*****
Out of such men and women a great city is ever builded. San Francisco may be wild and harum-scarum, and a great deal of its wildness is painfully exaggerated, but it is a mighty power in itself. Your San Franciscan is rightly proud of the progress made since the great disaster. More than $375,000,000—a sum approximating the cost of the Panama canal—has already been spent in rebuilding the city, and now, like a man who has spent his last dollar on a final substantial meal, the western metropolis calls for cake and scrapes up an additional $18,000,000 for a World's Fair "to beat everything that has gone before." That takes financing—of a high order. It takes something more. It has taken a real spirit—enthusiasm and love and courage—to build a new San Francisco that shall gradually obliterate the poignant memories of the city that was.
Concerning Toronto it may be said that she combines in a somewhat unusual fashion British conservatism and American enterprise. Her neat streets are lined with solid and substantial buildings such as delight the heart of the true Briton wherever he may find them; and yet she has among these "the tallest skyscraper of the British Empire," although the sixteen stories of its altitude would be laughed to scorn by many a second-class American city.
Still, many a first-class American city could hardly afford to laugh at the growth of Toronto, particularly in recent years. She prides herself that she had doubled her population each fifteen years of her history and here is a geometrical problem of growth that becomes vastly more difficult with each oncoming twelvemonth. At the close of the second war of the United States with England, just a century ago, Toronto was a mere hamlet. Beyond it was an unknown wilderness. The town was known as York in those days, and although Governor Simcoe had already chosen the place to be the capital of Upper Canada, it was a struggling little place. Still, it must have struggled manfully, for in 1817 it was granted self-government and in 1834, having garnered in some nine thousand permanent residents, it was vested with a Mayor and the other appurtenances of a real city. Since then it has grown apace, until today in population and in financial resource it is very close upon the heels of Montreal, for so many years the undisputed metropolis of the Dominion.
But perhaps the spur that has advanced Toronto has been the knowledge that west of her is Winnipeg, and that Winnipeg has been doubling her population each decade. And west of Winnipeg is Calgary, west of Calgary, Vancouver; all growing apace until it is a rash man who today can prophesy which will be the largest city of the Dominion of Canada, a dozen years hence. The Canadian cities have certainly been growing in the American fashion—to use that word in its broadest sense.
And yet the strangest fact of all is that Toronto grows—not more American, but more British year by year. Within the past twelve or thirteen years this has become most marked. She has grown from a Canadian town, with many marked American characteristics, into a town markedly English in many, many ways. Now consider for a moment the whys and the wherefores of this.
We have already told of the rapid progress of Toronto, now what of the folk who came to make it? In the beginning there were the Loyalists—"Tories" we call them in our histories; "United Empire Loyalists," as their Canadian descendants prefer to know them—who fled from the Colonies at the time of the Revolution and who found it quite impossible to return. In this way some of the old English names of Virginia have been perpetuated in Toronto, and you may find in one of the older residential sections, a great house known as Beverly, whose doors, whose windows, whose fireplaces, whose every detail are exact replicas of the Beverly House in Virginia which said good-by to its proprietors a century and a half ago.
Those Loyalists laid the foundations of Toronto of today. The municipality of Toronto of today is, as you shall see, most progressive in the very fibers of its being, ranking with such cities as Des Moines and Cleveland and Boston as among the best governed upon the North American continent. Such civic progress was notdrawn from the cities of England or of Scotland or of Ireland. And Toronto was a well organized and governed municipality, while Glasgow and Manchester were hardly yet emerging from an almost feudal servility. Because in Toronto the old New England town-meeting idea worked to its logical triumph. The Loyalists who had left their great houses of Salem and of Boston brought more to the wildernesses of Upper Canada than merely fine clothes or family plate.
To this social foundation of the town came, as stock for her growth through the remaining three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the folk of the north of Ireland. The southern counties of the Emerald Island gave to America and gave generously—to New York and to Boston; to New Brunswick and to Lower Canada. The men from the north of Ireland went to Toronto and the nearby cities of what is now the Province of Ontario. And when Toronto became a real city they began to call her the Belfast of America. For such she was. She was a very citadel of Protestantism. Her folk transplanted, found that they would worship God in their austere churches without having the reproachful phrase of "dissenter" constantly whipped in their faces. Toronto meant toleration. So came the Ulster men to their new Belfast. For more than sixty years they came—a great migrating army. And if you would know the way they took root give heed to a single illustration.
One of these Irishmen had founded a retail store in the growing little city of Toronto. It thrived—tremendously. News of its success went back to the little north-of-Ireland village from whence its owner came.
"Timothy Eaton's doin' well in America," was the word that passed through his old county. Timothy Eaton and those who came after him took good care of their kith and kin. For the Eaton business did prosper. Today the firm has two great stores—one in Toronto andone in Winnipeg—and they are not only among the largest in North America but among the largest in the world.
This is but one instance of the way that Toronto has grown. And when, after sixty years of steady immigration there was little of kith and kin left to come from Ireland, there began a migration from the other side of the Irish channel, a new chapter in the growth of Toronto was opened.
