R. E. Vernède

“ But it must be borne in mind that the traveller par excellence in Canada is the commercial traveller whose business it is to talk. Off the line—and on it, where other travellers are concerned—one finds men with a gift of silence that can at times be disheartening. It is natural that this should be so. Men in remote places lose the use of their tongues. All men are not talkers, indeed I think the great majority of men in any country are not talkers. When Canadians do talk, it must be admitted that they excel us, or their working-men do. ”

“ There, at the end of the lake, was a mountain pass visible from the chalet, and the thin white line that screwed about among the rocks and trees was the trail. The slicker trotted. He trotted through the wood that borders the lake; he trotted through a wonderful pebbled valley beyond it which might have been a sea beach (only everywhere slim spruces, like sharp, green, tenpenny nails, grew out of the pebbles) ; and he trotted up the first stretch of trail leading to the pass ahead of us. Then for an hour or more the slicker climbed as steadily as a Swiss guide. ”

“ The extraordinary rivalry that exists between the great East Canadian cities never leads to imitation. On the plains it is different. Winnipeg is the great model for all the little towns on the plains. But while Quebec resents the idea that Montreal is a much more important city than itself, and Montreal regrets that the seat of Government should be at so small a place as Ottawa, and Toronto considers Montreal ill-balanced in spite of its wealth, each of them would only consent to expand its own real superiority along its own particular lines and in its own particular manner. ”

“ Sometimes the firs predominate, sometimes the birches, pale green still these latter, or yellowing in the fall. Then a splash of cherry colour or crimson shows a maple on its way to winter. There are reedy backwaters where great pike lie; and natural weirs, below which the rock bass wait for their food; the deep pools hold pickerel or catfish. Everywhere the air exhilarates, and along the wider reaches we used to meet a wind like a sea-wind that put the river in waves and set them tippling into the bows of the canoe. ”

“ And a love of sport and beauty and sociability, and even of leisure, is a good thing, especially when it is found among men who do their own work as these men do, and more especially when found among women who work as the women of the island do. The work is the best of all, but all work and no play turns many people—and not a few Canadians—not merely into dull folk, but into narrow-minded and backward ones, who will some day have all the unpleasantness of being rudely awakened to the fact. ”

“ What struck me as most interesting about Toronto was that it seemed to represent more than any other place in Canada what we mean in England when we talk of Canadians. We do not mean the French Canadians of Quebec Province, nor the American Canadians and English public-school boys who are to be found in such numbers in Alberta and the plains. The sort of people we are thinking of are people who have been born in Canada, who have even spent generations there, but are, nevertheless, British by descent and British in tongue. There are people of this sort in other parts of Canada. ”

“ The West is still—even to the Canadian born—the Unknown and the Happy Hunting-grounds and Eldorado and Ultima Thule and the Blessed Isles. West is where the farmer's son of spirit goes to seek fresh lands, where the prospector goes to find gold, where successful men go because they want to be more successful, or maybe because they want to retire and enjoy themselves, and they have heard that West there is a climate which hardly includes winter, and has none at all of that fierce break-up of winter which makes the plains in parts trying to the toughest constitution ”

“ The idea exists not only among business-like estate-agents, who see themselves in fancy selling Arctic blocks to this expected race, but among quite disinterested and patriotic people, who talk of it, as Mr. Service himself does, as a strong man's land. A few peculiarly strong men may survive there; and it is excusable for a poet to regard them as super-men—Canada's noblest type. As a matter of fact it is at least as romantic to weave halos about the heads of the crowd that seeks the Yukon country as it is to make one's heroine milk a wild deer. ”

“ Take American farmers. They are an undoubted gain to Canada in so far as they possess energy, capital, a knowledge of the local conditions, versatility and adaptability. I hardly know if it is an example of their versatility or their adaptability, but as soon as they cross over the line, American farmers who were Tariff Reformers instantly become Free Traders. It is not, of course, that they have adopted nobler principles in their new country. It is merely that, having become Canadians, they have now to support Canadian manufactures, and pay more for their farming machines and shoddy clothes. ”

“ Hard by lie the United States whose advertisers have, in a very few years, done more to blazon all the horrors of which the English tongue is capable than their great writers have done to point out its beauties. Their example has spread. So that in Canada, too, a barber's is announced as 'A Tonsorial Saloon'; a hat shop is 'A Bon Ton Millinery Parlour.' There may be some magic attraction in the words. The desire for a hat in the heart of a woman is not a definitely economic want; perhaps to be able to get a hat from a millinery parlour may strengthen that want. ”

