orchards being the largest in British Columbia and covering over a hundred acres. Such serried ranks of well-trimmed apple-trees, of full size and bearing, standing up in clean soil carefully tilled for the sake of the trees alone, is a sight we never see in England where apples fetch three times the price. Why our orchards are mainly turned into subjects for the landscape painter, pruned in primitive fashion, or not pruned at all, and, above all, matted with carpets «of perennial pasture and knocked about by the horns of milch cows, when their produce is an expensive necessary to almost every housekeeper in the kingdom, I do not know. British Columbian, like Californian fruit is not considered equal in flavour to that of Eastern Canada. It has to compete with the former in its own province, and with the latter in the prairie country east of the mountains. Success is, of course,366 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. largely a matter of wise selection, good packing, and judicious marketing. The notion is not uncommon that these markets can be overdone, and is exaggerated from the mistaken idea that anyone can stick in trees, watch them grow, pick the fruit, and sell it. Bitter disappointments in scores of English families, whose members have gone to different parts of the world with these optimistic notions, have done something to spread the truth, but it does not yet generally prevail. This last I think may be summed up in the fact that successful fruit-growers, like horse- breeders and poultry-raisers, are more often born than made. The largest fruit-grower in British Columbia remarked to me that he thought one safeguard against glutted markets lay in the inability of so many men who went into the business to take it sufficiently seriously, and in the absence of a natural taste for fruit cultivation. A further check to any congestion of markets has certainly been given by the immense volume of immigration now going on to the prairies where no fruit is grown to speak of. There is plenty of water in this Coldstream Valley, and Lord Aberdeen has sold several strips of his large estate in small lots of about twenty to forty acres under irrigation to fruit farmers, and several families of the better class, both English and Canadian, have settled on them and have now well-grown and full-bearing orchards of apples, cherries, pears or plums. Their owners have the opportunity of selling in the markets which the management of the Coldstream ranch secures for its own large crops—no small advantage. There is plenty of timber, too, besides the prevailing evergreen varieties, in this valley and in others like it—mainly, poplar, cottonwood, birch, and willow, and, there is a saw mill on the Coldstream estate which appears to be kept pretty busy. Between thirty and forty hands are regularly employed on this estate, including foremen and book-keeper, which for many years has been steadily increas- ing its output and efficiency under its present able manager. Although winter had virtually begun, for it was late November when I visited this region, its fascinations were too obvious to be dimmed by grey skies and, occasionally, by something more than the threat of a snowstorm. The variety of landscape, the mixture of wood and water, of hill and mountain, of pasture andTHE COLDSTREAM RANCHE. [To face p. 366.THE OKANAGAN. 3^7 tillage, all grouped so naturally, is very charming. The choice of occupation, too, so far as the soil is concerned, is very wide, and for field sports it would be hard to find a better centre. Trout abound in the streams and lakes, prairie chicken in the open country, and ducks and geese in their season, while at no great distance the big game hunter can place himself in touch with deer, caribou, mountain sheep, and goat. It is altogether a good country, though perhaps the farmers have not made so high a percentage on their capital invested as in the prairie countries for the last two seasons, nor has it gone ahead so fast. Manufactured articles and groceries are somewhat dearer here than beyond the mountains, but again farmers' produce is a little higher. As a residential country, however, the Okanagan district would be very hard to beat. I gathered from the best authorities in the district that the young Englishman going out there to learn the business with a view of settling would have some difficulty in getting any of the better sort of settlers to give him a permanent home in return for his inexperienced assistance. The big ranchmen want skilled hands, while among fruit trees a raw hand is worse than useless. As in the North-West, the disinclination of the well-established household to take a soft- handed, inexperienced young man to their bosoms for better or for worse is pretty general. With or without a quid pro quo the risk is very great, as these people know much better than those who have never had personal experience of these things, but indulge in vague generalities on a very complex subject. However, it is of no use young Englishmen going to British Columbia to farm unless they are of the sort who will have some capital. In such case it will probably pay their parents better to send them as pupils on some equitable arrangement to a capable, substantial married settler of good position, where they will be well fed and treated and taught their business, than to send them hunting about for free quarters or small wages among all sorts and conditions of men, and for engagements that may prove quite temporary. The young man of this class to whom subsistence for the moment is the main object, and the sort of people he lives with a secondary one, and who is without the prospects necessary to enable him to plan his future, had368 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. much better take chances on the prairies or in eastern Canada if he emigrates at all. British Columbia, at any rate, is not generally speaking a country for such lads to come to under these conditions. But for the young man who may be moderately endowed with the means to make a start there are undeniable attractions of climate and environment, which some, if they were in a position to make comparisons, might fairly set against certain material advantages of the prairies and the plains; while, in some cases, constitution and temperament cause a preference for the milder atmosphere. In any case he would have to gain his experience, and to a young man who was going later on to venture capital and put in his life's work with it, it is evident that the person under whom he fits himself for so important an enterprise exerts no little influence on the fortunes of his after-life, and in the formation of his character. It is curious how many parents seem wholly unconscious of this luminous truism when a country is four or five thousand miles away. If it were a hundred they would doubtless take no end of pains. It is not always easy to find the right man for this responsibility. Plenty will undertake it who are not fit, while some of those who really are qualified do not consider that even a moderate premium repays the trouble and responsibility of such a connection. A notable difficulty, of course, in this safer kind of probation lies not only in the choice of individuals, but in the fact that if the youth works steadily, as it is for his own good to do, the small farmers or hired men round tell him it is a swindle that he should work and "pay for his board." These last are naturally incapable of understanding anything beyond the actual food consumed, and they possibly upset the youth himself, who would be almost superhuman if he could quite realise the point of view of those who had him always with them as an inmate and a charge. It is perhaps superfluous to add that these local moralists would sell him a farm or a horse at three times its value in a moment if they got the chance; but then again, that is just what they could not do with a youth possessed of a responsible protector. However, the particular moral I wish to point is that a young Englishman without capital or prospective capital, and with agricultural intentions, had betterCOMMON FALLACIES. 369 remain on the other side of the Rockies. Another fact that cannot be too insistently rubbed in is that the young Englishman who has proved himself of the right mettle by a year or so of good honest work and has got rid of his angles and got over his green period, and above all learned how to do the various branches of farm work, belongs to an utterly different category, and is regarded from an entirely different point of view as regards all these things to the unknown quantity repre- sented by the freshly-landed youth of this class. Another curious notion which obtains in England is to the effect that one inexperienced youth of this sort must be of the same value as another when first on a farm in Canada. The following is to the point. A prominent English ranchman with whom I was recently staying, in talking of the many fallacies on all these matters obtaining at home, mentioned the case of two parsons, whom we will call No. 1 and No. 2, neighbours in England, whose two sons, similar in age, education, and for tennis party or football match purposes as like as two peas, were sent to him with not very direct introductions and a request to find them work. My host's ranch went like clockwork with the efficient aid of a number of skilled hands, and these youths would have been merely in the way. My host was also an intensely busy man, while his domestic arrangements were quite as elaborate and comfortable, in all probability, as those of either Vicar No. 1 or Vicar No. 2. At any rate, he kept the boys there for some days till he had got them each places for their board with small farmers in the neighbourhood. And one may take the opportunity of picturing the disgust of either of these clerical gentlemen if a couple of boys from the Antipodes, strangers with the slightest form of introduction, had been dumped down at their front doors in such fashion. This, however, is by the way. The point is that one of the lads, No. 1, proved teachable and apt, while No. 2 was so much the reverse that the farmer declined to keep him, and sent him back, and fully justified himself for so doing in my friend's eyes, who finally boarded him with another farmer for 15 dollars a month till he could hear from home. So far from getting any thanks for his hospitality and his trouble, my host received letters from His Reverence No. 2 bitterly C. BB370 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. complaining that, while his neighbour's son was getting his board and lodging, he had to pay so much a week for his own hopeful; nor could any explanations make that thick-headed and ungrate- ful person understand that there was not some kind of conspiracy to hamger his son's start on the road to fortune ; the real fact being that he was simply unfit to be a colonist, though carrying on his person no previous signs of this inaptitude.SOME POTATO STORIES. 371 CftAPTER XV. It has already been recorded that this Spallumcheene country is noted for its vegetables, and, indeed, I have never heard such potato stories in all my life as some which entertained me during a wait at Sicamous Junction for the Vancouver train. The potatoes had been worked up to about six pounds in weight, when a burly American land-hunter, a fine specimen of Dakota farmer, hitherto respectfully attentive, entered the lists and simply knocked the orators from Enderby and Armstrong clean out of time with instances of mammoth roots'culled from the garland of his imagination, though purporting to have matured in Dakota or Arizona. The British Columbians were no match for him, and in the stony silence which he had created he went on to speak of his birth and lineage, not after the manner of Southerners, hinting at some splendid but shadowy ancestor, but with the sort of practical interest, quite free from any vanity, that plain Westerners so often take in their forebears. His name, he said, was Proctor, and he proceeded to relate how his grand- father came into Missouri from England, and what a quiverful he had, and how Proctors of his stock were to be found in every State in the Union. Some were even suspected of having found their way to Canada, and the Proctors of South Dakota had begged our friend to keep his eyes open for these wandering sheep, and locate them if he could. But this commission he had no intention of fulfilling, remarking laconically to the crestfallen potato growers round him that he had come to Canada to hunt land not names—which a real estate agent present seemed to think the most sensible remark he had made. The hotel at Sicamous Junction is a comfortable little house, also the property of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and though not actually run by the Company, it is, or was, in the hands of an Englishman who has made a name among caterers on the b b 2372 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Pacific slope. The house, together with the little station, over- hangs Mara Lake, is beautifully situated, and a favourite resort of fishermen and summer visitors in general. Pursuing our journey to the coast, Kamloops, about seventy miles west, is the next point of importance. In getting there we follow for many miles the banks of the Salmon arm of Shushwap Lake, called after the tribe of Indians of that name who still have a reserve here, and after climbing high forest- covered ridges, we drop down into the valley of the Thompson River. Here is a long string of settlements originating with the miners of the fifties and sixties, and fronting quite a large ranching country of the Vernon type which lies among the hills beyond. Kamloops itself is a small town of nearly 2,000 population, and stands at the junction of the North and South Thompson, and is the centre both of a grazing and a mining country. For twenty miles below Kamloops we skirt the long lake of that name, tunnels being driven in several places through obstructing headlands for the passage of the railway. Then after its long rest the Thompson River, of prosaic name but poetic nature, plunges besides us through canyons whose gloom is relieved by the brilliant green of the glacial waters, and the pink and yellow, the ruddy brown and white colouring of the rocks over which it rushes. Then come more signs of open country about Ashcroft, a growing little town: then more canyons and more rushing of green waters over gay-tinted rocks, more precipices overhung with spruce and fir and cedar, till at Lytton the Fraser rushes into the Thompson, and we are fairly on the last stage of the long journey. For some time the scenery, though picturesque and grand, has been of a different order from that of the Rockies and the Selkirks. The awful aloofness and desolation no longer haunts you, for the mountains of the Gold and the Coast ranges are. much lower and less awe-striking even when you see them, which in following the Thompson and the Fraser canyons is not very often. The presence or near neighbourhood of human life and industry, wide scattered as yet though it be, seems to breath a different spirit over this region. In autumn, too, the temperature may have risen 10 to 30 degrees since leaving Banff, FieldROUND-UP IN THE KAMLOOPS COUNTRY, B.C. [To face p. 372.THE FRASER RIVER. 3?3 or Glacier, and the great abundance of deciduous trees, poplar, birch or cottonwood will be only now turning colour where their scantier kinsmen on the banks of the Bow or the Kicking Horse will be tossing their leaves in thin golden showers to the colder winds. But chiefly the traveller who thus crosses the continent for the first time will, I think, take note that he is in the presence of a river, the precise like of which he has never seen before. For fifty miles, speaking broadly, the railroad runs along the edge of a precipice, beneath which the Fraser, in a narrow, clearly- defined trough, and with swift, silent, greenish-tinted current of fifty to a hundred yards in width, and of what great depth I know not, rushes seaward. The canyon is hardly as savage as those in the Rockies. The ruddy walls which drop to it give foothold here and there for grass or bushes, while the crest of the ridge along the side of the railroad is often gay in the yellow sunshine with the foliage of deciduous trees. There are few conspicuous rapids or cataracts here. Though we glide smoothly down mile after mile at a greatly accelerated speed, the river beneath us is always the same—silent, swift, cruel-looking; ever polishing and lashing the walls of rock that enclose it, with the look of a river continually speeding towards some tremendous cataract. The cataract, however, does not come, though the great volume of water drives ever forward, with the same subtle, noiseless velocity. Boats might descend it, but none could come up, so no boats as yet are to be seen. Small chance, too, would any mortal have who was cast into that icy, hurrying flood. Lower down, however, the Fraser becomes more restive and angry—its channel less straight and unobstructed and in sharper angles lashes the powerful current into foam and surge. On the opposite bank at heights varying from a hundred to a thousand feet above the river, the old Government waggon road made in the sixties for the first miners clings to the precipice and accompanies us the whole way down : and the first gold in British Columbia was discovered in this immediate neighbour- hood. Towards Yale, the head of Tidewater, the river begins to spread out, and the current to slacken. Indian villages with their strange graveyards are poised upon the steep, and Indians them- selves in the season may be seen in queer-looking boats, or374 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. waiting, spear in hand, on posts of vantage by the bank for the ascending salmon; while Chinamen here and there are washing for the precious metal. Dropping ever downward at smooth and rapid pace, with a sense that all the difficulties of the route are past, stern cliffs disappear, and the river broadens out into a slow and smooth current. Big trees shooting up from beds of fern, and with leaves still green and gold, spread their branches over it; farming lands sweep backwards from its shore, while humpy detached fragments of the coast range, soft and blue in colour, spring far aloft behind lovely foregrounds, which seem quite semi-tropical and sensuous after the savagery of the Selkirks. The valley is now wide enough for the line to leave the river at intervals. At Agassiz, the Government experimental farm covers a spacious flat, and next we are rumbling over the mouth of the Harrison River, just emerged from that long lake, which shooting straight northwards through walls of mountains, makes a passage into a back country containing tablelands of prairie, attractive