No one seems to know just how the tide of English emigration started, but it is a fact that it had its beginning about the time of the end of the Boer war. It is no less a fact that within ten or fifteen years it has attained proportions comparable with the sixty years of Irish immigration. The agents of the Canadian government and of her railroads have shown that it pays to advertise.
There is good reason for this immigration—of course. Canada, with no little wisdom, has given great preference to the English as settlers. She has not wished to change her religions, her language or her customs. The English, in turn, have responded royally to the invitation to come to her broad acres and her great cities. The steamship piers, at Quebec and Montreal in the summer and at Halifax and St. Johns in the winter, are steadily thronged with the newcomers, and they do not speak the strange tongues that one hears at Ellis island in the city of New York. They bring no strange customs or strange religions to the growing young nation that prides herself upon her ability to combine conservatism and progress.
And just as Toronto once did her part in depopulating the north of Ireland, so today is the Province of Ontario and the country to the west of it draining old England. It is related that one little English village—Dove Holes is its name and it is situate in Derbyshire—has been sadly depleted in just this fashion. Eight years agoand it boasted a population of 1250 persons. Today 500 of that number are in America—a new village of their own right in the city of Toronto, if you please—and Dove Holes awaits another Goldsmith to sing of its saddened charms. One resident came, the others followed in his trail to a land that spelled both opportunity and elbow-room. Your real Englishman of so-called middle class, even gentlemen of the profession or service in His Majesty's arms, seem to have one consuming passion. It is to cross Canada and live and die in the little West Coast city of Victoria. Victoria stands on Vancouver island and they have begun to call Vancouver island, "Little England." In its warm, moist climate, almost in its very conformation, it is a replica of the motherland of an Englishman's ideal; a motherland with everything annoying, from hooliganism to suffragettes, removed.
But Victoria is across a broad continent as well as a broad sea, and so your thrifty emigrant from an English town picks Toronto as the city of his adoption. Winnipeg he deems too American; Montreal, with her damnable French blood showing even in the street-signs and the car-placards, quite out of the question. But Toronto does appeal to him and so he comes straight to her. There are whole sections of the town that are beginning to look as if they might have been stolen from Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool—even London itself. The little red-brick houses with their neat, small windows are as distinctively British as the capped and aproned house-maids upon the street. In the States it takes a mighty battle to make a maid wear uniform upon the street. In Toronto it is not even a question for argument. The negro servant, so common to all of us, is unknown. The service of the better grade of Toronto houses is today carefully fashioned upon the British model—even to meal hours and the time-honoredEnglish dishes upon the table. And in less aristocratic streets of the town one may see a distinctively British institution, taken root and apparently come to stay. It is known as a "fish and chip shop" and it retails fried fish and potato chips, already cooked and greasy enough to be endearing to the cockney heart.
*****
Remember also that the city upon the north shore of Lake Ontario is an industrial center of great importance. You cannot measure the tonnage of Toronto harbor as you measured the harbor of Cleveland—alongside of the greatest ports of the world—for Ontario is the lonely sister of the five Lakes. No busy commercial fleet treks up and down her lanes. But Toronto is a railroad center of increasing importance; they are still multiplying the lines out from her terminals and, as we have just intimated, she is a great and growing manufacturing community. Her industrial enterprises have been hungry for skilled and intelligent men. They have gradually drafted their ranks from the less-paid trades of the town. Into these places have come the men from the English towns. The street cars are manned by men of delightful cockney accent, they drive the broad flat "lourries," as an Englishman likes to call a dray, they fit well into every work that requires brawn and endurance rather than a high degree of intellectual effort.
Just how this invasion will affect the Toronto of tomorrow no one seems willing to prophesy. The men from Glasgow and from Manchester are used to municipal street railroads and such schemes and the New England town-meeting ideas, which were the products of Anglo-Saxon spirit, come home to rest in English hearts. The street railroad system of Toronto may groan under its burden—it is paying over a million dollars this year to the city and is constantly threatened with extinction as a private corporation. But the Englishmanof that city merely grunts at the bargains it offers—six tickets for a quarter; eight in rush-hours, ten for school children and seven for Sabbath riding, all at the same price—and wonders "why the nawsty trams canna' do better by a codger that's workin' like a navvie all the day?"
Toronto will see that they do better—that is her vision into the future. But just how the new blood is to infuse into some of the Puritan ideas of the town—there is another question. Here is a single one of the new puzzling points—the temperance problem. It was not so very long ago that Canada's chief claim for fame rested in the excellence of her whiskey—and that despite the fact that the Canadian climate is ill-adapted to whiskey drinking. The twelfth of July—which you will probably recall as the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne—used to be marked by famous fights, which invariably had marine foundations in Canadian rye. However, during the past quarter of a century, the temperance movement has waxed strong throughout Ontario. Many cities have become "dry" and it is possible that Toronto herself might have been without saloons today—if it had not been for the English invasion. For your Englishman regards his beer asfood—"skittles and beer" is something more than merely proverbial—and he must have it. He looks complacently upon the stern Sabbath in Toronto—Sunday in an English city is rarely a hilarious occasion—but he must have his beer. Up to the present time he has had it.
