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Pictures of Canadian Life: A Record of Actual Experiences
In the Gulf Stream we found the usual number of whales and porpoises. The latter would play around the bow or race along the side of the ship in considerable quantities of all sorts of sizes. There were other fish of which I know not the names to be seen occasionally leaping out of the water as high and repeatedly as possible, as if a shark were in their midst seeking whom he might devour.
One sight I shall never forget in the Gulf Stream. It was that of a tortoise. I was leaning over the ship’s side, when something big and round seemed to be coming to the surface. I could not make out what it was; then all at once the truth flashed upon me as he wobbled along, paddling with his fins, his head erect, his little eyes peering at the ship as if he wondered what the dickens it was, and what business it had there. He seemed to be treading the water.
‘I saw him but a moment,But methinks I see him now.’The sight gave me quite an appetite, though my friend Sir Henry Thompson will insist upon it that turtle soup is made of conger-eel, but in the wide Atlantic one has time to think of such things; day by day passes and you see nothing but the ocean – not even a distant sail, or the smoke of a passing steamer.
People complain of the uneventfulness of life on board a ship. That, however, is a matter of great thankfulness. A collision or a shipwreck are exciting, but they are disagreeable, nevertheless. It seems the homeward voyage is always the pleasantest as far as the sea is concerned, the wind being more frequently in the west than in any other quarter. Perhaps that is one reason why the Americans are so ready to cross the Atlantic. When I left New York, Cook’s office, in the Broadway, was full of tourists, including Mrs. Langtry and other distinguished personages. Mr. John Cook seems as popular in New York as he is elsewhere. Indeed, I was confidentially informed that he was engaged in organizing a personally-conducted tour for the relief of Gordon and the capture of the Mahdi, and I hear from Egypt that he has a chance of being made Khedive, a position which I am certain he would fill with credit to himself and advantage to the people. Of course, there is a little exaggeration in this, but the American tourist has good reason to revere the name of Cook, and so have we all. As much as anyone he has promoted travel between the Old World and the New, and has made us better friends. It is to be hoped that every steamer that crosses the Atlantic does something similar.
I must own, however, that the nearer I approached England the more I felt ashamed of my native land. The weather was villainous. It rained every day, and the worst of it was, I had had the audacity to assure the Americans on board that we had dry weather in England, that occasionally we saw the sun, and that we were not a web-footed race. Fortunately, at the time of writing this I have not yet encountered any of my American friends, or I should feel, as they say, uncommonly mean. However, the weather was fine enough to admit of a good look at Bishop’s Rock, the name of the lighthouse at the Scilly Isles, where we got our first sight of land; you can imagine how we all rushed on deck to see that. In fine weather, I say, by all means return from America in one of the fine, steady, well-built ships of the Monarch Line. The scenery is far finer than that offered by Queenstown and Liverpool. You have the Scilly Isles to look at, and the Land’s End, and the Lizards. At Portland Bill we laid off till a pilot came on board, and we had a good look at the establishment where so many smart men are sent for a season, and Weymouth heading the distant bay; and then what a fine sweep you have up the Channel – crowded with craft of all kinds, from the eight thousand ton steamer to the frail and awkward fishing lugger – and round the Nore; whilst old towns and castles, speaking not alone of the living present, but of the dead and buried past, are to be seen. Even Americans, fond as they are of modern life, feel the charm of that; whilst to the returning traveller the landscape speaks of ‘home, sweet home.’
CHAPTER XII.
COLONIZATION IN CANADA
I was glad to see, the other day, Mr. Morley’s letter advocating the propriety of taking up land and settling on it some of the too numerous class who drift into our great cities, finding no work to do in the country, there to lead indifferent lives and come to an untimely end.