to the pioneer of small means who is content to wait for better communications. But along the river valley and the railroad, both in the open farming lands and the woods that divide or surround them, the observant traveller, more especially one conversant with English and North American conditions of soil and climate, will note the signs that characterise the Pacific slope. He will see turf like that of Great Britain growing and rioting everywhere; sward that bespeaks no struggle with long winters or over-dry summers, that seizes every vacant space like an English lawn where grazed, like an English fence corner where left to itself—red and white clover, foxtail, fescues, cocksfoot, and rye grass. Sixty to eighty inches of rain it must be remembered fall here, while the winter is that of southern England, and the soil immensely rich. Four degrees of frost is the lowest mean temperature for January over a group of years for this district, seven above freezing point the highest mean ; ten above zero the coldest winter night, 920 the hottest July day recorded, while the hottest mean of the latter month is 76° and the lowest 50°. Climatically it will be seen we are in England, though the extreme heaviness of the rainfall, that of Snowdonia,A RIVERSIDE FARM. 375 is partly due to the great amount which falls in the late autumn and winter. But here is a typical Fraser River farm, one well known to me and bisected by the Canadian Pacific Railway, so let us alight in fancy and walk up to the homestead on the ledge above the low lands, and from that vantage point gossip for a page or two on farming and farm life down here on the level of tide water; for these differ considerably from their equivalents at Vernon and on the central plateau of the Province. A high ridge clad with primeval forest rises steeply behind the house, and rolls away interminably in waves of hills to higher mountains, with all of which we have no concern, for it is wilderness. This is a very new country, it must be remembered, and the forests of the Pacific slope are so formidable that the expense of clearing them has not yet justified se tiers in going behind the rich flat lands of the Fraser. Below us are some fifty or sixty acres of clean grass land, neatly fenced into fields, and broken only by a single stretch of turnips. On either side, as in the rear, the property is walled in by the forest. In front, the fourth side of the square, flows the broad river, four or five hundred yards in breadth here, but smooth and navigable, though still running with considerable current. All this little estate has been cut out of the woods within the last twelve or fifteen years by the present owners at a cost of little less than a hundred dollars an acre, if they estimate their own labour at normal rates. Indeed, anyone with a general notion of the cost of clearing and bringing Ontario or eastern bushland into cultivation, about thirty dollars that is to say, would readily accept this larger estimate when he saw the nature of the forest, the immense size of the cedars and Douglas firs and hemlocks; not only of those standing, but the carcases of others, five, six and seven feet through, which have fallen in past years and lie cumbering the earth amid a chaos of rotten branches. But if the forest is formidable to its immediate adversaries, chiefly on account of its huge evergreens, its beauties, which here are very great, are much enhanced by the presence of large maples, poplars, cottonwood, and robuster specimens of birch and alder than we ever see in England. The dog wood376 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. too, whose white blossoms are such a feature of spring time through the Southern States, illumines the gloom also of these great British Columbian woodlands, and I saw it blooming in November! But if the clearing is a stupendous business the land is abnormally rich. Timothy, orchard grass, wild clover, or meadow hay will produce three tons to the acre, and baled hay near the sea coast towns has always a market and a good value, though just here it is mainly fed to stock. Milch cows, calves or bullocks, grain and all vegetables flourish, wThile fruit, though not perhaps of such quality as in the Vernon country, also thrives well. The house is frame, of several rooms and verandahs over which creepers twine freely. A well made tennis lawn, with a good show of flowers in season, makes a pleasant foreground to the green meadows stretching below and the broad river beyond. It is curious to look from the lawn and see the English pheasants straying about in the fields below and hear the cocks calling from time to time, for these birds, turned down in the lower altitudes of British Columbia and Vancouver Island, have thriven splen- didly. Having the eternal forest always handy as a sure refuge, they can never be killed in any numbers, and the vermin question, which caused anxiety to their introducers, seems to have been settled quite satisfactorily by the birds themselves. A mountain stream comes leaping down the wooded hill above the house, among ferns and rocks, and supplies the household with water through pipes, then races through the barnyard and the barnyard pasture, where the turf in December is as green as in North Wales, and the bracken stands in russet patches, and a few giant fir trees left in the open rear their tops from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet into the sky. The barn is of Ontario build, the stock all housed below and a floor above with waggon way through. Labour- saving machines, both indoors and out, are valuable in British Columbia where labour is even scarcer than on the plains or in the East. Everything flourishes here that likes a soft, moist climate and a rich soil. The moss hangs in great festoons from the forest trees, clover springs on every bare patch with rank luxuriance, while many varieties of fern riot in the forest and by the roadside. Over a hundred hens of selected breeds pick round the barn- yard, for poultry do well here and fetch better prices than inSETTLERS ON THE FRASER. Ontario, as also does dairy produce. It would be hard to define the special industry of these farms along the banks of the lower Fraser and its delta. They can grow anything except Indian corn, and each man follows his fancy, but land is expensive, whether to clear or to buy when cleared. People from many parts of the world are to be found here, gentlefolks, many of them, from various Anglo-Saxon countries, possessed of small incomes perhaps, with a fancy for fruit or poultry farming, a mild climate, sublime scenery, and ready access to a city. There are villages of Norwegians, too, who combine fishing in the salmon season with small farming at other seasons. Chinamen, Indians and half-breeds follow the same mixed calling, and cultivate small holdings on the river bank. In the woods there are ruffed grouse, and in the lakes and rivers duck shooting, though of a second-class compared to that of the prairies. There are deer, bear, and caribou too in plenty, further back, and trout and salmon everywhere in the waters. Salmon are perhaps the product with which British Columbia is most often associated in the eyes of the world, and the stories of how they jostle each other running up the streams are no whit too tall. The Fraser River is, of course, one of their great high- ways to the interior, and thence they travel up the various tributaries, pushing their way far into the heart of the big moun- tains. A few miles from my friend's farm a large tributary, the Stave, meets the Fraser, and some big saw-mills occupy the point of junction. We drove there one glorious Indian summer day in November, over rough backwoods roads, greasy with recent rains, whose drops lingered in the great fir and cedar boughs which brushed our hats. We were to take our luncheon at the meeting of the waters for the gorgeous view revealed from that particular spot, paddle on the Fraser, and do a little desul- tory fly fishing perhaps, though the season was over. Precarious- seeming bridges of logs carried us over mountain brooks, faced by perpendicular declivities of slippery track, which could only be negotiated by putting the two sturdy horses at them at a gallop. And talking of salmon stories, I do not suppose any- one would guess why we had the utmost difficulty in finding a place to picnic on the banks of either river. The trouble was a378 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. normal one at that season, but forgotten for the moment by my companions, and lay in the fact that the banks of the river, particularly the Stave, were strewn thick with the carcases of dead salmon, and the stench was overpowering. I stood for a few moments at one spot, quite at haphazard, and counted twenty- eight dead fish of from ten to twenty pounds, lying on the rocky shore within as many yards of me. Others were rolling about in the shallow water dying. The dog salmon, and I think another of the six or seven varieties of British Columbian salmon, are the victims of this extraordinary provision of Nature. They are said only to come up once in their lives to spawn, and that in their fourth or fifth year, and to die after spawning, though thousands must succumb soon after they get into the Fraser. It is a loathsome spectacle, and a still more extraordinary one higher up among the hills, where the streams are smaller. Friends who go back there deer-hunting or prospecting tell me that it is sometimes impossible to spin a minnow for trout for the number of half-moribund salmon floundering in the pools. And, moreover, that in this condition birds of prey—crows, hawks and gulls—will pick chunks of flesh out of the living and help- less fish, and that even the bears come down and scoop them out with their paws on to the bank. No one who had seen them even as I have in the Stave or Fraser rivers would find their credulity in any way strained, even had the information come from unauthentic sources. A Chinaman was fishing for trout off the piers of the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge on this occasion. He had a small string of half-pounders, but his bait, I regret to say, was salmon roe. Our flies proved useless, as we expected, for when the salmon run up the mountain streams the trout follow them, and, I believe, eat the spawn, or at any rate, reject any notion of surface food. But the view that day up the Fraser was unforget- able, for Mount Baker, in Washington territory, across the United States border, was in all its glory. And Mount Baker is the greatest mountain in this country, not surpassed by the loftiest peak of the Rockies, being over eleven thousand feet, and, unlike them, it stands alone. From the mouth of the Stave you look up a long reach of the broad shining Fraser, andMOUNT BAKER FROM THE FRASER. [To face p. 378.LAST STAGE OF THE JOURNEY. apparently at its termination, though actually forty miles away, this same Mount Baker, an almost perfect pyramid, and at this season wholly clad in virgin snow, fills the sky. When I say that Vancouver city is near forty miles away from this spot, and that Vancouver Island lies forty miles beyond that again over the sea, and furthermore, that from near Victoria the same wonderful mountain is still a prominent object, its reputation will be understood. This was in the sunshine of midday. On our return we lingered for tea at the house of a man of science from Ontario, who had built and laid out a charming home on a lofty hill above the Fraser, had planted orchards, and done some little landscape gardening. We watched the ducks flighting up the river from his lawn at sunset, and night had almost fallen as we again entered the gloomy woods with their now doubly fear- some roads, but still looking back over the fading landscape, the great white figure of Mount Baker was there as plain as at midday against the violet sky, though everything between it and us was darkening blur. I must not linger over the last thirty miles of rail to Van- couver and the coast. Narrow farms of fat meadows, backed by wooded hills, with mountain tops showing here and there behind them, are the main features, till the great river turns away to- wards New Westminster and its delta, and leaves us to run down through a shut-in country of huge trees to Port Moody at the head of Burrard inlet. On the way, however, we cross Pitt River, broad and deep, not long emerged from the lake of that name. Here, too, are the celebrated Pitt meadows, thousands of acres of valuable grazing and hay land, where herds of heavy bullocks or milch cows help to make a picture suggestive of the levels of some English river, as it nears the sea. For the last dozen miles or so the track follows the winding shores of Burrard inlet, till it gradually widens into Vancouver Harbour. It is all very beautiful. The densely-wooded mountains of the coast range, snow-capped by November and often earlier, rise into the sky, while the leafy slopes and promontories of their foothills reflect their gorgeous colouring in the narrow waters of the fiord. Sea-going craft begin to show; steamers laden with or towing lumber, and fishing boats manned by Indians or Japs.380 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. And as one runs slowly into Vancouver and sees the busy city covering the slopes beside the water, the big ships and liners lying off it in the most beautiful harbour in the world, one tries to realise that twenty years ago this whole scene was an obscure wilderness of wood and water. The transformation is, of course, due to the fact of the Canadian Pacific Railway having made its terminus here. In 1885 it reached Port Moody, and two years later was extended to Vancouver City, which had built itself up and already been burned to the ground, only to be re- stored on a greater scale before the first train steamed into it. The history of British Columbia, originally of course a happy hunting ground of the Hudson Bay Company, and a howling wilderness inhabited only by somewhat formidable Indians, is short enough. The gold rush of 1849 to California broke the savage calm of even these remoter northern coasts. The Hudson Bay Company secured a charter to govern and settle Vancouver Island from its fort and settlement at its southern point Victoria. In this, as might have been expected from a fur trading company, it failed dismally. The island then became a Crown Colony, and began to attract a few emigrants from England, though it was a five months'journey. The mainland presenting, as it seemed, a coast line and interior of unbroken mountains and haunted by hostile Indians, was left out of all practical calculations only forty odd years ago! During the fifties gold was discovered both on the island and the main- land, and the United States Pacific seaboard being then crowded with miners, a great rush took place into British territory. Two thousand arrived in one day at Victoria, and in the summer of 1858 as many as thirty-three thousand sought the auriferous canyons of the Fraser River that we have just descended. The Governor of the province then made his first trip to the mainland, and at Hope, on the Fraser, erected a sort of nucleus of Crown Government. Two years later New West- minster, twelve miles south of Vancouver City, on the delta of the Fraser, was founded and incorporated as the capital of the mainland, which became a Crown Colony to itself. In 1866 Vancouver Island and the mainland were united in one govern- ment, Victoria becoming the capital. In 1871 British ColumbiaVANCOUVER CITY AND HARBOUR. [To face p. 380.VANCOUVER. 38I came into the Canadian Federation. Till then, it must be remembered, she had had nothing to do with Canada, nor any- thing in common with Canadians. Her connections with the Mother Country were direct by sea, or through the United States. Her older population are former employes of the Hudson Bay Company and their descendants, and yet more the descendants of Britons who came in with the gold rush of the fifties and sixties, and who stuck there. They are mostly found on the island—in Victoria or its neighbourhood—and in New West- minster. Their complexions are soft and fresh-coloured like those of English people at home, owing to the climate. Their accent and intonation is not that of Eastern Canadians, nor is there any reason why it should be, but of this anon. Vancouver, how- ever, is a distinctly Canadian town, with a large leaven of old country people, and the leading city of the coast, as the terminus of the Canadian Pacific. Vancouver lies on a long, narrow, ridge-shaped peninsula, between Burrard inlet, which forms the harbour, and English Bay, a somewhat similar but shorter arm of the same inlet. In sixteen years it has achieved a population of nearly thirty thousand, and is as solid and handsome a town as you could wish to see. The business blocks are mainly of grey stone, and the business streets stretch along the gentle slope above the harbour, or run at right angles to them up the ridge. The town is, of course, lighted by electricity, and served by a good system of electric cars, while almost every house is "on the telephone." The residential quarter runs far along the narrow peninsula which carries the town; pleasant villas, only differing from those of the East in the velvety softness of the lawns which front or surround them, and the prevalence of ivy and creepers, which in this Devonian climate luxuriate so freely. At the point of this peninsula is Stanley Park, some three or four miles long by a mile in width, one of the most beautiful public resorts of its kind in the world, prolific of enormous specimens of cedar and Douglas fir, and still in great part in the wild condition of a British Columbian forest. It is threaded in all directions, how- ever, by good driving roads or woodland paths, where the turf mats as thickly, and the ferns grow as lavishly, as in Savernake382 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. or Sherwood Forests. Here, however, from the rocky shores of this sea-girdled park,or through the vista of its marly avenues, you have always in sight the glistening waters that the Pacific thrusts so far inland. You may see great steamers, their yard- arms almost brushing the branching tree tops, sailing through the narrow channel for China or Australia or Japan, and on the further shore a pile of mountains rising from the water's edge to summits white at this late autumn season with freshly fallen snow. The slope on which the city lies drains it admirably. Rain" it ever so persistently, and in November Vancouver is capable of immense things in this line, the streets dry and the soil sucks up the rain with wonderful celerity. It is an almost unique place in its way, from the dense forests that Surround it upon all sides. In the vacant lots on its prominent residential streets, with fine buildings, public or private, on either side, you will see huge stumps bristling among a jungle of undergrowth, forcible re- minders of how recent all this civilisation is, for there is nothing crude nor rough, nor Western, about Vancouver in its buildings, houses or population. The people are mainly from Eastern Canada, or the old country, and what are generically known as the "better classes," are very strongly represented. Within limits it is a cosmopolitan city, and contains the best club west of Toronto. It has handsome business blocks of grey stone: the Canadan Pacific Railway has a large and well known hotel, while the others are moderately good. There is an Opera House in almost constant occupation by travelling companies, and some fine churches, while many of the private residences, whether bordering on one or other of the maple shaded avenues, or standing high in pleasant grounds of their own, and commanding the most gorgeous views over the harbour to the opposing mountains, are wholly charming. One feels, too, on peculiarly intimate terms with the shipping that goes in and out of Van- couver. Steamers run to China and Japan, to Honolulu and Australia. There is regular connection with the Alaska, and the Yukon and Klondike gold fields, for which Vancouver is an impor- tant base. There is here no maze of projecting wharves and docks to keep all these great steamers at arms length. They float right up to the back gardens of the houses. As you sit at theSALMON READY FOR THE CANNERY. [To face p.? 383.NEW WESTMINSTER. 