But these problems are slight compared with the problem of assimilation of alien tongues and races, such as has come to New York within the past two decades. The Englishman is but a cousin to the Canadian after all, and he shows that by the enthusiasm with which he enters into her politics. He entered into Mr. Taft's pet reciprocity plan with an enthusiasm of a distinctsort. With all of his anti-American and pro-British ideas he leaped upon it. And when he had accomplished his own part in throttling that idea he exulted. Whether he will exult as much a dozen years hence over the defeat of reciprocity is an open question. But the part that the transplanted Englishman in Canada played in that defeat is unquestioned, just as the part he is playing in providing her with useless Dreadnoughts for the defense of other lands is undisputed.HThe Englishman is no small factor in Canadian politics; he is a very great factor in the political situation in the city of Toronto.
HThis plan is temporarily blocked in Canada, whose enthusiasm for Dreadnoughts seems to be waning. E. H.
HThis plan is temporarily blocked in Canada, whose enthusiasm for Dreadnoughts seems to be waning. E. H.
Lest you should be bored by the politics of another land, turn your attention to the way the Toronto people live. They have formal entertainments a-plenty—dinners, balls, receptions—a great new castle is being built on the edge of Rosedale for a gubernatorial residence and presumably for the formal housing of royalty which often comes down from Ottawa. There are theaters and good restaurants, and no matter what you may say about her winters, the Canadian summers are delightful. For those who must go, there are the Muskoka Lakes within easy reach, Georgian bay and the untrod wildernesses beyond. But if we lived in Toronto, we think we should stay at home and enjoy that wonderful lake. There are yacht-clubs a-plenty alongside it, bathing beaches, sailing, canoeing—the opportunity for variety of sport is wide. In the milder seasons of the year there is golf and baseball, football, or even cricket, and in the wintertime tobogganing and snowshoeing and iceboating. No wonder that the cheeks of the Toronto girls are pink with good health.
In the autumn there is the big fair—officially the Canadian National Exhibition—which has grown from a very modest beginning into a real institution. Lastyear nearly a million persons entered its gates, there were more than a hundred thousand admissions upon a single very big day. Delegations of folk came from as far distant as Australia—there were special excursion rates from all but three of the United States. It is not only a big fair but a great fair, still growing larger with each annual exhibition. Toronto folk are immensely proud of it and give to it loyalty and support. And the Canadian government is not above gaining a political opportunity from it. We remember one autumn at Toronto three or four years ago seeing a great electric sign poised upon one of the main buildings. It was a moving sign and the genius of the electrician had made the semblance of a waving British banner. Underneath in fixed and glowing letters you might read:
ONE FLAG, ONE KING, ONE NATION
*****
To see Toronto as a British city, however, you must go to her in May—at the time of her spring races. The fair is very much like any of the great fairs in the United States. The race-meet is distinctly different. In the United States horse-racing has fallen into ill-repute, and most of the famous tracks around our larger cities have been cut up into building lots. The sport with us was commercialized, ruined, and then practically forbidden. In Canada they have been wiser, although the tendency to make the sport entirely professional and so not sport at all has begun to show itself even over there. But in Toronto they go to horse-races for the love of horse-racing, and not in the hopes of making a living without working for it.
The great spring race-meet is the gallop for the King's Guineas. It is at the Woodbine and in addition to being the oldest racing fixture in America it is also just such a day for Canada as Derby Day is for England. If yougo to Toronto for Plate Day—as they call that great race-day—you will be wise to have your hotel accommodations engaged well in advance. You will find Plate Day to be the Saturday before the twenty-fourth of May. And, lest you should have forgotten the significance of the twenty-fourth of May, permit us to remind you that for sixty-four long years loyal Canada celebrated that day as the Queen's birthday. And it is today, perhaps, the most tender tribute that the Canadians can render Victoria—their adherence to her birthday as the greatest of their national holidays.
If you are wise and wish to see the English aspect of Toronto, you will reserve your accommodations at a certain old hotel near the lakefront which is the most intensely British thing that will open to a stranger within the town. Within its dining-room the lion and the unicorn still support the crown, and the old ladies who are ushered to their seats wear white caps and gently pat their flowing black skirts. The accents of the employés are wonderfully British, and if you ask for pens you will surely get "nibs." The old house has an air, which the English would spell "demeanour," and incidentally it has a wonderful faculty of hospitality.
From it you will drive out to the track, and if you elect you can find seats upon a tally-ho, drawn by four or six horses, properly prancing, just as they prance in old sporting-prints. Of course, there are ungainly motor-cars, like those in which the country folk explore Broadway, New York, but you will surely cling to the tally-ho. And if your tally-ho be halted in the long and dusty procession to the track to let a coach go flying by, if that coach be gay in gilt and color, white-horsed, postilioned, if rumor whispers loudly, "It's the Connaughts—the Governor-General, you know," you will forget for that moment your socialistic and republican ideas, and strainyour old eyes for a single fleeting glimpse of bowing royalty.