“ As one goes West, woman becomes more of an indoor creature; and this may be due to the greater chivalry of their men folk. But one has to remember that the great charm of Canadian life, especially on the prairies, is an outdoor charm—working in the exhilarating air—not cooking over a hot stove indoors. One hears of a few cases in which women have taken up farming or vegetable-gardening and made a success of it, but no one could honestly say that the fortune awaiting women who take up such work is usually a great one. The work is too hard, especially in the winter time. ”

“ Moreover, it creates a restless spirit among those genuine farmers out in the country who would honestly be farming their land, if real estate agents would leave them alone, and not persuade them that it is just as profitable a game to hang about waiting for opportunities to sell their farms in plots. Of course they, like most other people who get as far as Vancouver, are not mere innocents. Sellers and buyers are probably equally aware of the risks they run; but where a tide of speculation sets in, the shrewdest people seem ready to take the most absurd risks. ”

“ What a simple world it seems. No clothes question, no washing, the simplest cookery, one man one plate (and that plate never washed) , one knife for eating with or for skinning a grizzly bear, no carpets or curtains in the houses, no dustings or spring-cleanings, no knick-knacks to knock over or break, no flowers without or within except such as grow wild, no luxuries, in short, either to enjoy or to pay for, and a terrible amount of dirt. That is the physical aspect of the world without women. ”

“ As it is, Ontarian farmers thrive again; new Ontario thrives excellently in a score of ways; the Canadian-born prosper in that part of Canada where they are—and always have been—most massed and most solidly Canadian. The West is a medley of races; and if it had suddenly become dominant by reason of its vastly superior prosperity, a people that could definitely be called Canadian would have been still further to seek than it is. ”

“ To expect the land to take on hordes of the city-bred without ever failing is to dream. It would be easier for the sea to swallow men clothed in cork jackets. Some are bound to be rejected, and they turn to the cities. But the cities of a New World cannot absorb indefinite numbers of men; London or Glasgow cannot. The work is not there for them—not for all of them.
The Canadian winter also has to be remembered as a factor driving men to cities like Montreal. ”

“ Montreal has, so I am told, sixty-four millionaires—real, not dollar millionaires; self-made, not descended millionaires; strenuous, not idle millionaires. Most of them live in Sherbrooke Street, or near it, on the way up to the Mountain. It is a fine wide road with an extraordinary variety of houses in it. You cannot point to any one house and say this is the sort of house a millionaire builds, for the next one is quite different, and so is the next and the next. It is natural that Canadians should be more original in their house-building than our millionaires. ”

“ It is still a centre for ranchers and miners; but its real importance is that it has become the headquarters of that prairie which produced once, perhaps, half a ton of hay to the acre, and now yields the finest wheat in the world. If any statues are to be put up in the town—and it would be as well to wait for a native sculptor of talent—they should be the statues of the men who constructed the irrigation works. ”

“ Setting aside for a moment this political elasticity as of doubtful value, Canadians may still wonder if the American farmer is all gain to them. Is it an objection, for example, that the American introduces the purely commercial spirit into farming? Not entirely. Not certainly so far as love of gain induces promptness and enterprise. It is, however, an objection if it destroys that love of the land which causes the English farmer to stick by his farm, generation after generation. Perhaps American farmers have not that land love in any case. ”

“ If we understood—or believed we understood—what was for the future welfare of Canada, it is doubtful if we could refrain from pointing it out, even if we could refrain from insisting upon it. If the Canadians thought themselves capable of directing us in the right way—say in the management of India—they would feel urged to give their opinion, and Anglo-Indian officials, having this last straw added to their backs, would strike en masse. As it is, we let each other's real problems {290} alone, and are satisfied with our own solutions of them. ”

“ Quebec will never be one of those cities, however great she may grow. Quebec stands on a hill, and just as a city on a hill cannot be hid, so too it cannot hide from those who live in it the country round, nor even the country it stands on. ”

“ An old-fashioned Englishman, straight from the old country, might even now be scared by it, and decide on the strength of it not to become a citizen of Thebes. He need not be scared. He can dislike the advertisement if he chooses, but he should bear in mind that by just such advertisements men were attracted to prosperity in the States as much as to adversity—even in the Dickens period—that real cities as well as sham ones were built up by them, and that anyway most of the Canadian land thus advertised is of an easily ascertainable value. ”

“ I don't {171} remember to have passed any one on the way to the station. There were two or three sleepy-eyed people lounging about there; there always seem to be a few in Canadian stations, no matter what the hour. I think they must be out-of-works who keep their spirits up by listening to the squeaking and clash of shunting trucks, and the letting off of steam, and the great clang of the bells that are sounded from the engines as a trans-continental train comes in—all those sounds of life and hustle that are dear to the Canadian soul. ”