It is a step I have repeatedly advocated. Land is cheap enough now; there is no occasion to wait for an Act of Parliament. It is as easy to buy an estate, and to split it up into small portions, of which each shareholder will become in time the proprietor, as to form a building society, and thus enable any man to become his own landlord. But there are certain drawbacks. There is the parson to be dealt with, who will be sure to claim his higher tithes; there are burdens on property, of which the working man, who is told by Mr. Chamberlain that he is more heavily taxed than any other class of the community (is not the reverse of this the case?), has no idea; and last, and not least, there is the unfitness for peasant proprietorship of the average English workman, who has no idea of living on the scant fare of the peasant proprietor of Belgium or France, or, I fear, of working as hard. Granting, however, that he does, the great fact remains, that peasant proprietorship is no remedy for all the ills of life, and that France has its surplus population quite as badly off, and a great deal more difficult to deal with than our own.
What is to be done to relieve the distress, the existence of which all must own and deplore? I answer, Emigrate.
Emigration is the natural means of relieving the poverty of a nation. Every man is an emigrant. No one lives and dies in the village in which he was born. He finds his way to the neighbouring town in search of work; then to the great metropolis; then across the water to one or other of our colonies.
Greece and Rome realized the fact that under no conditions could a certain tract of territory maintain more than a certain number of people, and had their settled plans of emigration. In England, at any rate since the days of the Pilgrim Fathers, we have too much left the matter to chance, and an ordinary emigrant, with the ordinary want of backbone, it seems to me, is just as likely to go to the dogs in New York, or Toronto, or Melbourne, as in London. What we want is what is now being attempted by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the leading members of which have established a Church Colonization Land Society. Its object is to assist, in a practicable, businesslike manner, on a remunerative basis, the great and pressing work of emigration to the British colonies in connection with the Church of England.
This society, I learn from a proof of a circular just placed in my hands, issued by Canon Prothero, the chairman, will, under proper safeguards, render temporary pecuniary aid in such cases as approve themselves to the council, take charge of the emigrants on the journey to the colony, provide for their settlement on lands selected, from those acquired by the society, provide temporary dwellings until the emigrants can put together their own (the materials for which may be bought ready to hand, or the society itself can erect dwellings for them), will break up the land if desired, and secure for the emigrant religious services similar to those enjoyed at home.
The society have secured land in Manitoba, near the railway, which land has been selected by a practical farmer, a Yorkshireman, who is to act as local manager. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge have laid particular stress in looking after the spiritual welfare of emigrants in all our colonies; and in Liverpool, as some of my readers may be aware, the society have placed the Rev. J. Bridger, of St. Nicholas Church, as emigrants’ chaplain; chaplains have also been appointed at several other ports, such as Plymouth, Glasgow, Cork, and Londonderry; but, as is manifest, the great centre of emigration is Liverpool, and there Mr. Bridger finds his hands full.
No pains are spared to show every attention to emigrants going from or arriving at Liverpool, and occasionally Mr. Bridger sails with the first party of emigrants to their new homes. It seems to me that the idea of the Church Colonization Society is the right one; but that it might be further extended by sending out at the same time the schoolmaster, and the doctor, and the storekeeper, and the shoemaker, and tailor, and baker, and butcher, and thus forming a village community.
It is at home impossible to realize the solitariness of the settler’s life, far away from friends and the civilizing and elevating influences of home. I met men in the North-West who seemed to have almost lost the power of speech, so long had they been left on their homesteads alone. Emigration in communities would do away with this state of things. At present it is a serious sacrifice for a man with a family to emigrate into a new country. It is not good for man to be alone. As a rule, he degenerates on the prairie; civilization is the gift of towns to humanity. A man does not live on bread alone. He needs that his heart and head be stimulated by contact with his fellow-men; not, as in the old country, in consequence of the extensive competition, by rivalry for the crust of bread, but by mutual aid and companionship in the great work of subduing the wilderness and making it to rejoice and blossom as the rose.