For royalty drives to Plate Day just as royalty drives to Ascot. Its box, its manners and its footmen are hardly less impressive. And in the train of royalty comes the best of Toronto, not the worst. Finely dressed women, jurists, doctors, bankers—the list is a long, long one. And in their train in turn the artisans. The plumber who tinkers with the pipes in your hotel in the morning has a dollar up on the "plate," so has the porter who handles your trunk, so have three-quarters of the trolley-car men of the town—and yet they are not gamblers. The "tout" who used to be a disagreeable and painfully evident feature of New York racing is missing. So are the professional gamblers, the betting being on thepari-mutuelsystem. And the man who loses his dollar because he failed to pick the winning horse feels that he has lost it in a patriotic cause. It should be worth a miserable dollar to see royalty come to the races in a coach.
*****
From Toronto we will go to her staunch French rival, Montreal. If we are in the midsummer season we may go upon a very comfortable steamer, down the lonely Ontario and through the beauties of the Thousand Islands. And at all seasons we will find the railroad ride from Toronto filled with interest, with glimpses of lake and river, with the character of the country gradually changing, the severe Protestant churches giving way to great tin-roofed Roman churches, holding their crosses on high and gathering around their gray-stone walls the houses of their little flocks.
Our hotel faces a little open square and in the springtime of the year, when the trees are barely budding, we can still see the sober gray-stone houses on the far side of the square, each with its brightly colored green blinds. At one is the "Dentiste," at another the "Avocat," a third has descended to apensionwith its "Chamber d'Louer." There are shiny brass signs on the front of each of these three old houses, and every morning at seven-thirty o'clock three trim little French Canadian maids attack the signs vigorously with their wiping cloths. Then we know that it is time to get up. By the same fashion we should be shaved and ready for our marmalade and bacon and eggs as the regal carrier of the King's mail trots down the steps of the French consulate and rings at the area door of the neighboring "Conservatoire Musicale." In a very little time that row of houses across the Place Viger Gardens has become a factor in our very lives. It is the starting-point of our days.
In the morning, when the marmalade and the bacon and eggs are finished, we step out into the Gardens for the first breath of crisp fresh air of the north. There is a line of wonderful cabs waiting at its edge, and a prompt driver steps forward from each to solicit our patronage. The cab system of Montreal is indeed wonderful—it first shows to the stranger within that city's gates its remarkable continental character. For you seemingly can ride and ride and ride—and thensome more—and the cabby tips his hat at a quarter or a half a dollar. He has an engaging way of smiling at you at the end of the trip, and leaving it to you as to what he gets. You can trust to the Montreal cabby's sense of fairness and he seems to feel that he can trust to yours. But that is not all quite as altruistic as it may seem at first glance. Back of the cabby's smile is the unsmiling, sober sense of justice always existent in a British city, and it is that which really keeps the Montreal cab service as efficient as it really is, as cheap and as accessible. For at every one of the almost innumerable open squares of the city, are the cab-stands, the long line of patiently waiting carriages, and the little kiosk from which they can be summoned. It is all quite simple and complete and an ideal toward which metropolitan New York may be aspiring but has never reached.
*****
On sunny mornings we scorn the cabs and stroll across the Gardens. Sometimes we drop for a moment on one of the clumsily comfortable benches under the shade of the Canadian maples, and glance at the morning paper—a ponderous sheet much given to the news of Ottawa and London, discoursing upon the work of two Parliaments, but only granting grudging paragraphs to the news of a home-land, scarce sixty miles distant. That is British policy, the straining policy of trying to make a unified nation of lands separated from one another by broad seas. That England has done it so well is the marvel of strangers who enter her dominions. Montreal is loyal to her mother land, despite some local influences which we shall see in a moment. A surprising number of her citizens go back and forth to the little island that governs her, once or twice or three times a year. There are thousands of business men in the metropolis of Canada who know Pall Mall or Piccadilly far more intimately than either Wall street or Times square—and New York is but a night's ride from Montreal. So much can carefully directed sentiment accomplish.
The paths that lead from the Gardens are varied and fascinating. One stretches up a broad and sober street to Ste. Catherine's, the great shopping promenade of the town, where the girls are all bound west toward the big shops that stretch from Phillips to Dominion squares—another at the opposite direction three blocks to the south and the harbor-front, a wonderful place now in a chaos of transformation that is going to make Montreal the most efficient port in the world. We can remember the water-front of the old town as it first confronted us a quarter of a century ago, after a long all-day trip down the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence—back of the gay shipping a long stretch of sober gray limestone buildings, accented by numerous domes, the joy of every British architect, the long straight front of Bonsecours market, the little spire of Bonsecours church, and the two great towers of Notre Dame rising above it all. There was a curving wall of stone along the quay street and it all seemed quite like the geography pictures of Liverpool, or was it Marseilles?