383 club window, and look across its tennis lawn of English hue and texture, the masts and hull of an Australian liner seem almost to touch the garden fence, while through their yards and rigging the snowy peaks of the Cascade range look down upon the blue waters of the inlet. Everything, however, outside this lively town, so wonderful for its age, so sound and well built, so absolutely civilised—to use a convenient term—is dense bush. You may scale a mountain on a trail, or you may sail a boat, but except on one or two definite roads through the woods, or round Stanley Park, there is virtually no open country, no casual getting about, no outlet. Magnificent as is the outlook, excellent though the boating and bathing, pleasant, sociable and well-built though the city, there is yet a certain sense of being hedged in by impenetrable forests. Golf links are now being laboriously hewn out of this same forest at great cost, though as the turf takes here as readily as in England, the ultimate result will be well enough. South of Vancouver and Burrard inlet (pronounced, by the way, not as the family of the late Admiral, after whom it is called, pronounce it, but with the accent on the last syllable) is a strip of rolling forest land, reaching to the Fraser River, a dozen miles away, and to New Westminster. This old capital of the mainland, whose nose has been put out of joint by the younger city, and still further crippled by a terrible fire.in 1890, still flourishes moderately as the capital of the salmon canning and cold storage industry, and has a population of nearly seven thousand. It is mainly interested in a dozen canning factories, and several great lumber mills. It lies on steep sloping ground on the north bank of the Fraser, sixteen miles from its mouth, and is available for big shipping. A branch of the C. P. R. switches off to New Westminster from the main line about seventeen miles above Vancouver. An electric tram runs through the forest from the greater to the smaller and older town, and as the latter is more accessible to a farming country, its market is much sought after by housekeepers from Vancouver, who can get there for ten cents in three-quarters of an hour. This light railroad is punctuated by small clearings in the forest around its stations, where settlers of a modest kind are occupied in various small384 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. industries, poultry being the chief one, for eggs in Vancouver are just about the price they are in England, and fowls to match. Even in this small peninsula, with no mountains, nor even serious hills, the wandering streamlets play amid mossy rocks and ferns. The various evergreens of the sombre forest are mixed with birch and poplar, whose leaves make bright dashes of colouring in autumn, while the tangled undergrowth, of bracken, blackberries and long grasses, is essentially British, and seems still more so when an old cock pheasant struts out betimes from its shelter. But the delta of the Fraser is a wholly different country from this—several thousand acres of open and flat alluvial land of immense fertility, long occupied in valuable farms which grow everything in the way of vegetables, stock and grain, except perhaps wheat and Indian corn. This region, judged by the scale on which we have to view things since coming West, is limited. Its settlement commenced quite early, when New West- minster was founded in 1858, and such fat lands with water carriage at their edges, and not very much clearing to be accomplished, did not long go begging. New Westminster, as I have said, climbs a fairly steep hill, and is a curiously scattered, countrified, unpretentious sort of a place, though the constant humming of the electric cars saves its atmosphere from being actually somniferous. But its main business street, terraced above the river, appears to have the sole merit of great width, and an extremely picturesque outlook up and down and across the Fraser, to high forest- covered ridges, whose effect has been spoiled by a fire at some former time, reducing the woods to the appearance of a vast depot of telegraph poles. Small steamers run far up the Fraser, carrying farm produce and passengers, while others cross the Sound to Vancouver Island, fifty miles away in the Pacific. Boats laden with salmon for cold storage, even in November, are coming up from the broad stretches in which the Fraser glides just below in two arms to the ocean, leaving the fertile Lulu Island in its embrace, while canning factories are numerous in and about the town or towards the river mouth. Residences seem, however, more in evidence in this hillside town than business houses—pleasant enough villas in smallSALMON CANNERIES. 385 gardens, where the lawns are lush and green behind privet hedges, and mountain ash trees show their red berries, so much darker than the English sort, and ivy clambers naturally over porch and verandah. There are small tracts of common land, too, almost in the heart of New Westminster, where English turf and bracken, brambles covered with red haws, blackberries, willows, alders and hazel give a complete replica of a Surrey common. Hundreds of children sport and run in the play- grounds of the Government schools, and show in their chubby faces the atmospheric influence of the North Pacific—though, as in Devonshire, adults from more strenuous climates, such as those of the Upper Province or of Ontario, do not always thrive under the change, or at any rate retain their native energy. But a few words must be said about the salmon canneries which, by the way, are to a large extent owned by English companies and run by English capital. It is quite a relief to find one industry at any rate that, so far as outside capital is concerned, is in the hands of British, not American, owners. There are over seventy canneries in the province, and about fifty on the Fraser River, and between them they put up nearly a million and a half of cases. No signs of depletion are apparent from this enormous toll, due partly perhaps to the hatcheries maintained by the Government. The canneries are only working for a few weeks in each year during the run of the fish, in late summer and early fall. It would be just as well for anyone who enjoys a strong partiality for the king of fishes not to " take in " a canning factory during a trip to British Columbia. To see a favourite delicacy manipulated by the ton, and that, too, in warm weather, is disturbing to a sensitive palate. But the most fastidious may visit the cold storage depots at New Westminster without a qualm. It is one thing to see salmon gutted and hacked about by the thousand, and quite another to watch them transferred, freshly caught, from the actual boat into ice-cold chambers and transformed into blocks of marble. There are seven varieties of British Columbia salmon : sockeye, cohoe, spring salmon, steelhead, tyhee, dog and humpback. The first five are all of more or less good quality, though the flavour of the best Pacific fish is inferior to c. c c386 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. that of the Atlantic. The spring salmon are the best eating, but run too early, and are not numerous enough, to be very valuable for canning. The sockeye provides the greatest numbers, while the steelhead, a sort of large sea trout, runs late, and is not much used in the canneries. The salmon are sometimes merely frozen, at others are coated in addition with a layer of ice, while some again are despatched at once and merely packed in ice. It is curious to see them being handled in these bitter cold chambers, stacked in layers like piles of cordwood, or run along the slabs like curling stones. They are shipped in cold storage cars to the eastern markets, Montreal, Chicago or New York, as well as to Great Britain and Australia. Of the two inferior varieties of salmon, the dog and the humpback, the former is, I think, alone used in commerce, China and Japan being the accommodating customers, who take them at two to four cents a pound, and consume them with increasing apprecia- tion. I have frequently seen large cases of kippered dog salmon on the wharves of Vancouver ready for shipment to Asia. The humpback is a hideous brute to behold, and I believe is rejected absolutely as a commercial factor, even by the Heathen Chinee. It is these two varieties that mainly contribute to the ghastly spectacle of festering corpses which I have already described as lining the banks of some of the streams in November. A large fishing fleet of small craft, manned by various nation- alities—Japs, Chinese, Indians and whites of mixed races, the first named greatly preponderating—contribute to this enormous and increasing trade, which is not confined by any means to salmon only, for sturgeon, halibut and other varieties are caught in great quantities. Everyone knows that the Pacific salmon does not rise to the fly, though now and then instances to the contrary are bruited about. With the congested condition of the streams, however, as the fish are running up, one may be permitted to wonder what would happen if he did. One cannot help thinking that if the merely normal inclination towards rising possessed by the Usk or Tweed salmon distinguished his British Columbian relative, the competition for a Jack Scott or a Silver Doctor would create an odd situation. He takes a spoon, however, inSALMON FLEET OFF THE MOUTH OF THE FRASER. [To face p. 386.A WELL-BEHAVED CITY. 387 salt water, and there is excellent trolling from a boat in all these estuaries. Vancouver is not a " wide open town " like its sister cities of Seattle and Tacoma, just to the south of it in Washington, and some people interested wholly in its material progress, and regardless of its morals, look on such conservative tendencies with disfavour. A " wide open town," speaking generally, indi- cates a place where entertainments and institutions of the rowdiest and most deplorable description, gambling and other- wise, are regarded with complete toleration, not only for six, but for seven days in the week. It is argued by practical people that these towns have strong attractions for the miners and other sons of toil who come from the interior and from the Yukon in playful mood and their pockets full of money, that they shy at a town run on British principles like Vancouver, and blow their wages more easily, more quickly, and more cheerfully in the less prudish cities across the line. I do not pretend to gauge the subtleties of this question, but from what many people who know both sides of the border most intimately at this remote corner of North America tell me, everything except the relative speed of mere material progress is overwhelmingly in favour of British Columbia. I believe that in Vancouver the youth of this description who wishes to get rid of his wages can do so quite easily at games of chance in haunts of low repute, and gambling is, for obvious reasons, more natural to the rougher classes in the West than in the East, but the city does not lower itself to make revenue out of these poor fools. At present the average cowboy and the subordinate miner are apt to regard their earnings as mere means to a brief and senseless spree. Sharp- witted, keen and full of talk about the value of money and dollars, what avails all such boasted experience, when in practice it is sacrificed in quite puerile fashion to the aggrandisement of publicans and sinners ? I have heard groups of highly-skilled cowboys talking of their wages as if the difference between fifty and fifty-five dollars a month were a matter of vital import, and in the same breath agreeing that the " boy " who did not go to town and " blow " it all as fast as possible was unworthy of their noble calling. I c c 2388 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Lave heard them jeer with absolute unanimity at the compara- tively fresh Ontario youths who from time to time come to the ranches with the views of an ordinary eastern hired man, and the intention of saving the greater part of their year's pay, this last being so much higher than ordinary farm wages. But it must be remembered that it is not everybody with a partiality for horse-back exercise that can graduate as a cowboy, and those who are by physique and temperament thus qualified, take a long time to reach the standard achieved by such young men as I am alluding to; for, improvident and foolish in their scheme of expenditure as they seem and are, it may be put to their credit when they are at work no men work harder. Those who pay them these high wages get full value for their money. For months together they are in the saddle at all hours and in all weathers, and often touch nothing stronger than tea the whole time. They take a pride in their proficiency, with a consciousness that it is only achieved by courage, hardihood and long experience, and are apt to rate the tenderfoot, particularly the old country variety, somewhat after the manner of the proverbial Australian whose impression of England was only that of a country full of " new chums." The Canadian cowboy, however, is deprived of the halo that hangs around the hero of the American dime novel, for revolver practice is absolutely out of the question, murder being a hanging job. The mounted police are not greatly in evidence, but a telegram from any quarter where they might be wanted will soon bring a posse of these formidable horsemen ready and authorised to gallop into Montana if need be, and with the purse and the power of the Dominion Government behind them. The occupations of Vancouver are numerous. Its shipping trade across the Pacific is of course a large and growing item. As the terminus of the Canadian Pacific, it is much bound up with that great corporation, and among other visitors, passengers to and from the Orient or the Antipodes, and Europe, frequently break their journey here. The chartered banks are, of course, strongly represented in Vancouver, and brokers, real estate and insurance agents, and agents for eastern houses of all kinds, are especially prominent in itsVANCOUVER. 3*9 business streets, which are paved with asphalt and well kept. There are several factories of various goods, iron works and canneries, which are somewhat hampered, however, by the scarcity of labour. The shops are excellent, but their wares are a good deal dearer than in Winnipeg or in the East. The city is also an outfitting centre for the mining regions, not only of the interior, but for the great Klondike and Yukon district of the far North, for the fisheries and for the lumber camps, the last two industries being at present the most important ones of the province. A number of people in Vancouver are interested in mines, and may be described just now as " staying with their invest- ments," occupying themselves in the meantime with more active concerns. The auriferous regions of British Columbia are immense, so are the coal, iron, copper, and silver-lead depots. In spite of the busy districts and mining centres such as Nelson, Ross- land and Greenwood, they are as yet but faintly known and scarcely trenched upon, but every one is aware that gold mining has been, and is, a brisk industry in the province, and that the latter has a market of its own, and has had its boom. The memory of this rankles in the minds of most British Columbians, and still more in that of others who are not residents of the Pacific province. There is no question whatever of the potentialities of the country, but confidence in it abroad was temporarily shaken, if not shattered, by the unwisdom of its immediate friends and exploiters. Men lost their heads, and for the most part their money, in reckless speculations, and the market acquired such a reputation for wild-cat schemes that the outside investor was ultimately choked off, and buttoned up his pocket relentlessly against all further propositions from British Columbia. Thus was a good thing spoilt by the shortsighted folly of those who had its making in their hands—spoiled for the time that is to say. The paying mines do not cease to pay on account of paper speculations among the mountains surrounding them, and no doubt confidence will one day be restored to a field that itself has given no cause whatever to forfeit it. One hears a great deal of the Yukon in Vancouver, that far away mysterious mining region generically known in England as Klondike.390 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. One meets many people from there wintering in Vancouver, who are glad enough to exchange the temperature of forty-five and even sixty below zero for a winter like Bournemouth or Ilfracombe. Steamers run from Vancouver for a thousand miles through countless islands to Skagway in Alaska, and thence passengers for the Yukon proceed by rail over the famous " White Pass " to Dawson City six hundred miles away and in British territory. The terrors of the old route to Klondike, the dangers by land and water, by frost, hunger and mysterious diseases, were in the later nineties of world-wide notoriety, and were no wit exaggerated. I have been much in company with many people on the coast who went through them all and have heard tales enough of their adventures to fill a book. But now they go backwards and forwards by rail and steamer in luxury though at great expense, while Dawson has