CHAPTER XX.
EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT AT TORONTO—CANADIAN ARGUMENTS AGAINST COMMON SCHOOLS—A CANADIAN’S OPINION ON SECULAR SCHOOLS IN ENGLAND—HOW THE CANADIAN’S OBJECTIONS ARE MET IN THE UNITED STATES—UPPER CANADIANS NOT YET A PEOPLE—ADVANTAGES POSSESSED BY UPPER CANADA—SERVICE AT THE ROMANIST AND ANGLICAN CATHEDRALS—UNMANNERLY BEHAVIOUR PERMITTED ON CANADIAN RAILWAYS—BADNESS OF THEIR CARRIAGES—WHY CANADA IS NOT ‘THE LAND OF FREEDOM’—YANKEE SMARTNESS IN TRAIN-DRIVING—PICTURESQUENESS OF VERMONT—TRAVELLING ON AMERICAN RAILWAYS NOT FATIGUING.
EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT AT TORONTO—CANADIAN ARGUMENTS AGAINST COMMON SCHOOLS—A CANADIAN’S OPINION ON SECULAR SCHOOLS IN ENGLAND—HOW THE CANADIAN’S OBJECTIONS ARE MET IN THE UNITED STATES—UPPER CANADIANS NOT YET A PEOPLE—ADVANTAGES POSSESSED BY UPPER CANADA—SERVICE AT THE ROMANIST AND ANGLICAN CATHEDRALS—UNMANNERLY BEHAVIOUR PERMITTED ON CANADIAN RAILWAYS—BADNESS OF THEIR CARRIAGES—WHY CANADA IS NOT ‘THE LAND OF FREEDOM’—YANKEE SMARTNESS IN TRAIN-DRIVING—PICTURESQUENESS OF VERMONT—TRAVELLING ON AMERICAN RAILWAYS NOT FATIGUING.
Educational Department at Toronto.
At Toronto I was taken over the educational department for Upper Canada. It is very ambitiously housed, and combines so many objects, namely a general library, a collection and depôt of school-books and of school apparatus, galleries of art, chiefly for copies of celebrated pictures and pieces of sculpture, and normal schools, that I spent two hours in going through it. On my making some observation on the cost of the building, and of its contents, I was told that it might appear that too much had been spent on the department, but that it had designedly been carried out on this scale, and the building made imposing, and the galleries added, in order to give dignity and elevation to the idea of education in the minds of the people. A hope had been entertained that if the normal schools were brought under the same roof, a better class of youngpersons would offer themselves for the position of teachers: this hope had not been disappointed.
The arguments and facts which are in favour of the Canadian Common School system are to be heard at the department, the officers of which appeared to be able and zealous men. The system, however, has been very far from securing that unanimity which to the south of the great lakes exists on the subject of common schools. I will state this difference of opinion, and some of its causes, in the words of one of the leading men in the province, used in conversation with me on the subject. He said, ‘that throughout Upper Canada their common schools had quite failed in winning anything at all like general approval. The Grand Jury of Toronto have for several years past made a presentment against the system, hanging the expression of their dissatisfaction on the peg of their visitation and inspection of the jail. Their dissatisfaction is shared very largely by the upper class, who pay a heavy tax for the schools, and yet find that those for whose benefit and elevation they were willing to be taxed do not send their children to the schools; but that, instead of this, the well-to-do tradesmen who could very well afford to pay for their children’s education are now provided with it, almost gratuitously, at the expense of the community.
‘Some towns in Upper Canada, as for instance Hamilton, have all along refused to establish common schools.
A Canadian on Common Schools.
‘Another difficulty about the system, besides its injustice, and its failure in its true object, is that it extinguishes private schools. When all the schoolsbecome of one kind, competition in excellence ceases, and everyone is content with a low standard of mediocrity. Every master knows that, so long as he is not more inefficient than his neighbours, his position is safe; and that his salary, which is all that he at last cares about, will be paid him.
‘The local superintendents, who are almost universally clergymen, have other things to attend to, and carry out their inspection in the most perfunctory manner.
‘A cause that is doing much harm to the schools is, that everything connected with them is rapidly falling into the hands of the politicians. No party can now afford to forego an opportunity for strengthening itself by electing, or procuring the election, of party men as managers; and these again, for the same reasons, are guided in the selection of teachers by party considerations. It is coming to this, that no one who has to do with the management, supervision, or teaching of schools, will be the fittest person for what he has to do, except by accident.’