A church parade in the streets of MontrealA church parade in the streets of Montreal
Nowadays that quiet prospect is gone. A great waterside elevator of concrete rises almost two hundred and fifty feet into the air from the quay street; there are other elevators nearly as large and nearly as sky-scraping, a variety of grim and covered piers and the man from a boat amidstream hardly catches even a glimpse of Notre Dame or Bonsecours. And Montreal gave up her glimpses of the river that she loves so passionately, not without a note of regret; the market-men gently protested that they could no longer sit on the portico of the Bonsecours and see the brisk activity of the harbor. But Montreal realizes the importance of her harbor to her. She is a thousand miles inland from "blue water" and for five months of the year her greatstrength giving river is tightly frozen; despite these obstacles she has come within the past year to be the most efficient port in the world, and among twelve or fourteen of the greatest. And commercial power is a laurel branch to any British city.
There are other paths that lead from Place Viger Gardens—that lead on and on and to no place in particular, but all of them are filled with constant interest. The side streets of Montreal are fascinating. Their newer architecture is apt to be fantastic, ofttimes incongruous, but there are still many graystone houses in that simple British style that is still found throughout the older Canada, all the way from Halifax to the Detroit river. There are the inevitable maple trees along the curbs that make Montreal more of a garden city than unobservant travelers are apt to fancy it. And then there are the institutions, wide-spreading and many-winged fellows, crowned with the inevitable domes and shielded from the vulgarity of street traffic by high-capped walls. These walls are distinctive of Montreal. Often uncompromising, save where some gentle vine runs riot upon their lintels and laughs at their austerity, they are broken here and there and again by tightly shut doors, doors that open only to give forth on rare occasions; to let a somber file of nuns or double one of cheaply uniformed children pass out into a sordid and sin-filled world, and then close quickly once again lest some of its contaminations might penetrate the gentle and unworldly place. And near these great institutions are the inevitable churches, giant affairs—parish churches still dominating the sky-line of a town which is just now beginning to dabble in American skyscrapers, and standing ever watchful, like a mother hen brooding and protecting her chicks. These chance paths often lead to other squares than the Gardens of the Place Viger—squares which in spring and in summer are bright green carpets spreadin little open places in the heart and length and breadth of the city, and which are surrounded by more of the solid graystone houses with the green blinds. When we go from Montreal we shall remember it as a symphony of gray and green—remember it thus forever and a day.
But best of all we like the path that leads from the Place Viger west through the very heart of the old city and then by strange zig-zags, through the banking center, Victoria square, Beaver Hall Hill and smart Ste. Catherine's to Dominion square and the inevitable afternoon tea of the British end of the town. We turn from our hotel and the great new railroad terminal that it shelters, twist through a narrow street—picturesquely named the Champ d'Mars—and follow it to the plain and big City Hall and Court House. They are uninteresting to us, but across the busy way of Notre Dame street stands the Chateau de Ramezay, a long, low, whitewashed building, which has had its part in the making of Montreal. This stoutly built old house was built in 1705 by Claude de Ramezay, Governor of Montreal, and was occupied by him for twenty years while he planned his campaigns against both English and Indians. Then for a time it was the headquarters of the India company's trade in furs, and for a far longer time after 1759 the home of a succession of British governors. Americans find their keenest interest in the Chateau de Ramezay, in the fact that it was in its long rambling low-ceilinged rooms that Benjamin Franklin set up his printing-press, away back during the days of the first unpleasantness between England and this country. After that, all was history, the Chateau was again the Government House of the old Canada—until Ottawa and the new Dominion came into existence. Nowadays, it faces one of the busiest streets of a busy city—and is not of it. It is like a sleeping man by the roadside, who, if he mightawake once more, could spin at length the romances of other days and other men.
Beyond the Chateau de Ramezay is a broad and open market street that stretches from the inevitable Nelson monument, that is part and pride of every considerable British city, down to that same water-front, just now in process of transformation. Sometimes on a Tuesday or a Friday morning we have come to the place early enough to see the open-air market of Montreal, one of the heritages of past to present that seems little disturbed with the coming and the passing of the years. Shrewd shoppers coming out of the solid stone mass of the Bonsecours pause beside the wagons that are backed along the broad-flagged sidewalks. The country roundabout Montreal must be filled with fat farms. One look at the wagons tells of low moist acres that have not yet lost their fertility. And sometimes the market women bring to the open square hats of their own crude weaving, or little carved crosses, or even bunches of delicate wild-flowers and sell them for the big round Canadian pennies. There is hardly any barterable article too humble for this market-place, and with it all the clatter of small sharp pleasant talk between a race of small, sharp, pleasant folk.
From the market-place leading out from before the ugly City Hall and the uninteresting Court House, our best walk leads west through Notre Dame street up to the nearby Place d'Armes. It is a very old street of a very old city and even if the history of the town did not tell us that some of the old houses, staunch fellows every one of them, high-roofed and dormered, with their graystone walls four and five feet thick and as rough and rugged as the times for which they were built, would convince us, of themselves. They are fast going, these old fellows, for Montreal has entered upon boom times with the multiplication of transcontinental railroadsacross Canada. But it seems but yesterday that they could point to us in the Place d'Armes the very house in which lived LaMothe Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, nearby the house of Sieur Duluth. Montreal seems almost to have been the mother of a continent.