every convenience of an ordinary North American city—though at twice or three times the cost. The Alaska boundary question, of course, affects this region vitally, but both that question and the Yukon territory is outside our province here except so far as it affects its nearest British port, Vancouver. Many Austra- lians are mining in the Yukon, and all that I have met declaim in unmeasured terms against the administration of the territory by the Dominion Government, always excepting the mounted police stationed there, for whom, like everyone else they have nothing but unstinted praise. They maintain that men who bear the actual burden of development and industrial progress at the mines are hampered at every turn by the claims of absentees'with a "pull" at Ottawa, and they tell stories of partiality in distribution of whiskey licenses (which are tanta- mount to a small fortune to each lucky recipient) that would make the blood of the lover of democratic government run cold. I know nothing of this, but Australians of course are old experienced hands in mining organization, and they found a Government grappling for the first time in their history with the difficulties of goldfields and a sudden influx of a mixed population from all the ends of the earth. The mounted police at any rate saved the situation so far as law and order went, and the Yukon soon became as safe as Hyde Park, a whollyVANCOUVER CITY. 39i disappointing place in its social life to the Western American miner who has to leave his six shooter behind him; and a curious object lesson to the United States, whose half-hearted and feeble efforts to spell murder with a big M are looked upon with some contempt by other Anglo-Saxons the world over. Vancouver is the most cosmopolitan of Canadian towns as Victoria claims to be the most English. The people,1 it is true, are nearly all from various parts of Old Canada or Great Britain, but they are of more varied types, and more fused together, I think, than in any similar community east of the Rockies. Of course this tendency increases the further west one travels. In Ontario you have the Ontario Canadian surrounded by his own people ; in Nova Scotia the Nova Scotian, another developed type not really differing, but still with a sufficient individuality of his own, to be recognisable enough among Canadians them- selves. And the same theory applies to other provinces where an ordinary stranger from Europe would find himself more out of it from the fact of his new neighbours being all of the same type. But in Vancouver, and to a certain extent all over British Columbia, the typical Ontario man would not feel at first quite at home. In Winnipeg, despite its being a western city, he would notice much less change, but on the Pacific slope he would no longer feel himself precisely on his own heath, nor regard settlers from the old country as strangers, in the same degree. Eastern Canadians, it is true, largely prevail on the mainland, but the change of atmosphere and surroundings, and the starting together as it were with a large leaven of Britishers and others in a quite new country, has rather altered the type and the point of view. There is a tendency for national diver- gencies to vanish under these circumstances. The harsher voice of the average eastern man beyond any doubt softens on the coast, whether from climatic causes or by contact with English or native British Columbians, I do not know. Then, of course, there is the feeling of the West towards the East, which, though nothing like so keen as in the States, still forms a link in the bond that is welding these coast communities together in readiness for the future that indisputably lies before them. Then again, in 1 The labouring class is of all nationalities.392 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Vancouver the Asiatic is a prominent feature, for Japs and Chinese are here in great numbers. The latter form almost the only domestic servants, every well-to-do household having one or two. Numbers of people of good position, living in moderate- sized houses, such as would require two or three women servants in England, are looked after from kitchen to garret by a single Chinaman who receives from five to eight pounds a month. I need not expatiate further on the labour-saving contrivances which assist the natural ability of the Canadian lady in setting her house in order; but the Chinaman, if a good one, will achieve so much himself as to leave his mistress a very reasonable amount of freedom to enjoy society and enable her to entertain in the quiet and rational way indulged in by the more sensible people in the West. Everyone knows, of course, that your China- man is an autocrat, that he not only cooks the dinner, but some- times decides what it is to be, and has recipes that very often have never seen the light in Christian characters or in Roman type, but remain a mystery locked within his impenetrable brain. I am speaking now of the reasonably efficient or the entirely effi- cient Chinaman. There are plenty of another sort who would not be in the domestic market at all but for the almost complete absence of female help. I am not going to write a treatise on the Chinaman as a domestic or as anything else, common object of the highway as he is here. All except new comers are agreed that he is unfathomable, and the labouring classes of British Columbia do not like him, though he fills a score of situations they will not, and indeed could not, fill themselves. But it is by no means only as domestics that Chinamen fill the breach and pile up dollars to send home to China. As laundrymen they are conspicuous throughout Western Canada, and monopolise the business. They are said to be hard on linen. I have experienced their treatment for several months together, and have not found this. At any rate, compared to such British steam laundries as are within my experience, the Chinaman is a gentle and considerate handler of one's shirts and collars; that he turns them out in the remotest Western village as well as the best London dressers, is a fact pleasing enough at the moment, but irritating by contrast to that sad bungler, theCHINESE LAUNDRIES. 393 average washerwoman of the provinces and the rural districts in the old country. Indeed there is no part of Canada, French or English, in which these self-satisfied antediluvians, judged by results, would not be regarded as ridiculous impostors. The washing-bill of the Chinaman is a mysterious document and is mysteriously rendered. He creeps noislessly up to your bedroom door in his soft shoes, and proclaiming his presence by a knock or an exclamation, both wholly uncanny, discloses an apparition that might well startle a nervous old lady, just arrived on the coast. With his pig-tail knotted at the back of his head, short, wide-sleeved, shapeless jacket of blue jean or kindred stuff, his unfathomable yellow face, and tin-kettle voice struggling with a few English words necessary to the matter in hand, he presents a paper. The dollars and cents are plain enough, but the items are for his own, not for your benefit, though this is of no consequence, as in such matters he is quite reliable. A young society woman of majestic appearance is said to have expressed much curiosity on one occasion to have the hieroglyphics on her laundry account rendered into English, the address, that is, not the articles. She was not pleased when the expert of the tea-party announced the reading as " Big long woman, top hill." What the Chinaman does, he does thoroughly. As a grower of vegetables he notoriously excels. He will work on farms and in the lumber camps, on the wharves, and as already related as a gold-washer and fisherman, though at the latter business the Jap is far more prominent. He is a steady consistent labourer, under the force of a habit descended through countless generations. Already short-handed in this respect, I do not know what British Columbia would do without him, yet the white labourer wants to keep him out. Of course the reasons he gives are mere sounding wind, the bellows being blown by the politician who possibly disagrees in his heart with the tune. His propounded reasons may be good or bad, but they are not the ones he has in the back of his mind, which are purely selfish, and have regard to keeping the province a paradise for the man who wants a short and perfunctory day's work for big pay as in Australia, thereby retarding its development. The labouring classes of394 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the great West, when their interests are concerned, drop into fictitious utterances, and even beliefs, with a readiness unnatural to a European atmosphere. The British Columbian working man would persuade the public that the Chinaman is dirty; on the contrary, he is cleaner than the European-American labouring man, whose pretensions to personal cleanliness would be ridiculous to anyone who knows anything about him at all. Stories of immorality have been manufactured wholesale, and have passed into articles of faith, which have very little truth in them. Nobody would desire an overwhelming Chinese population, but I believe the best men in the province wish to see them continuing to fill the place they do. They send their savings away, it is true, to China, where for the most part they leave their families. On the other hand their labour aids in the development of the country to an extent which should more than compensate for this loss, while the housewives of British Columbia would be left absolutely without domestic help, a state of things which the working man is of course not very keenly alive to the evil of. In the adjoining territory of Washington the tax on Chinamen entering the country is almost prohibitive, and so not a few enter it by way of Canada, packed in fruit boxes and by other stealthy methods, the relation of which are sometimes more humorous than truthful. The Chinaman, too, is fairly free with his money, and gives liberally to charities and charitable institutions, such as hospitals. The lumbering business is naturally one of great import in a country famous not only for the density of its forests, but for the size of its trees. The Douglas fir is the greatest of these, and while occasionally reaching three hundred feet in height, will quite commonly be more than half that altitude, with a diameter of five or six feet. The big trees in Stanley Park, which are much thicker than this, make good object studies for passing travellers. The yellow and red cedar is almost equally plentiful, and yet more valuable. These varieties are the chief spoil of the lumber- man, just as they give the chief character to the scenery, and there is no occasion here to tabulate the less important trees, deciduous and evergreen, that are found among them. Large saw-mills are a prominent object along Burrard inlet.LUMBERING. 395 Sawn lumber and roofing shingles are exported hence to all parts of the world, the red cedar in particular making a picturesque and durable roof. Here, as in Ontario, the lumberman, as the capitalist is called, buys or leases tracts far away in the back- country, adjoining streams or lakes with outlets to sea, or rail to the port. Hither he takes his one or more gangs of twenty, thirty, or forty men into camp, puts them under bosses, and provisions them, having himself in the meantime an office in the town, where the actual business is transacted. Into the deep bays that run northward from Vancouver, a half-day's journey by steamer, such as Howe Sound, swift rivers like the Squamish empty themselves, and up their tortuous courses between high mountains lumbering goes on apace. In Eastern Canada the long, hard winters and deep snow and more level country all assist the lumbermen to get their logs to the edge of the waters with oxen and horses, while the certain floods, when the ice breaks, insure their passage downwards. In British Columbia wooden slides down the steep slopes have often to be used for fetching down the huge fir and cedar logs, while donkey engines are more often necessary than with the smaller timber and smooth surface of the east. The necessary floods to wash them down the shallow, broken rivers are not always forthcoming, and sometimes, on the other hand, are ruinously violent. They may be looked for also in the autumn, so the seasons for cutting and driving logs, where the best British Columbia timber grows, are not necessarily guided by the cus- toms of Canada. On the other hand, an acre of good British Columbia timber land will produce infinitely more marketable stuff than in Ontario or Quebec, half a million of feet being not uncommon. The lumberman has to take many financial risks: his pay roll goes on whether his logs get out quickly or not, though, on the other hand, his profits are large. He has long journeys in all weathers, through deep snows in winter, through mosquito and black-fly haunted woods in summer, over rough trails, stormy rapids or frozen lakes. Capitalist, more or less, and often large capitalist as he is, a good deal of endurance and a good deal of inevitable roughing it falls to his lot at various periods of his life, however luxurious his town house and comfortable his offices.396 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. But the life has great fascinations for many men, even apart from its money making possibilities. But the manipulation and management of gangs of the roughest class of men in a demo- cratic country does not come readily to every one, while outside the capacity to value standing timber over large areas, the lumberman has to understand transport and supply business and be in touch with his markets. I cannot myself recall ever meeting an Englishman engaged as principal in the lumber business in Canada.1 It seems to be in the blood of the Canadian of a certain temperament, and its somewhat complex mysteries come naturally to his understanding. Good lumber, however, is in great demand nowadays, and perhaps the risks are less than they used to be, though the cost of production is said to have increased 60 per cent, in the last five years in Ontario. At any rate, your elderly or middle-aged Canadian lumber merchant is generally an interesting man, and has an ample fund of experiences relating to adventures by flood and forest and to the humours and performances of the wild class who have worked under him in wild regions, while his fish and bear stories will take a great deal of beating. 1 English capital is now being invested in timber limits and saw-mills in British Columbia with good prospects where the management is judicious.VANCOUVER HARBOUR. [To face p. 396.VANCOUVER ISLAND. 397 CHAPTER XVI. It seems a curious thing at the first hearing that the capital of British Columbia should be on an island forty or fifty miles out in the Pacific and itself some eighty miles by steamer from its sister city and chief port. But thus it is, and that the persons who q[uite recently christened the city of Vancouver had not wit enough with the great island of that name staring them in the face to make some other selection may well pass the understanding of mortal man. Imagine a great mainland province, a good deal bigger than England and Scotland, with an island to the west of it nearly the size of Ireland. Continuing the parallel, think of Liverpool as the chief city and port of a thinly-populated Great Britain. Then imagine Ireland to be called Liverpool Island, and, lastly, the capital of the whole country not to be the growing and larger city of the mainland, but a somewhat smaller place on the island which bears the other city's name ! When I solemnly affirm that during a protracted visit to the coast I received letters from Canadian friends, or, I should say, eventually received them, showing very plainly on the outside of the envelope their unmistakable confusion of mind on these matters, English people may surely be forgiven if Vancouver island carrying Victoria, the capital, upon it and Vancouver city are altogether too much for them. A more deliberate, short-sighted and deplorable piece of folly in a place name has surely never been perpetrated in the history of colonisa- tion, and the inconvenience of it will continue into remote times, particularly in the postal department. Canadians complain, and with truth, that English people are hopelessly vague on the rudiments of Canadian geography, and their vagueness often goes beyond mere geography. I know that it is of no use telling English readers that there are numbers of English people of the educated and upper classes who do not know the difference398 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. between Canada and the United States, or to whom they respectively belong, because they will not believe it. Oppor- tunities of discovering these gems do not so often come in their way; but any Canadian conversant with social life here, or any Englishman whose interests frequently make Canada the matter of conversation, could cite innumerable instances giving the heroes or heroines of them, with their names and addresses if necessary. To cull a specimen or two from a collection that could be amplified from one's own and one's friends' experience to any extent. A well-known Toronto personage, of strong Tory and anti-American proclivities, a fact which lends further spice to the incident if any were needed, was introduced at a recep- tion in London during the Coronation season to a lady of such distinction as is conferred by a respectable name, a good deal of money and a penchant for figuring in as many heated social functions as she had strength for, who thus addressed him : " It was so splendid of you dear, brave Canadians to come over and fight for us in the war, more particularly so soon after your poor, dear President's death " (meaning McKinley). Another lady during the same period, having examined the men of a Canadian cavalry detachment camped at the Alexandra Palace, with much the pose she would assume at a Wild West Exhibition, remarked to an officer: " Do all the tribes speak as good English as you do ?" Soon after the Sackville-West incident at Washington, when that ambassador was recalled for indiscretion at the request of President McKinley, a Canadian lady friend of mine was at a dinner party at an English country house, having just crossed the Atlantic, and was taken in by a prosperous hunting parson. When the fact transpired that she was Canadian, her neighbour, by way of making conversation, remarked : " I think you treated Sackville-West very badly the other day." My friend, thinking he had misunderstood her, reminded him again that she was a Canadian. "Yes, yes," he replied ; "all the same, I think your people behaved most unfairly sending him home like that." She began to think he was mad, and repeated the fact thatACROSS THE STRAITS. 