This gentleman had studied the subject of education, as well in England as in his own country, and he gave me some of the opinions he had formed on the religious part of the question, or rather as to how he conceived the proposal for secular schools would affect the Established Church, in the following words. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘the Church will lose nothing by the absence of a Church character in the schools. I never met with a clergyman in the old country, whether it was an archbishop or the incumbent of a small rural parish, to whom I put the question, who felt sure that the Church gained by the schoolsbeing in the hands of the clergy. No one will say that this attaches the children, when they are grown up, to the Church. For my own part, I feel sure that a system which would rigidly exclude both all Church and all denominational teaching would be a gain to the Church. This is necessarily true, if under the present system Church schools do less to indoctrinate those brought up in them with Churchism, than the denominational schools do to indoctrinate those brought up in them with dissent. My conclusion is, that if I were an English Churchman, I should not vote against the plan which would supplement your existing system with secular schools. It would do you no harm, and would give you many intelligent members.’
Canadians not yet a People.
The way in which my Canadian friend’s opinions about common schools differed from those held everywhere in the United States, supplies a means for measuring the social and moral differences of the two peoples. Not one of the above objections, whatever weight it may have in Canada, has any weight at all in the United States. There the first thing thought about is making the schools as suitable as possible for all classes, and this object is very largely attained, so that the upper class need not, and do not, hold themselves aloof from them. There, too, instead of noting with feelings and expressions of discontent that a great number of the lower class in the towns do not resort to the schools, great efforts are made to bring them in, by varying, and adapting to their wants and habits, the character of the schools, as is done at Boston and New York, and by getting as many people as possible to become volunteer workersin the effort to persuade such parents to send their children. I was, while at Washington, very much struck and interested by the account Mr. Barnard, the Commissioner of Education, gave me of the way in which this had been effected. And then, as to the deadness and inefficiency which show themselves in the public schools in Canada, as soon as competition with private schools ceases, an American public and American parents would not tolerate anything of the kind. And the American teachers themselves are so energetic and ambitious, that they would be the last in the community to succumb to such influences. The inefficient inspection the Canadian objectors complain of is a great evil, but is very far from being an irremediable one.
The fact is, that the inhabitants of Upper Canada are not yet a people. They are Englishmen, Scotchmen, or Irishmen, just as if they were still in the old country; and what would not have suited them there, they think will not suit them where they are. Unlike their neighbours, they are not possessed with the idea, that if they will only give themselves the trouble to attempt it, they can make anything bear its proper fruit. The American is the hardest worker in the world, never sparing himself, but always toiling on, in the faith that he will soon be able to bring all things right; and he generally succeeds in doing so. These are not yet the characteristics of the inhabitants of Upper Canada.
In Canada there is the stage, and there are the materials for a great nation. Its towns are more solidly built than those of the same size in the States, possibly on account of the greater severity of theclimate. The country is generally fertile. It is also very varied, full of lakes, and streams, and forests. It abounds in mineral wealth and in agricultural produce. Notwithstanding its seven months’ winter, it is capable of ripening maize and maturing tobacco; and even, to speak of small things, through the medium of its peas, a crop which can rarely be grown profitably to the south of the lakes, it supplies no inconsiderable part of what is used for coffee among its neighbours. That product, however, of Canada, which most attracts the attention of the traveller, and is likely to make the strongest impression upon him, is the complexion of the Canadian ladies. It gives you more of the idea of transparency, otherwise you might have thought that it was of pearl.
On a Sunday, while at Montreal, in my way to the Episcopal cathedral of Christ’s Church, I allowed time for witnessing the celebration of High Mass at the church or cathedral annexed to the Jesuits’ College. As I left the building the thought in my mind was, ‘I should like to ask the priests who have just been officiating, if they have, or can imagine, any reasons for believing that this service is either acceptable to God or edifying to man?’ In the English cathedral the service was very well and impressively read by an elderly clergyman; but the young clergyman who afterwards occupied the pulpit was far too minutely acquainted with all that passes in the mind of the Almighty. No man could be so fully acquainted with what passes in the mind of his most familiar friend—hardly with what passes in his own mind.
Canadian Railways.