*****
It is in this Place d'Armes, this tiny crowded square in the center of the modern city, hardly larger than the garden of a very modest house indeed, that so many of the romantic memories of the old Montreal cluster. With the great church that has thrust its giant shadow across it for more than three quarters of a century, the Place d'Armes has been the heart of Montreal since the days when it was a mere trading post, a collection of huts at the foot of the lowest rapids of the mighty river. Much of the old Montreal has gone, even the citadel at the west end of the town gave way years ago to Dalhousie square, which in turn gave way to the railroad yards of the Place Viger terminals. But the Place d'Armes will remain as long as the city remains.
At its northwest corner is the colonnaded front of the Bank of Montreal, one of the finest banking-homes in Canada.
"It is the great institution of this British Dominion," says a very old Canadian, whom we sometimes meet in the little square. "It is the greatest bank in North America."
Offhand, we do not know as to the exact truth of that sweeping statement, but it is a certain fact that the Bank of Montreal is the greatest bank in all Canada, one of the greatest in the world, with its branches and ramifications extending not only across a continent four thousand miles in width but also over two broad seas. To Montreal it stands as that famous "old lady of Threadneedle street" stands to London.
"And yet," our Canadian friend continues, "rightacross the Place d'Armes here is an institution that could buy and sell the Bank of Montreal—or better still, buy it and keep it."
Our eyes follow his pointing hand—to a long, low building on the south side of the little square. It is very old and exceeding quaint. Although built of the graystone of Montreal, brought by the soot of many years to almost a dead black, it seems of another land as well as of another time. Its quaint belfry with delicate clock-face and out-set hands is redolent of the south of France or Spain or even Italy. It does not seem a part and parcel of Our Lady of the Snows—and yet it is.
"You know—the Seminary of St. Sulpice," says our Canadian friend. "It was the original owner of the rich island of Montreal. No one knows its wealth today, even after it has parted with many of its fee-holds. It still holds title to thousands of acres and no one save the Gentleman of the Corporation of St. Sulpice, themselves, knows the wealth of the institution. To say that it is the richest ecclesiastical institution of the Americas is not enough, for here is an organization that for coherency, wealth and strength surpasses Standard Oil and forms the chief financial support of the strongest church in the world."
And this time we feel that our acquaintance of the Place d'Armes is not by any chance over-stepping the mark. In the quaint little Seminary that stands in the half-day shadow of the second largest church on the continent—a church that it easily builded in the first third of the nineteenth century from its accumulated wealth—there centers much of the mystery of Montreal, a mystery which to the stranger takes concrete form in the high walls along the crowded streets, in whispered rumors of this force or that working within the politics of the city, in the so-called Nationalist movement, and flaunts itself in rival displays of Union Jack and thehistoric Tricolor of France. There is little of mystery in the outer form of the Seminary. The quiet folk who live within those very, very old walls are hospitality itself—even though their ascetic living is of the hardest, crudest sort. The only bed and carpeted room within the building is reserved for the occasional visits of bishop, or even higher church authority. But hidden from the street by the earliest part of the Seminary—almost unchanged since its erection in 1710—and enclosed by a quadrangle of the fortress-like stone buildings of the institution, is a most delicious garden with old-fashioned summer flowers and quaint statues of favored saints set in its shaded place. We remember a garden of the same sort at the mission of Santa Barbara, in California. These two are the most satisfactory gardens that we have ever seen. And it is from the rose-bushes in the Seminary of Montreal that one gets a full idea of the size and beauty of the exterior of the parish church of Notre Dame. Like so many of the cathedrals of Europe, it is so set as to have no satisfactory view-point from the street.
And yet Notre Dame is one of the most satisfying churches that we have ever seen. It is not alone its size, not alone its wonderfully appropriate location facing that historic Place d'Armes, not any one of the interesting details of the great structure that comes to us, so much as the thing which the parish church typifies—the intact keeping of the customs, the language and the faith of a folk who were betrayed and deserted by their motherland, more than a century and a half ago. One rarely hears the word of English spoken in the shadowy and worshipful aisles of Notre Dame. It is the babbling French that is the language of three-quarters of the residents of Montreal.
For there stands French, not only entrenched in the chief city of England's chief possession, but a languagethat, in the opinion of unprejudiced observers, gains rather than loses following each twelvemonth. There are reasons back of all this, and many of them too complicated and involved to be entered upon here. Suffice it to say here and now that the city school taxes are divided pro rata between Protestants and Roman Catholics for the conduct of their several schools of every sort. And that in most of the Catholic schools French is practically the only language taught, a half-hour a day being sometimes given to English, whenever it is taught at all. The devotion of these French Canadians to their language is only second to their religion, and is closely intermingled with it. There is something pathetic and lovable about it all that makes one understand why thehabitansof a little town below Montreal tore down the English sign that the Dominion government erected over their Post Office, a year or so ago. And the Dominion government took the hint, made no fuss, but replaced its error with a French sign. Remember that there are more Tricolors floating in lower Canada than British Union Jacks.