399 she was Canadian two or three times over very clearly and emphatically. But it was no use ; he could not take it in, and after once more protesting against the injustice of Sackville-West's treat- ment by the Government at Washington, the matter dropped, so far at least as the parson was concerned. My friend was, of course, wholly bewildered, but learned with some surprise, in the drawing-room after dinner, that, so far from being a lunatic, the reverend gentleman held a good living, and was a magistrate and a sportsman, and what more need a man want as witness to his intelligence ? On the other hand, so far as geography is concerned, you could nearly always turn the tables over on a Canadian by asking him whether Sydney is the capital of Victoria or New South Wales, and what are the approximate situations of Perth, Adelaide, or Brisbane. As one steams out of Vancouver Harbour bound for Van- couver island, and more particularly for Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, on its southernmost point, eighty miles away, it is well to be on deck and lose nothing of the spectacle. Looking backward up Burrard inlet, beyond the city, the mountains through which on our way here we followed the Fraser River unfold themselves in a long vista of ascending heights. Immediately from the northern shore of the Narrows, but a few hundred yards wide, and through which the tide rushes with great force, the coast mountains, draped in evergreens and capped with snow, spring in broken masses to the skyline. Southward, again, of the narrow channel is the long wooded peninsula of Stanley Park; its rocky walls gay with the autumnal hues of moss, fern and vine, and casting brilliant colours on the clear, green tide that laps their base. Queer- shaped, high-prowed, double-masted boats rowed by Indians, attired in gaudy shawls, crawl along the shore, dwellers for the most part by the waterside in rude shacks. High-coloured, full and almost rosy-cheeked are these Siwash and other British Columbia Indians ; active and quite useful members of society, not only as fishermen—which is their speciality—but in many other paths of industry. As they were warlike and formidable4oo CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. above others in quite recent times, so they have proved them- selves among the best of Indians since they have accepted modern conditions in philosophic fashion. Outside the Narrows, the high shores upon the north and the low coast running down to the delta of the Eraser on the south open rapidly. The wide entrance to How Sound, which pierces the mountains in fjord-like fashion, is passed, on the one hand; on the other, the far-stretching flats and shallows, which for many weeks in summer and early autumn are dimpled with the fishing fleets. Beyond this mouth of the Fraser rises the Olympian range in Washington, with its long array of snow- capped peaks, while ahead of us the dim uplands of Vancouver lie across the horizon and break the force of the Pacific. But the approach to Vancouver island is not so simple, per- haps, as I have made it appear. You may cross direct to Nanaimo, which lies opposite Vancouver city, some forty miles across the Straits of Georgia, by small steamers. But the ordinary channel of intercourse between the mainland and the island is by the large Canadian Pacific steamers which leave Vancover for Victoria, after the arrival of the daily through train from the east. These, after clearing the capes of Burrard inlet, turn due south, and after a couple of hours of open water enter the beautiful archipelago of small islands which fringe the eastern shore of the greater island of Vancouver. The passage by which the steamer winds its way through them is so narrow in some places that you could throw a stone on shore. They seem mainly wooded, but on some there are patches of open prairie, and considerable tracts cleared by the settlers, who are fairly numerous, and whose residences nestle snugly by the shore. These last are not the abodes of rude squatters, but very often of people of refinement and education, who make sheep farming or fruit raising subsidiary to the enjoyment of a quiet life upon a small income far from the madding crowd. For the first of these industries the absence of the wild animals, which are still numerous on the mainland, is a particular advan- tage, while the climate is as favourable for mankind as it is delightful. Some of the islands rise to considerable altitudes, others areVANCOUVER ISLAND. 401 of smoother surface, about a fourth of which, speaking generally, is fertile. At any rate, they are very beautiful to look at, and sport of all kinds, by land and water, is available. Like the rest of Vancouver, they are free from that pest the mosquito and his vile little companion the black fly, which, by the way, I am afraid I have not said enough about, seeing how ubiquitous both are in their season in all the wild or semi-wild regions from Halifax to Vancouver, flourishing alike in prairie and in woodland. This omission arises from no personal immunity, for I once spent the three months of their most virulent activity in their very inner sanctuary in the far depths of Ontario forests, an experience to which the ordinary mosquito annoyance of the farming countries and towns in these days is a trifle. On the unopened portion of the mainland of British Columbia I believe they would challenge comparison with any section, and Vancouver island may count its freedom from them as no mean asset. An hour or so of steaming down the coast, after emerging from the islands through Haro Strait, brings one into the landlocked harbour of Victoria, which occupies the southernmost point of the island. The island of Vancouver is about two hundred and eighty miles in length, and runs northward parallel with the coast, and has an average width of about fifty miles. This southernmost point is fairly level, and is cleared, settled, and penetrated with good roads, for about twenty miles back from the city. On the east shore a strip of partially settled country extends for seventy miles to Nanaimo opposite Vancouver city, a coal-mining centre and harbour of much importance. Adjoining this strip are the inhabited islands of the archipelago already noticed. Outside these comparatively narrow limits the island is wild, mountainous, forest-clad, unsurveyed, and in part even unexplored; of little immediate value for farming, but full of promise for minerals of all kinds. We are concerned here with that southern and south- eastern fraction of the island, which is all that as yet counts for much except with the prospector and the sportsman. Now, Victoria, which contains a little over 20,000 souls, has a character all its own among British North American towns. As before related, it grew out of the gold rush in the 'fifties and the Hudson Bay officials, who were there even before that Its c. D D402 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. nose has naturally been somewhat put out of joint by the sudden uprising of Vancouver. Still, all the Pacific liners going to and from the latter make Victoria a point of call. It has direct shipping connection, too, with the States to the south, and with the Yukon country in the far north, and is a great outfitting point for miners and fishermen. It does some manufacturing business, moreover, particularly in iron. Lastly, it is the capital of the province, and, well knowing its undoubtedly inconvenient situa- tion for this purpose, its friends, at that time numerically strong, caused public buildings of such magnificence to be erected there that future legislatures, however preponderating the mainland population may become, are likely to hesitate long before they sacrifice them and move the centre of government elsewhere. This, at least, is the mainlanders' story. But it is not only on these solid advantages that Victorians particularly pride them- selves, but rather on the fact that their town and neighbourhood is more English than any other in the whole of the great Dominion. The people of Vancouver city declare that the accent of native Victorians is more English than that of England herself, and it is an open secret that these satirical remarks are not resented by the properly-constituted islander. I think all voices modulate and soften as you draw towards the Pacific coast, but in Victoria, among the educated classes, the voice and tone is again almost literally that of the old country. At the same time, it is perhaps not realised that educated English people of equally irreproachable habit of speech, who would notice no difference whatever among themselves, actually do differ so much in the ears of Americans or Canadians as to mark the distinction between intelligibility and incoherence. Canadians, like Americans, frequently use the term " English " accent to denote the somewhat unfamiliar sounding speech of the stranger from the old country within their gates, and home- staying Britons not unnaturally think this an immense joke when they read of it. But if they lived for some years in these countries, and got their ears thoroughly attuned to the various modulations and intonations around them, even though they kept their own, they would nevertheless hear the speech spoken by educated English men and women as others hear it when theyVICTORIA'S ENGLISH ACCENT. 403 return, and I promise them it would be an interesting experience. They would understand, presuming, of course, they were capable of receiving impressions and had something of an ear for this sort of thing, what Americans meant by an English accent. They would be surprised to detect a number of notes that jarred on them as affectations, of which they were formerly unconscious. They would notice a number of tricks and haltings of speech, of inconsequent utterances and jerkiness, to which they had long been a stranger. The rendering of their parts by the average official of a cathedral would strike strangely on their ear as somewhat effeminate and overdone. At any rate, they would have a little sympathy for the over-sea Anglo-Saxon, who, perhaps for want of a better word, falls back on the terms English accent and "very English accent" to express his meaning, which is clear enough. Above all the returning Englishman of reasonable perspicuity would realise the wide divergencies of voice, modula- tion, intonation, and directness among his acquaintances of precisely the same rank and training that had formerly escaped his notice, and would understand why one educated English gentleman goes about the United States without hitch or difficulty in conversation and another almost requires an interpreter, and even makes the rude and untutored laugh. Of course, I am not referring to people tainted with provincialisms or vulgarisms, which is wholly another matter and quite irrelevant. Nor, again, am I drawing invidious comparisons, but merely stating facts that are of common knowledge to every Englishman who spends long periods upon the other side. Whatever type of intonation the Canadian or the American, according to his section or his class, may use, he always talks clearly and straight along. The Victorian, though he cannot achieve the accent of a minor canon, beyond a dcubt owns an English accent, though not, perhaps, a very English accent; but then he beats his way along in measured if mellow tones, and does not present such varieties of tone and inflection as the European Briton, though really I suppose it is the ladies who are mostly concerned in this harmless rivalry of accent with the mainlanders. But this disquisition has gone too far. What Victoria also does is to afford a refuge for the man with social tastes and d d 2404 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. comparatively small means, who may or may not have completed his life's work, but at any rate wants to enjoy the advantages of a pleasant place, a splendid, though not very bracing climate, agreeable society and ample scope for recreation, without feeling that he is regarded as a loafer for not having an office down town. Many ex-military and naval men are settled here. Many native Victorians, too, who have inherited money or property from fathers and grandfathers who got in here early, lead lives of comparative ease. Victoria, as every one knows, is an important naval station, Esquimault, four miles away, being the actual harbour; and here, too, is a battery of artillery and a corps of engineers, while the Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia resides in a new official residence on the hill above the town—in the person, at the present time, of a venerable and most popular French-Canadian gentleman of the old school, Sir Henri Joly de Lothbiniere. Even the exigencies of Canadian politics, which, as a rule, in these days run on wholly democratic lines, still con- cede something in the case of Lieutenant-Governorships to tradition, and Victoria, at any rate, being both a small and extremely sociable place, would doubtless make a great to-do if it were treated otherwise by the Ottawa Government. How- ever, there are now six Canadian peers, as many baronets, and thirty-six knights of various orders to draw upon, though there is doubtless room for discretion even in this exalted sphere. In structure and appearance Victoria is much like other Canadian towns: grey-stone or red-brick in its business streets, while a majority of its residential avenues and suburban villas are of wood. The harbour winds narrow and river-like into the very centre of the town, and is full of craft of all sizes. On one bank the main part of the town slopes gently upwards, rising ultimately into higher ridges. On the other, those extremely fine Parlia- ment buildings, already alluded to, stand in a small park. Here sit the single elective assembly of about forty members who legislate for British Columbia, and, as in the other provinces, are paid; and here are the Government departments—agriculture, mines, education, and law—spaciously housed. The buildings are well worth a visit, if only to see the fine museums, containingHOUSES OF PARLIAMENT, VICTORIA. [To face p. 404.VICTORIA. 405 exhibitions of the timber, mineral, and cereal productions of the province, particularly the large hall devoted to stuffed specimens of the wild animals, birds and insects of the country. But the park, outside the town, towards the shore line facing the coast of Washington and the huge ramparts of the Olympian range, is a matter of very particular pride to Victorians. Now, oaks do not grow on the mainland of British Columbia; but here on the island the English oak, rugged, solitary and venerable, rises from green English-looking pastures, and as the soft, moist wind rattles their brown withered leaves and the sombre greynes* of a mild November day lies upon land and sea, there is a sniff of England such as could not possibly be inhaled in any part of the North American continent at any season of the year. Wandering along the pleasant avenues of cedar, maple, arbutus or fir, with open commons broken by outcropping crests of rock and slopes of turf, you may follow a firm but tortuous road along a low cove-indented coast line that would certainly make a permanent exile homesick, if homesickness were possible in such a pleasant place as Victoria. On the mainland the enormous sombre fir trees and the overpowering, all-pervading impenetrable forests surround every spot where man has not hewed an opening for his town, his village, or his farm. But here, for a few miles at any rate, is a breezy open country. Such light woodlands as it carried vanished long ago, save those preserved for use or ornament. Country houses stand picturesquely perched on knolls or hill sides. Stretches of stubble or meadow, sprinkled with horses, cattle or sheep, spread pleasantly between their farm- buildings. Market gardens and fruit orchards are dotted over the rolling landscape, and among the scattered fir woods there is ample deciduous timber, maple, willow, and Cottonwood to light the scene with the last flicker of their autumn fires. This very coast road, winding around the sloping headlands of rock and turf and ferns, receives the pressure of one's feet with that soft but still firm, gritty sensation peculiar to so many roads along the southern English seacoast when moistened by autumn damp. And here at last, unlike other Canadian golf links, kept playable by large expenditure in summer and closed by ice and snow in winter, is a veritable English course, stretching along406 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. the margin of the low rocky shore, and with the exception of a neighbour, the only one in all Canada that admits of winter golf amid the atmosphere and surroundings of East Lothian, or, I should say rather, of Hampshire or North Devon. Here, for instance, is a putting-green where too strong an approach would send the ball trickling down on to the pebbly beach on to which the tide is quickly surging between outstretching ledges of seaweed-covered rock. An inspection of the greens, however, will reveal unmistakably the greater dryness, though not, I } think, the greater heat, of the Victorian summer. As on the mainland, the annual rainfall is considerably greater than that of southern England, but in the summer months, taken alone, is actually less. Victoria, however, is not so wet a spot as Vancouver, having an annual precipitation of from forty to fifty inches. The summer heat very rarely reaches eighty degrees, and in winter the thermometer seldom registers ten degrees of frost. This I gather from the official tables, covering several years. Putting all these things together, it will be readily under- stood why the turf mats and the white clover blooms by the roadside, why ivy climbs about the porches; why the same odours seem to float on the breeze, and the earth and all that grows on it seems to give out its scents laden with that inde- scribable fresh moisture so peculiar to a British atmosphere. But standing here by the shore, or indeed anywhere on this side of Victoria, and looking out to sea, all thoughts of Devon- shire or Sussex fly in a moment; for across what looks like a narrow strait, but is in reality nearly thirty miles in breadth, a long line of glittering snowy peaks cut the sky. Of all the panoramas I have ever seen in North America only the distant view of the Rockies from the prairie will compare with the spectacle of these Olympian Mountains rising sheer out of the sea. Though the atmosphere is soft and often grey like that of Britain, its infinitely greater clearness is fully demonstrated here in a most emphatic manner. The Strait of Juan de Fuca, dividing Vancouver from the American mainland and opening to the ocean, is just here something wider than the Straits of Dover. But these snowy heights, so far up in the sky, with the dark masses of mountain side lowering gloomily between them andVICTORIA. 