One who has just come from the States may compare the manners and customs of the Americantravelling public with those of the Canadian. The former are very much in advance of the latter. The Canadian conductor, unlike his brother officer to the south, appears to make no attempt to keep things and persons in order for the general advantage. Anybody, however rough (and many Canadian travellers are in winter very rough indeed, perhaps because they are lumberers out for a holiday), is allowed to take his seat in the ladies’ carriage. The shaggiest and most unmannerly fellows, sometimes with short pipes in their mouths, and in their shirt sleeves, are permitted to perambulate the train, staring everybody in the face; I suppose merely to show that they are lords of the situation. But what I found the most annoying of all was, that I hardly ever left my seat for a few moments without finding on my return that some one had pushed my luggage and rug on one side, and taken possession of my place. This I believe to be a practice quite unheard of in the United States; at all events, I never noticed an instance of it. The only case of drunkenness I ever saw in any railway car was on the Grand Trunk line of Canada: it was that of a dirty, uncombed rough, who was uproariously tipsy; but neither conductor nor anyone else took any notice of him.
Again; the worst carriages in the States are better than those on the great Canadian lines. All the former have good springs; but the Canadians are too strongly protectionist to tolerate American cars on their lines, and their own native cars have, as far as my experience goes, no springs at all. A Canadian assured me that there had once been a time when they had had springs, but that they had now stiffened orworn out, or in some way or other gone to the bad. The effect is that there is an incessant short, sharp, rattling jar, which becomes very distressing. Their home-made carriages must also be very deficient in strength, or else their rails must be most alarmingly out of order; for in one day I counted about a dozen wrecks of trains lying by the side of the road. This is not encouraging as one goes along and sees (the ground being everywhere covered with snow) nothing else but overturned and smashed-up cars.
Still, we must remember that in the great bridge over the St. Lawrence, at Montreal, they have one of the grandest railway works in the world. It seems to be about a mile and a half long, and carries the train over the rapids of the St. Lawrence through a series of tubes supported by massive stone piers.
On crossing this bridge, on my return to the States, I left behind me on the west bank more than two feet of snow. In some places the fences were entirely buried. On the eastern side, however, of the river the snow was much thinner, and in less than two hours we were passing over a country from which it had almost disappeared. This was not lost on a voluble little Irishwoman, the chief talker in a party of Irish whom she had been endeavouring to persuade to leave Canada and settle in the States. ‘You see for yourselves,’ she said, pointing out to them how much less snow there was than what they had left two hours ago in Canada, ‘you see for yourselves that this is the land of freedom; for here, if a body has no shoes, she can go without them: but in Canada it is entirely too cold: faith, then, this is the land of freedom.’
American Railway Travelling.
For the first sixty miles of this journey we remained in the execrable carriages of the Grand Trunk of Canada Company, and in the hands of their officials, whose way of doing things leaves on the mind the feeling that their object is to show how what ought to be done may be neglected. The instant the Yankees took charge of the train everything changed, as if by magic. You could feel at any moment that the train was being driven against time, and not allowed to go anyhow. The smartness with which the driver brought it into the stations, and took it out, never waiting one instant longer than was necessary for giving up the mail-bags, or whatever it might be the conductor had to do, showed the value he attached to the passengers’ time, and to his own reputation for punctuality. I believe there were times when we were not stopped for more than thirty seconds. In a long day’s journey, to feel that the train is handled in this way has quite an exhilirating effect.
All day long we were winding our way among the hills of Vermont, which rose above the valleys to a height of six or seven hundred feet. Every valley had its stream. The land appeared generally to be poor; but, as is usual in such cases, it was very picturesque.
I tried sometimes to make out why it is that five hundred miles by railway in America do not fatigue one so much as fifty in this country. More than once in America I travelled upwards of a thousand miles at a single stretch, but never on any occasion, in a tour of eight thousand miles by railway, did I feel, either during a journey or after it, anything likefatigue or discomfort, or have any sensation to remind me that I had travelled a single mile. The only explanation I could hit upon was that on English and European railways you are shut up in a little box, in which you cannot move about, and in which there are incessant draughts from a door and window on each side of you. The result is, that your feet instantly get cold, and cold feet affect the whole system disagreeably. In American cars, however, from the way in which the floors are fastened, and from there being no side doors at all, one’s feet, with rare exceptions, even when the thermometer outside is below zero, are as far from being chilled as they would be in one’s own house. Of course the American cars have also a stove at each end.