“ That Great Britain still bears the main expenditure in all such matters is proof, if proof be needed, that what American papers somewhat unkindly call 'British Island Politics' are, still, more Imperial than the politics of any other part of the Empire. We pay and we ask for little in return, and the Empire will go on, even now that Canada has become a nation. Only some mistake could, I think, part us—a mistake as big as that which parted us from the United States—and we are not likely to make it; nor is Canada likely to wish for it, however great she may picture and make her own destiny. ”

“ Others point out that the Catholic Church, which believes that the poor must be always with us, is supreme in Montreal; poverty and the faith, they say, go always together. I think it is truest to argue that, while all these things are in their degree contributory, it is not fair to fix on any one of them as the chief cause of the ill. One thing is certain. Montreal's slums are not typical of Canada, but of a great city. No great city has as yet found itself completely, and the greater it is, the less soluble are its problems of poverty. ”

“ Other great cities have grown up anyhow, usually on lines that suggest that their greatness was thrust upon them unexpectedly. Winnipeg too has grown big—beyond all expectation one would have thought—yet it suggests in its lines that it never felt, even in those far-off days when Main Street was the Hudson Bay trail, that it would be anything but tremendous. Very likely it is an accident that Winnipeg did possess this power of expanding and Winnipegers did not deliberately foresee and provide for its future vastness. ”

“ Now Calgary is a stone-built town of solid appearance, and still more solid importance. Like so many other Canadian towns, it is more important than it looks. It looks bustling enough, but hardly important. There are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The hotels are singularly inadequate. They are not only not comfortable enough for their guests, but they are not large enough. I had occasion to visit Calgary twice within a week, and each time I got the last bed in a different hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did not succeed. ”

“ Nowadays, though the London we know is to that old London as a vast and sleepless city to a small somnolent town, the country cousin is no longer carried off his feet by a visit to it. It is not vast enough or noisy enough or new enough to impress him. ”

“ Always there will be in Quebec a sense of steepness. The cliffs still climb even where they are crowded with houses. And the air that reaches Quebec is the air of the hills. Always too—from Dufferin Terrace at least—there will be visible the sweep of the St. Lawrence, the dark crawl to the north-east {27} of the Laurentian Mountains, and the clear and immensely lofty Canadian skies.
I spent the whole of my first day in Quebec on Dufferin Terrace, except for that journey down to the docks. ”

“ It is more like a lake among mountains, and less like a lake in a dream. I went to it because I wanted to get into the Yoho Valley, if only for a day, and the trail from Emerald Lake into the Yoho is, I had heard, the most picturesque of all. Even superficially to see the valley takes four days, and I had left myself with only one, so that it was in a deprecating spirit that I asked the manageress of the lake chalet if I could at least get within sight of the valley and back before dark. She said that if I started at two o'clock punctually, on a pony, the thing could just be done. ”

“ Another point to which the immigration department might give all the attention it can spare, is that of making it as simple as possible for decent immigrants to be joined at the earliest opportunity by their wives and families. The lack of women in Canada is a curse which there is no disguising. For one thing, to have a country full only of able-bodied men without wives or families is to give it an air of prosperity which is unreal. ”

“ That aspect of the commonweal which can be referred to somewhat vaguely as material prosperity now bulks very large in their minds, and, as a result of it, the idea is beginning to prevail that not only can cities be planned before they are built, but that whole provinces can and should be encouraged to grow in certain thought-out directions.
In the old world the new idea is likely to work slowly and somewhat obscurely. Cities and countries have already grown up there in the old-and-anyhow style; and grown-up things, like grown-up people, are not easily changed. ”

“ I do not say that the Canadian Government is bound to find for such men the work for which they are fitted; but in so far as they undertake to find work for immigrants, they should as far as possible find the right work. That jealousy which causes the United States to put obstacles in the way of the skilled immigrant who {122} comes into the country, should not be encouraged in Canada. It is absurd to suppose that Canada is already stocked with skilled workmen, and I repeat it is waste to use men, who are skilled, in work to which they are wholly unaccustomed. ”

“ Perhaps it is that I like a town to be a town and a garden to be a garden; whereas Victoria is a sort of garden city, grateful no doubt to those eyes that are accustomed to the utilitarian towns of the West, but altogether lacking in architectural fineness. The Parliament Buildings are good, and would be very good if those responsible for their maintenance would remove the inscription 'Canada' from across the front of them. ”