407 the sparkling sea below, give the latter the appearance of a mere estuary. This, however, as a matter of scale and distance, seems almost as nothing when you turn and look over your left shoulder. For yonder, just eighty miles away in an air line, Mount Baker springs up as ghostly and aggressive to all appear- ances as when we saw it at half the distance from the junction of the Fraser and the Stave. Indeed, I should like to know how far one has to travel on the way to China before this extraordinary peak sinks into the ocean. Esquimault (with the accent on the second syllable) lies on the further side of Victoria. An extension of the electric car service, which serves the latter, carries you thither through woody and rocky suburbs. Here, in a deep land-locked harbour of exceeding picturesqueness, the war-vessels of the Pacific Squadron have their anchorage. There is a dry dock, too, a naval arsenal and barracks, where British troops, as I have already stated, have their quarters, and enjoy them, I fancy, as much as they do in the ever popular Halifax. The grey walls and crags of rock around the harbour are feathered thickly with small pines and cedars of brilliant green, and covered with delicate mosses of bright and tender hues; and there is a fine vista from near the barracks of verdant meadows, sprinkled with trees, stretching downwards to the brink of the sea, with the always dominant Olympians glittering in the sky beyond. The great Canadian banks are as much in evidence on the main streets of Victoria as elsewhere, and the agencies of familiar eastern houses, inscribed upon plate-glass windows and over doors meet the eye in all directions. The shops are excellent, but their wares are, of course, dearer than in the east; and even food of most kinds, particularly small products, such as poultry, eggs and butter, are considerably higher in price than in Toronto—a condition of things which is partly due to the fact that the producers of the neighbouring districts have not quite caught up the demand, and partly, no doubt, on account of the higher price of manufactured goods. Nor, again, is there any coin in British Columbia of less value than five cents. The streets are wide, and the residential quarters roomy and well408 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. planted, but rents are high. The crowd is curiously cosmo- politan. What with Chinese, Japs and Indians, soldiers and man-of-war's-men, sailors of all nations, together with English, Victorian, and Canadian residents, there is none of the uni- formity of an Ontario town. There is an excellent club and a wooden cathedral, of unassuming architecture but much dignity of situation. And if any stranger was inclined to forget that Victoria was not a mere jumped-up western town, a large shady cemetery, crammed with gravestones and monu- ments that time has used roughly, would remind him of his ?rror. "What Victoria wants," said one eastern drummer to another on the steamer, as I was myself proceeding thither, "is a new first-class hotel." "No," said his friend, "there is something Victoria needs far more, and that is about fifty first- class funerals.,, This merely illustrates the popular notion on the mainland that Victoria is reactionary and easy-going in business, and gives itself social airs. As a matter of fact, for a town of twenty odd thousand souls, Victoria does a great deal of business, though it does it quietly, and perhaps reserves its outward enthusiasm for more frivolous affairs. A Vancouver wag will tell you that if there is a cricket match between the town and the garrison business h suspended for the day. The cricket season was over when I was there, but the Victorian seemed to me to get around the business blocks pretty quickly in spite of his English accent. There is, of course, an immense deal of local interest in minerals and mines, mainly prospective at present, but the island is a vast wilderness of little proved but undoubtedly great possibilities. But the Chinese quarter is one great feature of the town, and contains entire streets devoted wholly to the mysterious Mongolian and his more mysterious ways. Having a friend in one of the chartered banks, who had of necessity a business acquaintance with quite a number of the Chinese merchants there, we made a pilgrimage through the quarter under somewhat favourable circumstances, and visited shop after shop crammed with goods of all kinds from the Flowery Land, the comestible departments emitting flavours mainly disagreeable, but always of a kind absolutely novel to an unsophisticated European nose. AndCHINATOWN. 409 we watched the bookkeepers making their entries in Chinese characters and in upside-down Chinese fashion, and shook hands and talked with such merchants as my friend was accustomed to provide with drafts on Pekin, and that could speak some English, one or two of them being obviously far removed in breeding and appearance from the common ruck, though adhering to the ordinary Chinese dress of the rest. We went into a joss-house, too, and in the dim light of the single lamp that is never extin- guished, wondered—being then without a native guide—at the strange creatures of diverse colours and forms fantastic who look after the soul of the Chinaman in this eminently practical and uncongenial country, so remote from the bones of his ancestors. But, after all, this is a bit of China pure and simple, and quite exotic to British Columbia. Let us away, then, for a brief trip into the fresh open country, which will have more attraction, for some of my readers at least, than any part of Victoria, whether Chinese or British. The settled, or to be more precise, the partially settled, portion of Vancouver is but a trifling fragment of its whole, a narrow- strip running north from Victoria up the coast facing the main- land for some eighty miles, having the railroad which makes its terminus at Nanaimo as its artery. Tributary to this are off- shoots of settlement running inland on the one side, while upon the other are the islands already threaded in our passage to Victoria. The character of the country is hilly, and clad with forests, chiefly evergreen, like the lower mainland, but not quite so heavy and difficult to clear. There are numerous valleys, however, carrying only willow and alder growth, which are easily cleaned up and very fertile. There are stretches of oak forest here and there that are also easily cleared, being thin on the land, which is always of the finest quality; and there are numerous lakes and streams holding trout and sea-trout, while salmon abound in the salt water. What is known as the Cowichan district, with its chief station at Duncans, about half-way to Nanaimo, is the most notable and popular section. Most of the settlers are from the old country, and quite a number of them retired military and naval men, or what is generically known as the younger son. As most of these4io CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. enjoy, I believe, small private incomes or pensions, which go three times as far under an enforced if cheerfully accepted sim- plicity of life as they would in the old country, farming must be considered in their cases an accessory rather than a main source of livelihood. It is always difficult to estimate under these conditions the profits and loss in the agricultural account, but that a delightful life for those who have a turn that way can be enjoyed is a matter beyond dispute, and Vancouver is better suited to this upon the whole than any portion of His Majesty's North American dominions. But a word or two of this later, lest it should be supposed that no serious farming was prosecuted in this, the crack district of Vancouver, and that there were no settlers who made it their main business. The Cowichan district, for instance, supports a creamery, con- tributed to by over fifty farmers and five hundred cows. It has also an agricultural society, and a flock-master's association, for the raising of sheep in small flocks has few drawbacks as an industry, for the proximity of the wild beasts of the forest is a naturally decreasing danger. Hence one motive for living on an island in the adjoining archipelago. Wheat and oats are grown in various districts and yield fairly well. Clover and grasses of various sorts do well, maturing before the dry summer season sets in. In short, everything that grows on the mainland, including all the fruits, flourish on the island where the land is suitable. The clearing of land, however, is expensive, costing forty to one hundred dollars, but all over Canada, as in the States, people shift their occupations. Farms are constantly in the market, and I am told, even if I required the telling, that cleared and improved land with buildings can be bought in the settled districts of Vancouver island and its adjacent archipelago much cheaper relatively than wild land, though of trifling prime cost, can be cleared, stumped, fenced, and built upon. Prices under these conditions are difficult to quote, but in the North Saanich district, fifteen miles from Vancouver, long opened and smooth farms carrying tolerable homesteads were variously rated to me by a local expert on the spot at thirty to fifty dollars an acre.A COUNTRYSIDE IN VANCOUVER. 411 A pleasant day may be spent in this Saanich peninsula by the visitor to Victoria, either with a view of seeing a pretty country and some charming water scenery or of taking stock of the farming. There are first-rate roads for fifteen or twenty miles back from Victoria, and a light railway, whose engines still burn wood, reminding one of old days on the Grand Trunk and its branch lines in Ontario, runs to Sydney—a hotel and cluster of houses on the east coast—whence a small steamer connects with the beautiful islands, large and small, settled and unsettled, off the shore. I have pleasant recollections of a long day spent in this past November, wandering afoot and in leisurely fashion about the neighbourhood of Sydney, whither the brisk and busy little train had deposited us betimes in the morning. We had steamed there through a rolling country, partly cleared in small farms and partly in timber of small or moderate growth, and picturesquely broken about midway by a forest-girdled lake. At Sydney, however, we walked out into a very gracious level belt of clear farming country bounded by wooded hills, while the blue waters of an island-sheltered bay lapped on the shore. It was a glorious day in mid-November: not one of those brilliant pageants, ablaze with gorgeous colouring and canopied by a bright blue sky, such as the middle States provide in autumn, nor yet the keen, stimulating, breezy transparency of the prairie in October, but an absolute reproduction of the best sample of day England can produce in early November—balmy and dreamy with subdued sunlight. It was quite an old settled country, for orchards fiad grown up level with the chimney tops of the modest frame houses. We strolled along admirable roads beside level, well-fenced fields, whence clover or oats had been cut in the past summer. We sat on fences and gossiped with farmers, who seemed here to be the outcome in themselves or their fathers of the old mining influx of the 'fifties and 'sixties. There was little labour here except the actual owners of these peaceful-looking farms, spreading back from the sea between wooded hills. The soil looked good, but might have been indifferently farmed. Content, rather than the air of bustling progress now characteristic of the prairies, seemed to reign here. Our goal was the farm of a friend, one of greater pretension412 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. than most of the others, and tenanted by a Cornishman dairying on a good scale, on the far side of the peninsula. Our road thither was the duplicate of an English lane in character, scent, and bordering foliage, for the fences were so buried in ferns and briar roses, blackberries and Scotch broom, that the cedar rails were invisible. On the short green turf by the roadside the yellow autumn leaves of overhanging willows and maples were sprinkled thickly, and now and again the mountain ash swung its dark red berries over our heads. A few sheep were nibbling at the clover, rye-grass, or timothy pastures—Southdowns or Shropshires—and the pigs, like those of the most civilised countries at this season, were enjoying a free range on the stubble and a licence to root to their heart's content. Here in this smooth sequestered vale, as in the neighbourhood of Victoria, the English environment is rudely shattered as one turns and looks away southward and westward. For above the pleasant homely foreground, without a glimpse of anything between, the crests of the Olympian Mountains, now nearly fifty miles off, glitter along the sky, and the white-robed pyramid of our old friend Mount Baker, much further off, is still watching us as if he were a native of Saanich instead of the pride of a far-away American State. A turn down a woodland road of natural grass through walls of lofty cedar splashed with the gold of cottonwoods, and we were at our friend's homestead. The farm lay below us, spreading over the shallow valley and up the fringe of the wooded slopes beyond; nearly all grass, and looking exceedingly trim with the brook edges cleaned and the fences in good order. Some forty milch cows were the main instruments in producing the owner's rent and his tenant's livelihood on this handsome little two hundred- acre estate, and in consuming the clover and timothy, red top and orchard grass, that looked so fresh and green in the slanting tempered rays of the November sun. At the west end of the valley and of the farm a wall of sombre forest shut in the view, but an opening cut through it for the purpose showed the water of Saanich arm shining beyond. A Cornishman does not lose his native accent in twenty years, and my host for the day, originally a dairy farmer in thatA VANCOUVER ISLAND FARMER. 413 delectable county, had been for this period in the western States and British Columbia without greatly disturbing it. Nor would any sane person wish it replaced by the dulcet tones of Montana or Oregon I We strolled all over the farm, and I learned that the surprisingly level and thrifty look of the aftermath was partly due to a dressing of phosphate, somewhat enterprising on Vancouver island. It is not indeed very often that one finds a practical English farmer pursuing his native art on the other side, and his reflections are always interesting, both social and otherwise, though I must not enlarge on them here. There was no difficulty in selling milk three miles from a railway on a good road. There was much more trouble about labour and getting the milking and farm work done on a place of this size. My host con- sidered that the white labour to be had in Vancouver at twenty- five dollars a month was a sad waste of money. Chinamen at fifteen dollars, in his opinion, were infinitely more remunerative. The former took a positive delight in doing a minimum of work, and when your back was turned in doing none at all, and, furthermore, made a point of leaving abruptly and at the most inconvenient time. The Chinaman, on the contrary, though slower, never left off working, and my host declared that he could leave the place for two or three days at a time, if business required, yet the Chinaman pursued his task as conscientiously as if his employer were standing over him. In a rough pasture by the woods there was a brood mare or two, Shire or Clyde, and some colts—heavy horses were the only sort, my Cornish friend said, that had a reliable market—and on the same large pasture Were English oaks, scattered amid beds of bracken, whence English pheasants were continually springing, though at safe enough distances, even had we been armed, and scudding away towards the thicker woods which bordered the estate. Even my practical companion said that he often fancied himself back again on his farm in Cornwall. The grouping of the woods, the green meadows, the oak trees, the ferns and the atmosphere all worked on the imagination of even this unimaginative agriculturist, who had wandered so far and so widely since he left the old country. We had an excellent tea in the farm- house, at which a neighbouring farmer's wife, of Nova Scotian414 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. origin, and a parson from Ontario assisted, and leaving our host and his two Chinamen to the milking of forty Short- horn cows, after inspecting a couple of extremely serviceable- looking red bulls in loose boxes, we started off on our walk back to Sydney through the pleasant cedar and broom-scented lanes in the fast gathering twilight. But Cowichan and its neighbourhood on this same east coast, twenty miles to the north, on the Nanaimo railroad, with the adjoining islands, is the favourite haunt of the gentleman emigrants, who seem the chief element among the old country settlers which Vancouver receives. If there is a country where this kind of settlement should prosper within the limitations it sets itself, it is surely this portion of Vancouver. Colonies of young Englishmen who have nothing but their farms to live upon always have, and probably always will, fail when packed together, for reasons given elsewhere in this book, and familiar to all North America. But the Vancouver settlers in most cases have incomes apart from their farms, which are usually small and manageable in area and comfortable in residence. A well-known English sportsman and author of merit, far beyond that requisite for the relation of big game shooting, who has long made his home on Vancouver island, considers that an Englishman can get more fun, sport and good living, for two hundred pounds per annum than he could get for a thousand pounds a year in the old country, and I can quite believe it. Indeed, I should say that Vancouver, but for its remoteness, has a greater list of attractions for this class than any other region in Canada, unless perhaps the Okanagan district of the mainland. The climate has no extremes. Few Englishmen like a quite equable all the year round climate, however good, but prefer a spring, summer, autumn and winter, and it better suits their constitu- tions. Here they get the four English seasons in many respects improved upon. The country is absolutely healthy. There are no mosquitoes. The scenery is beautiful, the soil is good, and living for many reasons easy. Fishing, boating, sailing and shooting are excellent, and at the settler's door, while a vast, scarcely trodden wilderness beyond offers unlimited openings to the more serious big game hunter. With a railwaySETTLERS ON VANCOUVER ISLAND. 