The signs of Montreal point the truth. Half of the street markers must be in English, half in French, just as the city government that places them divides its proceedings, half in one language, half in the other. This even division runs to the street car transfers and notices, the flaring bulletins on sign-boards and dead-walls, even so stolid a British institution as the Harbor Commissioners giving the sides of its brigade of dock locomotives evenly to the rival tongues.
To attend high mass in Notre Dame is to make a memory well-nigh ineffaceable. It is to bring back in future years recollections of a great church, lifted from its week-day shadows by a wealth of dazzling incandescents, to be ushered past silent, kneeling figures to a stout pew, by a stoutSuissein gaudy uniform; to lookto a high altar that stands afar and ablaze with candles, while priests and acolytes, by the hundreds, pass before it chanting, and the Cardinal sits aloft on his throne silent and in adoration; to hear not a word of English from that high place or the folk who sit upon the great floor or in the two encircling galleries, but to catch the refrain of chant and of "Te Deum;" these are the things that seem to make religion common to every man, no matter what his professed faith. And then, after it is all over, to come out of the shadows of the parish church into the brilliant sunshine of the Place d'Armes, the place where they once executed murderers under the old French law by breaking their backs and then their lesser bones, and to hear Gros Bourdon sing his chant over the city from the belfry of Notre Dame—this is the old Montreal living in the heart of the new. They do not swing the great bell any more—for even Notre Dame grows old and its aged stones must be respected—but they toll it rapidly, in a sort of sing-song chant. We have stood in the west end of the town, three miles distant from the Place d'Armes, and heard the rich, sweet tones of his deep throat come booming over the crowded city—a warning to a half a million folk to turn from worldier things to the thought of mighty God.
*****
Our best path leads west again from the Place d'Armes, past the newly reconstructed General Post Office, more stately banks here concentrating the wealth of the strong, new Canada; smart British-looking shops and restaurants. In these last you may drink fine ales, munch at rare cheeses, of which Montreal isconnoisseur, and eat rare roast beef done to a turn, with Yorkshire pudding, six days in a week. But you will look in vain for real French restaurants with their delectablecuisines. We have looked in vain in our almost innumerable trips to the city under the mountain. We have enlisted ourfriend Paul, who avers that he knows Montreal as he knows the fingers on his hand. Paul is a reporter on a French paper. He works not more than fourteen consecutive hours on dull days, at a princely salary of nine dollars a week, and the rest of the time he is our entertainment committee—and an immense success at that. Paul has taught us a smattering of Montreal French, and he has shown us many curious places about the old city, but he has never found us a French restaurant that could even compare with some we know in the vicinity of West Twenty-seventh street in the city of New York. Sometimes he has come to us with mysterious hints of final success and we have girded our loins quickly to go with him. But when we have arrived it has been a place white-fronted like the dairy lunches off from Broadway, and we have never seen one of them without the listing of breakfast foods from Battle Creek, Michigan, mince-pie or other typical dishes from the States. And at Paul's rarest find we interviewedMonsieur le proprietaire, only to have the dashing news that he had once served as secondchefin the old Burnet House, in Cincinnati. There is, after all, a closer bond between two neighboring nations than either Ottawa or London is willing to admit and even Paul, loyal to his language and to his traditions, admits that.
"Some day—some day," he dreams to us between cigarettes, "I am going down to see the Easter parade on Fifth avenue. Last year twelve thousand went from Montreal"—hechuckles—"and folks from Bordeaux ward looked at the swells from Westmount and thought they were real New Yorkers."
And a little while later, between another change of cigarettes, he adds:
"And I may not come back on my ticket. I understand—that reporters get fifteen or twenty dollars a week on the New York city papers."
Paul's collar is impossible and his appetite for cigarettes fiendish, but he has ambitions. Perhaps he shares the ambitions of the city which, old in heart and traditions, is new in enterprise and hope, and looks forward to being the mighty gateway of the greatest of all English great possessions—a city filled with more than a million folk.
*****
We pass through the splendors of Victoria square and up the steep turn of Beaver Hall Hill into Phillips square and smart Ste. Catherine street. In a general way, the French element have preëmpted the eastern end of the city for themselves, while the English-speaking portion of the population clings to the section north and west of Phillips square and Ste. Catherine street right up to the first steep slopes of Mount Royal. This part of the city looks like any smart, progressive British town—with its fine Gothic Cathedral of the Church of England facing its showy main street, its exclusive clubs and its great hotels. And nowadays smart modern restaurants are also crowding upon Ste. Catherine street, for modern Montreal will proudly tell you, and tell you again and again, that it is more continental, far more continental than London, which in turn is tightly bound down by the traditions of English conservatism. Montreal is not very literary—Toronto surpassing it in that regard—but it has a keen love of good paintings, good art of every sort. It ranks itself next to New York and Boston and among North American cities in this regard.