In a month or two the emigration season will have commenced, and there is no time to spare. Why cannot other denominations do what the Church of England is now preparing to do? Canada can feed and fatten millions, who in England will have to live as a burden on the community. There is many a man who does ill here who would do well there. We are all more or less the creatures of circumstances. In England the beershop has degraded the community, and many a man finds it hard to get away from its foul companionship: here, he declines into a criminal or a sot; there, not only will he be neither the one nor the other, but he will develop all the better tendencies of his character, and become a man. Make him a peasant-proprietor at home, and the chances are the old Adam in him will be too strong. Plant him in a colony, he feels in a new world, with a new aim. Here, he is looked down on: there, he is hailed as a man and a brother. We who are old must stop at home; but there is no reason why our sons should do so. Why should a young man be a drudge because his father was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water, when in a colony there are many ways of becoming well-off to a man who has good muscles and brains, has the sense to avail himself of opportunity when it occurs, and to keep his money in his pocket? I say Canada, because Canada is easy to get at, and is yet almost in a virgin state. It is only recently that it has been opened up by the Canadian Government and the Canadian Pacific Railway. I say Canada, because Canada is English, and I am an Englishman; because the Canadian Government does all it can to help the emigrant; and because the Canadians are mostly healthy, honest men. Englishmen thrive there better, at any rate, than they do in the United States, or in South Africa. Arrangements for a colony can easily be made. In London, the Canadian Pacific Railway have a fine office in Cannon Street, where you can see for yourself what are the results of farming in the North-West, and where you will find its courteous and intelligent representative, Mr. Alexander Begg, whose only fault is that he will persist in maintaining that the English climate is killing him, and that he enjoys much better health in that frosty Canada, the cold of which is a bugbear that has kept too many away. Go to him, and he will tell you where to plant your colony. The money which is now squandered in keeping paupers at home surely might be better spent in forming village communities in the boundless plains of the North-West. Let Dissenters imitate the Church. Let them have their communities as the Church of England seek to have theirs. Some people say the Salvationists are a nuisance in our crowded cities: let General Booth betake himself to Manitoba; he will find few people to complain of his processions there.
But this is no subject to trifle about; day by day the poor are becoming poorer, and the middle-classes and the rich also. The leaders of the coming democracy seem unwilling to recognise that fact, and are angry when I tell them it is better to emigrate than to agitate in the old country for the ruin of the capitalist, the destruction of our trade, the abolition of the landlord, the advent of the working man’s candidate, and the rights of man. Are they the friends of the poor who bid him stay where he is to cheapen the labour market, already overstocked; to crowd the cities with an unwholesome pauperism; to see his sons ripen into thieves, and his daughters cast on the streets; and to look forward to the workhouse as the refuge of his old age? Even if we had a revolution as complete as that of France, what then? Over-population will breed sorrow and sickness and want and despair all the same. In Canada, the man who cares to work is sure of his reward; he has a future before him and his.
I am glad to find, since the above was written, there has been formed by the Congregational Union a special emigration scheme, of which the Rev. Andrew Mearns, of the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, is Secretary, and that they have already sent out over a hundred qualified emigrants. The outfit and passage money of each man costs £7, and it is proposed to give each £2 when he arrives in Canada. The men to be selected are drawn from the ranks of the unemployed who are brought together at the various Mission Halls. The case of each applicant is fully examined, and the men themselves are thoroughly tested as to their honest desire and ability to work. The men having been approved and their record found satisfactory, they are sent to the emigration agent of the colony, who also examines into the cases of the various applicants. This acceptance having been notified, the next and, perhaps, the greatest difficulty is to provide a temporary home for them in the colony to which they are to be sent. As the result of much labour, each man will be sent to the care of some gentleman in the colony, who will see that he is properly provided for, and started in a fair way to obtain work. They are thus going to various towns in the Dominion, such as Kingston, Ontario, Ottawa, Hamilton, London, Toronto, St. Thomas’s, Bellville, and Guelph. Among those to whom introduction has been given are directors of railways, officers of Christian Associations, gardeners, farmers, merchants, and various ministers of influence. It is almost unnecessary to add that the spiritual needs of the men have not been forgotten, and in the kit of each one have been packed a Bible, supplied by the kindness of the Bible Society – who have intimated their willingness to make a similar presentation to every man the Union sends out – and an assortment of suitable and practical religious literature.
Thus far have I told the story of my Canadian experiences. Those who wish to fully pursue the subject will do well to get ‘Picturesque Canada,’ now being published by Messrs. Cassell and Co.
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