415 readily accessible to most people, the resident of the Cowichan district can place himself within a couple of hours in one of the pleasantest towns in the Dominion of Canada. This is not, perhaps, the country for the strenuous life any more than is the prairie for the Britisher who wants a farm as an adjunct to an income. The simplicity of existence in Vancouver, and the ease with which most necessaries are produced, makes living of course peculiarly cheap, as the requirements of towns are largely dispensed with, as are its social aspirations. Picnics, small dances, and a great deal of good fellowship are indulged in by the settlers of these districts, I am told by those of them whom I have met, while numbers, at the same time, do a great deal of more serious work—raising fruit, sheep, and dairy produce. For a family man with a pension or small income, fond of country life, there can be no question of the attractions of the island. As to young unmarried men who, if they could not make a clear living out of a small farm, would certainly be comfort- able with another fifty pounds a year, it is difficult to say. The average Canadian looks on such a career with contempt. He wants to " get there " like the American. The Canadian of the same class as the Vancouver settlers, with rare exceptions, does not touch farming, but goes into business or professions to make money, and he would not understand the Englishman's point of view. The other class who do go into farming, are energetic and valuable people, but the scheme of life as it appears to some educated Englishmen, would be quite beyond their comprehension, which, broadly speaking, is wholly material and that of a Government school. Which is right, who shall say ? But it is very difficult for most Canadians of any class to give lucid advice to certain types of Englishmen. The Canadian advises him from his own point of view, whereas the other, not knowing enough to understood that this is different from his own, very often suffers unnecessary and useless discomfort in following it. The young Englishman to whom it is really vital to make a living, and yet lives on remittances from home, which he " blows" in a saloon, is of course a contemptible person. But a steady young man of prosperous family, who has no yearning for banks or brokers' offices, and does not4^6 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. particularly care about city amusements, but really loves country life, why should he not expend a thousand pounds in a home more or less productive of income in Vancouver or anywhere else? And furthermore, why should he not have the same allowance that the family estate, whether landed or com- mercial, admits of, as his brother in the army, without being contemptuously spoken of as a remittance man ? The said remit- tance, for that matter, may be the young man's actual right— perhaps part of a settlement, for all his critics know. The western scheme of life, a know-nothing worship of hard work and dollars, is excellent for a new country, but it is not the life's ideal of the majority of the enlightened and cultivated people on the earth's surface to-day, nor will it ever be. An Oxford graduate, for instance, who prefers to live on the island of Vancouver, where his social surroundings are more congenial than they would be in a farming district of Ontario, because he likes fruit growing or sheep farming, yet has enough money to save him from sleepless nights if anything goes wrong, is not a man to be jeered at for this happy independence and useful taste. If he makes but fifty, nay five acres bloom that was a wilderness, and distributes five hundred or a thousand dollars a year that he legitimately owns among the merchants— not the saloon keepers—of Victoria, he is surely a good citizen, and what can it matter how much of this is made out of potatoes, and how much is the product of English Consols. Is it not, for instance, as good a life, whether in a new country or an old one, as shouting in the Stock Exchange of Montreal or Toronto, and assisting in the transfer of dollars from one man's pocket to another, less commissions or lawyers' fees ? Canada has an enormous territory to fill up. I do not think it is well to criticise the Doukhabor, on the one hand, or to call every old countryman who has an income outside his farm a remittance man. It smacks in some cases a little too much of the green-eyed monster. The aim of every less fortunate settler in a new country is to "get there." The Englishman in question has very likely " got there," or his family have, long ago, that is all. Very often, too, as a well educated and cultivated man, he obtains satisfaction from the natural surroundings of a kind thatA WHOLESOME LIFE. 4i7 the ordinary settler, who has to extract a living from the woods or prairies, would not be mentally qualified or sufficiently educated to even understand. The majority of Canadians are obliged to lead a country life whether they like it or not, and admirably hard-working lives they lead. But a strong minority, arid that the wealthier and more educated part, live in towns, and would not personally assist in making the desert bloom upon any consideration. Even the ambition of the rural classes, though perhaps not to so great an extent as formerly, lies mainly townwards, though the profits of farming do not often gratify it. The motives of the man who would have a good house in town, hustle in the struggle of life, and amass more money in what, after all, are the parasitical trades and professions, and enjoy himself in city fashion when work hours are over, are perfectly legitimate, but they are nothing to brag about, and are purely personal, and moreover inseparable from all the crueller features of the great struggle for existence. The educated man who from preference lives upon a farm, who improves and perhaps beautifies a spot that he found desolate or but half-reclaimed, deserves at least as well of his adopted country as the broker, the lawyer, the shop-keeper, or the insurance agent, who is very apt to laugh at his scheme of life. Is it a detriment that some of the money which assists in this wholly meritorious and quite innocent existence is derived from personal or real property in England, India, South America? To an English reader such apologetic tones will seem ridiculous, but Canadians, speaking of course generally, have had to work in the past, and still do work, so hard that they have fallen to some extent into the American point of view of regarding material gain as the one aim in life, and the educated man who prefers the fresh air and sunshine, and daily contact with the best of nature, and has a sufficient income to grow grapes or apples ardently but unalloyed with carking care, as a sort of loafer. The Englishman, and yet still more the Continental European of the cultured class (not using the epithet in the American sense), would reply that this was the crude view of life of a country in the making, the mere outcome of passing necessities repellent in its nature to the well-balanced mind—so easy, too, of refutation, c. EE4i8 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, as to be not worth the powder and shot of argument, which is perfectly true. Canadians, unacquainted with England, often forget, too, that owing to the long accumulated wealth of the country, numbers of Englishmen who make a home in the Colonies are the inevitable heirs to money in greater or less amounts, and within a shorter or longer period—and these are not as a rule matters of doubt or speculation. The prospective beneficiary does not publish this upon the housetop, reticence on these particular matters being characteristic, though he might reply to his Canadian acquaintances in town, when rallied on his rural proclivities and unambitious existence, to this effect. If he devoted himself to professional life for which he had no turn, success in a country where the professions were crowded, was virtually out of the question, while even if he achieved problema- tical success, he would merely crowd out some poor devil who had to make a living. Not all Canadians, but a distinct majority of the better class, cannot in the least understand a preference for country life, except for the summer vacation. They feel dull without a good deal of society, and regard as almost eccentric the self-contained life which some English men and women of the same class are content to lead. In Vancouver Island, however, social dulness is by no means inevitable to country life in the best parts. Nor do I think that the Vic- torians regard the rural predilections of the well-to-do Briton with the same lack of sympathy that is often displayed on the mainland of Canada, where, to judge by some utterances and writings, the educated gentleman with capital to farm, and very likely an income besides, was not wanted. At any rate, the present Agent-General for British Columbia—whom I quote because he has enjoyed the advantage of forty years' residence on the Island of Vancouver and a personal knowledge of most people in it—has no such indifference to settlers of substance and refinement, for whose reception it seems really better suited than almost any part of the Dominion, though here, as elsewhere, there are no domestic servants. Outside labour is scarce enough, as already noted—Japs or Chinamen at ten to fifteen dollars a month, and white men at twenty to twenty-five. The young Englishman with five hundred or a thousand pounds, and hisINTERNATIONAL BOUNDARIES. living to make out of it, would doubtless get a better return for his money by a hard-working life on the prairies. But those whose health, tastes, or means, turned them towards British Columbia, can, I am assured by those who should best know, make a living out of a ranch here, or in the Okanagan, by hard work at mixed farming. In regard to young Englishmen going out to learn the business, enquiries of leading men there, secretaries of agri- cultural associations and so forth, elicited much the same replies as on the mainland of British Columbia, only somewhat more emphatic. Nanaimo, the northern terminus of the railroad, is a great depot for the adjacent coal mines, and the growth of the place to a port of six thousand population on this account has created a few scattered settlements to the North and West of it. The West coast of Vancouver abounds in long inlets and fine harbours, as yet not within the domain of serious utility. The mountain ranges of the island, which average two to three thousand feet, and sometimes reach a height of six or seven, are much like the coast ranges of the mainland, and like them have long narrow lakes, as well as rapid streams in their troughs. The strait between Vancouver and the mainland becomes narrower as you proceed northward, and so obstructed by islands that it becomes a mere maze of channels, through which large steamers may travel securely and continue through an almost ceaseless archipelago for eight hundred miles to the remote shores of Alaska. There have been some rather absurd international disputes anent the little islands below the Straits of Georgia, just off Victoria. The middle of the Straits was cheerfully agreed upon by the Americans as the boundary between the two countries. So soon, however, as this imaginary line struck a group of good-sized islands, though there was no particular affinity to either coast, the astute Yankee never rested from agitation till he had twisted it into the channel between the island and the coast, and planted the stars and stripes upon the former. There was a good deal of preliminary wrangling, however, and landing of rival forces of armed men, and waving E E 2420 CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. of flags, and consultations between ministers, generals, colonels and admirals, and friendly commissions, which resulted in a company of troops of either nation being left in possession. •Some years afterwards, at the Treaty of Washington in 1871, it was stipulated that the San Juan (so called from the main island in dispute) question should be submitted to the arbitration of the Emperor of Germany. There is a wholly humorous suggestiveness about the Royal Dragoon, the very personifica- tion of Continental militarism, getting out of his eagle helmet and cuirass and big boots for such a purpose, and doubtless bored to death with details as far removed from his knowledge and sympathy as the planet Saturn. His Majesty, however, was naturally the victim of the best special pleader, and I am told in all these cases between Washington and Downing Street, the contrast in preparation of plans and arguments between the British and Americans has been remarkable. At any rate, the old Emperor William promptly awarded this remote Pacific island to the nation from whose coast it was most remote, and no doubt rode away with much relief to the more congenial dust of the parade ground. Vancouver, like the mainland, has no doubt a great mining future before it. The coal at Nanaimo is used by the Pacific squadron, thanks to the eighty miles of railroad already spoken of between that place and Victoria and Esquimalt. A relative, who is a resident of Victoria and an expert in local mining matters, but removed by circumstances from any possible motive for bias, tells me that English capitalists interested in Vancouver and British Columbia development persist in sending out the wrong sort of men to represent them ; that they spend too much money in elaborate shafts, and pay too much broker- age. Wherever one goes in North America, and whatever the industry may be that is owned by an absentee English corpora- tion, one hears a somewhat similar story; and from my own experience I feel it to be genuine and not merely the promptings of local jealousy. It is the same in the West as in the East. Men are sent out, not only overburdened with that inexperience so fatal in a strange country, but often unfit for any ^business undertaking at all, and whose main object is, first, toTHE FIRST ROUTE TO KLONDIKE. 1896-7. [To face p. 420.CONCLUSION, 421 spend money on their own establishments, and secondly, in unproductive showy work on the mine, or business. The venture sometimes ends by a rapid flank movement into the States or South America, leaving the company much sadder, and perhaps, a little wiser, and the local tradesmen with a bitterness in their hearts towards all old countrymen. If English companies would only send forward some sort of secret service agent to find out the reliable natives from whom to choose their managers, much disaster and loss would often be avoided. So long, however, as Colonial industries are managed by men in England who do not know their Colony—and by knowing it I do not mean such knowledge as a brief holiday visit gives—there is very little chance of much improvement in this respect, and the Americans will continue to monopolise those good things in Canada that the Canadians cannot handle themselves. It is when the traveller has reached this Ultima Thule of British North American civilization, and the end of his journey, and is actually facing the Pacific that bears its growing trade to Asian and Australasian seas, that the vastness of the Canadian Dominion is perhaps most insistently borne in upon him Memories of French-Canadian hayfields will seem dim and distant as those of another continent, the homesteads of Ontario utterly detached and remote. I do not know whether a leisurely pilgrimage of weeks or months from East to West leaves the senses most bewildered by space, and its almost unthinkable possibilities, or whether the unbroken return journey of five days from Vancouver to Montreal or Toronto that many have to take, make the stronger impression. At any rate, I shall not have penned these pages in vain if I succeed in inducing some of my readers to test the matter for themselves, and in giving to others who are never likely to, some sort of mental picture of this splendid heritage of our race across the sea. THE END.( 422 ) NOTE TO PAGE 219. In my desire not to overburden these pages with catalogues of the numerous institutions which are inseparable from the existence of any great British community, I have omitted all mention of music and the drama, which are important items in the social life in Canadian cities. The theatres are regularly occupied by companies from the United States and England through the winter season. And both Toronto and Montreal see and hear in due course most of the great artistes, musical and dramatic.INDEX. A. Aberdeen-Angus Cattle, 328 Abraham, Plains of, 37, 42, 48—50, 53, 54 Agassiz experimental farm, 374 Agricultural College, Guelph, 180, 206 Alberta territory, 316—351 Algoma district, 237, 238 Algonquin Indians, 21, 86 American ideas of Canada, 312 American land companies, 305 American settlers in North-West, 306 American summer visitors, 63 American tourists, 43 Ang61ique des Meloises, 38 Anthracite, 344 Anticosti Island, 13, 14 Armstrong, B.C., 332 Ashcroft, B.C., 372 Assiniboia, 296—316 Assiniboine River, 250, 267 Ayrshire cattle, 328 B. Baie St. Paul, 62 Baker, Mt., 378, 407, 412 Banff, 344 Banks, Canadian, 145—148 Battleford, 319 Beauport, Lines of, 46—47 Beauport, village of, 56 Beavermouth> BX., 356 Belle Isle, Straits of, 5, 8 Belleville, Ont., 149 Berlin, Ont., 149 Bigot, 38, 52 Birds of the Rockies, 358 Blackfeet Indians, 319, 333 Bougainville, 47, 48, 55 Bow River, 322, 343, 347 Brandon, Man., 265 Brandon neighbourhood, 265—268 Brantford, Ont., 129, 149 British Columbia, 356—421 British Columbia, history of, 380 Brockville, Ont., 145 Bryce, Dr., 240 Buffalo, last of the, 350 Buffalo hunting, 317 Burgess, Mt., 354 Burrard Inlet, 379 C. Cabot, Sebastian, 5 Calgary, 321—325, 343 Canmore, 344 Canning factories, 385 Cap Rouge, 20, 53, 54 Carignan Regiment, 22, 43 Cascade Mountain, 347 Cascade Range, 381 Champlain, 20—22, 55 Charlebourg, 55 Ch&teau Frontenac, 36, 37 Chdteau St. Louis, 35 Chateauguay, Battle of, 2& Chicoutimi, 85, 8.6424 INDEX. Chien d'or, 52 Chinamen, 392, 393, 408, 413 Chinook winds, 316, 324 Church in Quebec Province, 77—79 Clergue, Mr., 238 Coburg, Ont., 145 Cochrane, 343 Colbert, 22 Coldstream Ranche, 366 Colonial training, 194, 195 Columbia, River, 356, 359 Cove Fields, 44 Cowboys, 332, 388 Cowichan, 410, 414 Cree Indians, 319 D. Dennis, Mt., 354 Diamond, Cape, 30, 36 Doukhobours, 297, 298 Drummers, 291 Duck-shooting, 269 Dufferin, Lord, 54 Dufferin Terrace, 52 Dunmore Junction, 318 E. Earnscliff, 136 Eastern townships, 90—92 Edmonton, 319, 324, 340 Elbow River, 322 Elgin, Lord, 54 Enderby, 332 English Bay, B.C., 381 F. Family Compact, The, 29, 125 Field, 351 Field, Mt., 353 Fishing Admirals, 10 Flags, national, 65 Fort Garry, 246 Fort William, 233, 240, 245 Fraser River, 373 Fraser Valley farm, 375 French shore, 12 Frippone, La, 38 Frontenac, Count, 22, 26 G. Galloway Cattle, 328 Gait, 140 Gasp 6, 90 Gentlemen emigrants, 186—208 Georgia, Straits of, 400 Georgian Bay, 234—237 Glacier House, 358 Glengarry, Ont., 179 Goderich, 145 Golden, 355 Gold Range, 362 Golf links, 63, 219, 405 Gribaune, Cape, 61 Griswold, 294 Guelph, Ont., 129, 145, 149 H. Habitant, life of, 73—76, no, 111 Hamilton, Ont., 129, 144 Harrison River, 374 Head, Sir Edmund, 54 Hereford cattle, 328 High river, 336 Holstein cattle, 328 Hospital, Quebec General, 53 Hotel Dieu, 52 Hudson's Bay, 238 Hudson's Bay Company, 246, 388 Huguenots, 21 Hull, 131 Huron Indians, 21 Huron, Lake, 236 I. Illecillewaet, 357, 359 Indian head, 296 Innisfail, 326 Iroquois. The, 22 Isle aux Coudres, 61INDEX. 