"We are more proud of our public and private galleries," says the citizen of the town who sips tea at five o'clock with you in the lounge of the Windsor, "than we are of our New Yorkish restaurants that have imported themselves across the line within the past year or two. We have smiled at our daughters drifting in here for their tea on matinée afternoons, but dinners andAmerican cocktails—well there are some sorts of reciprocity that we decidedly do not want."
We understand. Montreal wants her personality, her rare and varied personality, preserved inviolate and intact. That is one great reason why she has cherished the pro-British habits of her press. New York is well enough for a trip—Montreal delights in our metropolis, as she does in our Atlantic City—as mere pleasure grounds, and the Easter hegira, in which Paul is yet to join, grows each year. But New York is New York, and Montreal must be Montreal. With her wealth of tradition, her peculiarly unique conservatism of two languages and two great peoples working out their problems in common sympathy, without conceding a single heritage, one to the other, the city of the gray and green must keep to her own path.
He stands, hat in hand, facing the city that honors his memory so greatly. To Samuel de la Champlain Quebec has not merely given the glory of what seems to us to be one of the handsomest monuments in America, but here and there in her quiet streets she brings back to the stranger within her walls recollections of the doughty Frenchman who braved an unknown sea to find a site for the city, which for more than three hundred years has stood as guardian to the north portal of America. Other adventurous sea spirits of those early days went chiefly in the quest of gold. Champlain had loftier ambitions within his heart. He hoped to be a nation-builder. And not only Quebec, but the great young-old nation that stands behind her, is his real monument.
Still, the artist's creation of bronze and of marble is effective—not alone, as we have already said, because of its own real beauty—but also very largely because of its tremendously impressive setting at the rim of the upper town—facing the tiny open square that as far back as two hundred and fifty years ago was the center of its fashionable life. Champlain in bronze looks at the tidy Place d'Armes—older residents of Quebec still delight in calling it the Ring—with its neat pathways of red brick and its low, splashing fountain, as if he longed to return to flesh and blood and walk through the little square and from it down some of the narrow streets that he may, himself, have planned in the days of old.
Or perhaps he would have chosen that once imposing main thoroughfare of Upper Town, St. Louis street, which out beyond the city wall has the even more distinctive French title of the Grande Allee. We have chosen that main street many times ourselves, leading straight past the castellated gateways of the Chateau, fashioned less than a score of years ago by a master American architect—Mr. Bruce Price—and since grown very much larger, quite like a lovely girl still in her teens. On the other side of the street, close to the curb of the Place d'Armes, is the ever-waiting row of Victorias andcaleches, whose drivers rise smilingly in their places even at the mere suggestion of a coming fare. Beyond these patient Jehus stands the rather ordinary looking Court House, somewhat out of harmony with the architectural traditions of the town—and then we are plunged into the heart of as fascinating a street as one may hope to see in North America. It is clean—immaculate, if you please, after the fashion of all thesehabitansof lower Canada—and it is bordered ever and ever so tightly by a double row of clean-faced stone houses, their single doors letting directly upon the sidewalk, and, also after the fashion of all Quebec, surmounted by steep pitched tin roofs and wonderfully fat chimneys, covered with tin in their turn. Quebec seems to have a passion for tin. It is her almost universal roofing, and in the bright sunshine, glittering with mirror-like brilliancy of contrast against the age-darkened stone walls, it has a charm that is quite its own.
One of these old houses of St. Louis street sets well back from the sidewalk in a seeming riotous waste of front lawn, and bears upon its face a tablet denoting it as the one-time home of the Duke of Kent. This distinguished gentleman lived in Quebec many years before he became father of Queen Victoria. In fact, Quebec remembers him as a rather gay young blade of a fellowwho had innumerable mild affairs with the fascinating French-Canadian girls of the town. These things have almost become traditions among the older folk of the place. Those girls of Quebec town seem always to have held keen attractions for young blades from afar. When you turn down Mountain Hill and pass the General Post Office with its quaint Golden Dog set in thefaçade, they will not only make you re-read that fascinating romance of the old Quebec, but they will tell you that years after the Philiberts and the Repentignys were gone and the English were in full enjoyment of their rare American prize, that same old inn, upon whose front the gnawing dog was so securely set, was run by one Sergeant Miles Prentice, whose pretty niece, Miss Simpson, so captivated Captain Horatio Nelson of His Majesty's ShipAlbemarlethat it became necessary for his friends to spirit away the future hero of Trafalgar to prevent him from marrying her.
Beyond the old house of the Duke of Kent, St. Louis street is a narrow path lined by severe little Canadian homes all the way to the city gate. Many of these houses are fairly steeped in tradition. One tiny fellow within which the ancient profession of the barber still works is the house wherein Montcalm died. And to another, Benedict Arnold was taken in that ill-starred American attack upon Quebec. A third was a gift two centuries ago by the Intendant Bigot to the favored woman of his acquaintance. Romance does creep up and down the little steps of these little houses. They change hardly at all with the changing of the years.