425 J. Jacques Cartier, 20 Japs, 386, 408 K- Kamarouska, go Kaministiquia River, 240 Kamloops, 372 Kent House, 57 Kicking Horse River, 353 Kingston, 126, 144 Klondike, 390 L. Labour in North-West, 288 Labrador, 6—8 Laggan,351 Lake Louise, 351 Lake of the Woods, 245 Laurentian Mountains, 61, 93, 94 Laval, Bishop, 32 Laval University, 32 Lennoxville, 92 Les Eboulements, 61 Levis, 36, 55 Little Bow River, 336 London, Ont., 144 Lorette, 55 Loyalists, U. E., 90 Lulu Island, 384 Lumbering in Canada, 87, 88 Lumbering in B.C., 394—396 Lytton, 372 M. Macdonald, Sir John A., 145, 248 Macdonald, Mt., 357 Mackenzie Rebellion, 29, 127 Mackinan, Straits of, 236, 239 Macleod, 325, 335—337 Magog River, 91 Maisonneuve, 95 Mance, Jeanne, 95 Manitoba, story of, 246—250 Mara Lake, 363 Medicine Hat, 314 Memphramagog Lake, 91 Mennonites, 297 Metis, 90 Military organization, 140, 141 Minnedosa, 267 Montaignais Indians, 80 Montcalm, General, 45—50 Montgomery, General, 28, 36 Montmorency Falls, 29, 46, 47, 56— 58 MONTREAL, 25, 95 Early history of, 95, 96 Bridges, 97 The Mountain, 97 Business streets, 98 McGill College, 98 Banks, etc., 99 Hotels, 100 Climate, 100 Amusements, 100 Residential quarters, 102 Hospitals, 102 Scotsmen in, 103, 104 British and French, 105—109 Church matters, 109, no Irish inhabitants, in The " Mountain," 112 The tourist in, 114 Environs, 115 Excursions, 116 To Ottawa, 116 To Lachene, 117 Moosejaw, 314 Moosemin, 294 Morley, 343 Mounted Police, 314, 332—334 Murray Bay, 62 Social life at, 63—65 Old seigneuries, 66 French Highlanders, 67 Sport at, 72 Habitant life at, 73—75 N. Nanaimo, 400 Nelson, Lord, 52426 INDEX. Nepigon, 244 New Brunswick, 11 New England, French emigration to, 81, 82 Newfoundland, 5—13 New Ontario, 232—243 New Westminster, 383—386 New York steamship lines, 1—4 Niagara district, 126, 127 Noblesse, French Canadian, 23 North Bay, 233 North-West Trading Co., 22 Norwegians, 377 Nova Scotia, 11 O. Okanagan District, 361 Old Man River, 337 Olds, 326 Olympian Range, 400 Ontario, Province of, 119—245 ONTARIO, Physical character, 121 Agricultural condition, 122 History of, 123 U. E. Loyalist settlements, 124 Country towns, 145—159 Farming districts, 163 Rural landscape, 163—165 Homesteads, 166—167 Changed methods, 169 Labourers, 171 Dairying, 171 Agricultural shows, 172 Fruit culture, 172 The year's work, 174 Creeds, 175 Characteristics of farmers, 176 Local government, 176 Social life, 177 Foreign blood, 178 Highland settlers, 179 Catholic Irish, 179 Orange Societies, 179 Back districts, 180 O N T A RIO—con tinned. Prospects of immigrants, 181 For English labourers, 185 For gentleman of small income, 186 Orleans, Isle of, 15, q6, eg, 61 OTTAWA, 129 History of, 130 Parliament buildings, 131 The Chaudiere, 131, 132 Climate, 132 Lumbering, 134 Society, 135 Cathedral, 140 Court of Appeal, 140 University, Catholic, 140 Owen Sound, 149, 234 P. Peace River, 340 Pean, De, 38 Peterborough, 14*5, 140 Petit Nord, n Phips, Sir William, 24 Politics, 136, 137 Portage la Prairie, 261 Port Arthur, 240—244 Port Hope, 145 Port Moody, 379 Prairie chickens, 271 Prairie fire, 316 Prince Albert, 305, 319 Pulp mills, 87, 88 Q- Qu'Appelle, 297 QUEBEC, 15 Custom House, 17 Hotels, 17, 18 History, 20—29 Society, 30 Present condition, 38 Buildings, 30 Language, 31 Physical features, 31—44 Houses of Parliament, 40INDEX. 427 QUEBEC—continued. Education, 40—43 Siege of, 44—50 R. Rainy River, 245 Ramezy, Chateau de, 96 Ranch companies, 338 Ranchmen, 336 Rapid City, 267 Rat Portage, 245 Rebellion of 1885. .319 Red deer, 326 Red River Expedition, 247, 250 Regina, 295, 304 Revelstoke, 359 Richelieu River, 92 Richmond, 90, 92, 93 Rideau Hall, 135 Riel, Louis, 319 Rigaud, 129 Roberval, 20, 21, 55 Rocky Mountains, 323, 343—356 Rogers's Pass, 357 Routledge, 294 Rundle, Mt., 344 S. Saanich, B.C., 411 Salaberry, De, 28 Salmon in Fraser River, 377 Salmon, methods of handling, 386 Salmon, varieties in B.C., 385 Saltcoats, 302 San Juan award, 416 Saguenay River, 15, 84 Saskatchewan, 305 Sault St. Marie, 237 Selkirk, Lord, 246 Selkirks, The, 356—359 Sheep ranching, 314 Sheep's Creek, 336 Sherbrooke, 90—92 Shire horses, 329 Sicamous, 361 Sillery, 53 Simcoe, 145 Sir Donald Mt., 357 Shorthorns in N.-W* T., 328 Smith, Captain, 20 Souris, neighbourhood of, 273—289 Souris River, 273, 294 Spallumcheene, 361 Spencer Wood, 54 Spray River, 347 St. Anne de Beaupr6, 58 St. Charles, 55 St. Foy Battle and monument, 50 St. Foy, village of, 54 St. Francis River, 99 St. John, Lake, 53, 84—86 St. Lawrence route from Liverpool 1—19 St. Lawrence route from Quebec 60—62 St. Louis Street, Quebec, 37 St. Roch, 42 Stanley Park, 381, 399 Stave River, 377 Steamship lines, 1—4 Stephen, Mt., 351 Stoney Indians, 333 Sulphur, Mt., 348 Sushwap Lakes, 361 Swan River Valley, 297 T. Tadousac, 89 Talon, M., 22 Tariff, 157, 158 Thompson River, 372 Three Rivers, 93—95 Thunder Bay, 240 TORONTO, 209 Situation, 209 Origin, 210 Population, 211 Trade, 212 As a domicile, 214 Servants, 215 Social life, 215—219 Amusements, 219 Climate, 220 Colleges, 221428 INDEX. TO RO N T O—con ti n ued. The Churches, 222 Lawyers, 223 Commerce, 224—226 Press, 226 Literature, 227 Tupper, Mt., 357 U. Ursulines, Convent of the, Quebec, 35 V. Vancouver City, 380—391 Vancouver Island, 397 Agriculture on, 409—416 Gentlemen immigrants, 409 Vermilion, Mt., 347 Vernon, 363 Victoria, 400 Population, 401 Origin of, 401 Social characteristics, 402 Shipping, 404 Park, 405 Trade, 407 Naval and Military station, 407 Chinese quarter of, 409 Volunteers, 140, 141 W. • War of 1812.. 125 Welsh Patagonians, 302 Wheat cultivation in N.-W., 279— 288 Winnipeg, 246—259 History of, 247—256 Colleges, 251 Commerce, 251 Churches, 252 Residential quarters, 252 C. P. R. Station, 253 Government agencies, 253 St. Boniface quarter, 255 St. John's Cathedral, 255 Investments, 256—257 Amusements, 257 Environs of, 259 Manufactures, 294 Wolfe, General, 44—50, 62 Headquarters of, 58 Wolfe's monument, 44 Woodstock, 129, 145 Women settlers, 304 Y. York, Little, 125 BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND TONBRIDGE,The Story of a Soldier's Life. By Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, G.C.M.G. Two volumes. Demy 8vo. With Portraits and Plans. Price 32s. net. The Life and Campaigns of Hugh, ist Viscount Gough, Field Marshal. By Robert S. Rait, Fellow of New College, Oxford. Fully illustrated, with Portraits, Maps and Plans. Two volumes. Demy 8vo. 31 s. 6d. net. Contemporary France. By Gabriel Hanotaux. With Portraits. Demy 8vo. Translated from the French. Volumes I. and II. now ready. Price 155. net each. 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That dealing with the British manufacturer is ' an eye-opener' regarding present methods. This section should be carefully read by all who contemplate the establishment of markets or agencies for their goods. The plates which illustrate the book are excellently reproduced. Some excellent sketch maps serve to locate the points of engineering importance." —Electricity. " Mr. Ransome's book covers much more ground than is suggested by its title. It is indeed so comprehensive that it is difficult to conceive of anyone who goes to South Africa failing to find in its pages information and suggestions of the utmost value to him. What we have said, however, may be sufficient to direct the attention of both merchants and emigrants to a singularly able and useful book."—Glasgow Herald. " Mr. Ransome has given us a very useful book which will repay careful study by all who have commercial interests in South Africa."—Sheffield Telegraph. ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & Co., Ltd., LONDON.Old Cape Colony A Chronicle of Her Men and Houses, from 1652 to 1806. by Mrs. A. P. TROTTER, Author of "Old Cape Architecture Fully Illustrated. Demy 8vo. 320 pp. Price 10/6 net. CONTENTS. TABLE BAY SETTLEMENT. SIMON VAN DER STEL: Builder and Governor. THE YOUNGER VAN DER STEL. THE ACCUSATION. EARLY GRANTS. STELLENBOSCH. DRAKENSTEIN AND FRENCH HOCK. PAARL, TULBAGH, CERES, AND BEYOND. MONEY, SHIPS, AND CHINA. FROM 1700—FOR 50 YEARS. THE TAVERN OF THE INDIAN OCEAN. MEN AND HOUSES. ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & Co., Ltd., LONDON.ASIA AND EUROPE BY MEREDITH TOWNSEND. NEW EDITION. Crown 8vo. Price 5/- net. Being Studies presenting the conclusions formed by the Author in a long life devoted to the subject of the relations between Asia and Europe* M An extremely interesting book, full of knowledge and enthusiasm and imagi- nation, written in a singularly clear and trenchant style, and with the method of a finished literary artist. ... Its views are of the greatest possible interest to serious students of Politics. Its range is wide. It extends from general questions such as the influence of Europe on Asia and the mental exclusion of India, the progress of savage races, and the variety of Indian Society to more detailed in- vestigations, such as the life of Mohammed, the core of Hindooism, and the future of the negro."—Pilot. " The public interested in that country (India) will do well to study the pages of this volume."—Athenceum. " It would be difficult to exaggerate the interest of this remarkable book, in it Mr. Meredith Townsend deals with some of the most poignant problems that confront the British people as the ruler of the greatest and most Asiatic of the Empires of Asia."—Spectator. Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy. BY EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN, Author of "Problems of Modern Democracy," &>c. New Impression. Crown 8vo. 6/- net. " After a survey of former democracies he proceeds to deal with (i) equality, (2) the nominating system, (3) the decline of legislatures, (4) American municipal government, and (5) public opinion, adding a supplementary essay on the Australian democracy. . . . Readers of his other books will not require to be told that he writes vigorously and yet dispassionately, with full knowledge of the facts, and with the command of an excellent style."—Times. "Mr. Godkin's work, so careful, so critical, at times so overcast by the shadow of political pessimism, and always so full of unpleasant home truths, is a visible embodiment of the spirit of a party whose raison d'etre is to point out the defects and weaknesses of popular government. ... Mr. Godkin has in this work performed a task which, whether or not it attracts the masses, has a peculiar attraction for the political thinker."—Spectator. ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & Co., Ltd., LONDON.An Autumn Tour in Western Persia. BY LADY DURAND. Illustrated from Photographs. Demy 8vo. 7/6 net. 14 Hill and valley, river and stream, houses and gardens, and the ways and appearances of the inhabitants are brightly described in this agreeable book. This happy and picturesque record of travel is not only good to read but is adorned with one of the best selections of photographs we have yet seen "—The Morning Post. 14 As a picture of travel in a somewhat difficult country it is decidedly good."— Spectator. 44 Pleasantly written, well illustrated, and furnished with a good map."—Field. 44 Excellent and animated description of a most interesting but little known country."—Athenceum. A RIBBON OF IRON. BY ANNETTE M. B. MEAKIN. With Illustrations and a Map. Crown 8vo. Price, 6/-. This is an account of a journey over the Great Siberian Railway and down to the lower part of the Amur River to Blagovestchensk and thence to Vladivostok. The author relates her adventures (which at present have a special interest) in plain and natural language ; the account of the outbreak of hostilities at Blagovestchensk will be found particularly interesting. In the course of her wanderings the author visited among others such widely separated places of interest as Omsk, Tomsk, the Yenisei River^ Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Stretinsk, the Amur River, Aigun, the Ussuri Railway and Vladivostok, passing thence to Japan. ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & Co., Ltd., LONDON. C. F FTHE WORKS OF Mr. SPENSER WILKINSON. The Great Alternative: A Plea for a National Policy. 65. The Volunteers and the National Defence. 25. 6d. War and Policy. 155. The Brain of an Army. 25. 6d. The Nation's Awakening. 55. "In a series of notable works he has pointed out the defects in the present system; and any man conversant with his teaching could have foretold the misfortunes which at the outset befell our army in South Africa. He speaks, then, as one whose inductions have throughout been confirmed by experience. But he is not merely a destructive critic; besides indicating the faults he has suggested the remedies ; and for that reason his views are worth careful examination."—Quarterly Review > July, 1902. The Nation's Need: Chapters on Educa* tion. Edited by Spenser Wilkinson. Crown 8vo. 6s. CONTENTS. The Elementary School, by F. S. Marvin. Local and Central Government, by Graham Wallas. Primary Educa- tion of Girls, by Catherine Dodd. Hygiene and Household Economics, by Alice Ravenhill. Higher Education in France and Germany, by P, S. Hartog and J. J. Findlay. The Secondary Day School, by J. J. Findlay. The Public Schools, by J. C. Tarver. The Teaching of Modem Lan- guages, by Karl Breul. Higher Education, by H. S. Mackinder. The Nation's Servants—School Education of Army Officers — Professional Education of Army Officers—Naval Officers, by Spenser Wilkinson. Appendix and Index. ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & Co., Ltd., LONDON.Constable's Library of TRAVEL & BIOGRAPHY Demy 8vo. This Library consists of Standard Copyright Works of Travel, History, and Biography. The Volumes are uniform in style, being bound in red cloth gilt lettered. The Fight with France for North America. By A. G Bradley. Illustrated. 3/6 net* Farthest North. By Fridtjof Nansen. The Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship Fram, 1893—96, and of a Fifteen Months' Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johansen. With 20 Full-page Illustrations and 2 Maps. 6/-. "a masterpiece ol story-telling."—The Times. The Waterloo Campaign, 1815. By Capt. William Siborne. Fully Illustrated with Portraits, Maps, and Plans. 3/6 net* "a classic in its way."—Globe. " The best account that has been written."—Scotsman. "The most clear and comprehensive account."—Speaker. Among the Himalayas. By Major L. A. Waddell, LL.D., Author of •• The Buddhism of Thibet." With over 100 Illustrations by A. D. M'Cormick, and from Photographs. 6/-* "With the exception of Hooker, no European has got nearer to Mount Everest than the author, and his observations of this and the adjacent peaks, in combination with the admirable photographs that he provides, form a feature of the work that deserves special attention."_ Morning Post. The Alps from End to End. By Sir William Martin Conway. With a Supplementary Chapter by the Rev. W. A. B. Coolidge. With 52 Illustrations by A. D. M'Cormick.3/6 net. " There is, perhaps, not another living Alpinist—unless we except Mr. Coolidge, who con- tributes a valuable precis of the topography—who could have combined the requisite knowledge with physical capacity for the task."—Standard. The Kingdom of the Yellow Robe (Siam). By Ernest Young. Fully Illustrated by E. A. Norbury, R.C.A., and from Photographs. 6/«■* " A book of which i can speak with unstinted praise."—Mr. T. P. O'Connor. " A book to be read, both for entertainment and instruction."—St. James's Budget. Rupert, Prince Palatine. By Eva Scott, late Scholar of Somerville College, Oxford. With Photogravure Frontispiece. 3/6 net. " Miss Scott's sound and impartial piece of historical work deserves this demand for a second edition."—Bookman. The Household of the Lafayettes. By Edith Sichel, Author of " Women and Men of the French Renaissance." 3/6 net> " A vivid and picturesque study of French life during the revolutionary period.Aforning Post. 14 One of the best and truest pieces of writing we have met with for a long time."—Spectator. ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & Co., Ltd., LONDON.TWO INDISPENSABLE REFERENCE BOOKS ON INDIA, CONSTABLE'S HAND ATLAS OF INDIA A Series of Sixty Maps and Plans prepared from Ordnance and other Surveys under the Direction of J. G. BARTHOLOMEW, F.R.G.S., F.R.S.E.,etc. Crown 8vo. Strongly bound in Half Morocco, 14s. This Atlas will be found of great use, not only to tourists and travellers, but also to readers of Indian History, as it contains twenty-two plans of the principal towns of our Indian Empire, based on the most recent surveys and officially revised in India. The Topographical Section Maps are an accurate reduction of the Survey of India, and contain all the places described in Sir W. W. Hunter's " Gazetteer of India," according to his spelling. The Military Railway, Telegraph, and Mission Station Maps are designed to meet the requirements of the Military and Civil Service, also missionaries and business men who at present have no means of obtaining the information they require in a handy form. The Index contains upwards of ten thousand names, and will be found more complete than any yet attempted on a similar scale. UNIFORM WITH THE ABOVE. CONSTABLE'S HAND GAZETTEER of INDIA Compiled under the Direction of J. Q. BARTHOLOMEW, F.R.G.S., And Edited with Additions by JAS. BURGESS, C.I.E., LL.D., etc* Crown 8vo. Half Morocco, 10s• 6d. The Hand Gazetteer of India is based on the Index to Constable's Hand Atlas of India, which contains nearly 12,000 place-names. To these have been added very largely from -arious sources, bringing the number of entries to close upon 20,000. The populations of districts, towns, and villages, and the position of each place are clearly indicated, thus forming within a small compass a general reference book to the topography of India, and a companion volume to the Hand Atlas of India. ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & Co., Ltd., LONDON.This book is a preservation facsimile produced for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It is made in compliance with copyright law and produced on acid-free archival 60# book weight paper which meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (permanence of paper). Preservation facsimile printing and binding by Northern Micrographics Brookhaven Bindery La Crosse, Wisconsin 2014