Canada and the Canadian Question/Chapter 3

Ontario, formerly Upper Canada, and better designated as British Canada, was the nucleus and is the core of the Confederation. It will be seen on the map, running out between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie on one side, and Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay on the other, Windsor on its extreme point being almost a suburb of Detroit, though separated from that city by the Detroit river. That great tongue of land is its garden, but it has also fruitful fields along the Upper St. Lawrence. It reaches far back into a wilder and more arctic country, rich however in timber, and still richer in minerals. The minerals would yield great wealth if only the treasure-house in which an evil policy keeps them locked could be opened by the key of free-trade. "Rich by nature, poor by policy," might be written over Canada's door. Rich she would be if she were allowed to embrace her destiny and be a part of her own continent; poor, comparatively at least, she is in striving to remain a part of Europe. At present the great industry of Ontario is farming. It is so still, in spite of the desperate efforts of protectionist legislators to force her to become a manufacturing country without coal. The farmers are usually freeholders, but leaseholders are growing more common. Not a few of ​the farms are mortgaged, as are a good many of the farms in the United States. Let this be noted by those who fancy that to make a happy commonwealth they have only to do away with landlords and divide the land among small proprietors. The mortgagee is a landlord who never resides, never helps the tenant, never reduces the rent. Much of the money, however, borrowed in Ontario has been spent in clearing or improving farms in a new country, and has proved an excellent investment to the borrower. The farms are generally from one to two hundred acres. The Canadian farmer works with his own hands, unlike the British farmer on a large farm who rides about and watches his men work. If he has not sons to help him he hires a labourer, who gets good wages, and lives with the farmer and his family, thus having a rise in life; for in England the farmer is now usually too much a gentleman, and his wife is far too much a lady, to live with the labourer. The system in Canada, however, has of late been changing, and labourers' cottages are beginning to be built. The labour-saving machines which are among the wonderful products of American invention, and of which the self-binder is the paragon, save the farmer much hire of men. Canada flatters herself that she is ahead of England in their use. Nowhere probably on this continent is the farming high; the land having hitherto been abundant, the farmer has preferred to work out his farm and move on. Thus the yield in some districts has decreased; it is said also that the crops have suffered by the clearing of the land, which exposes them to the cold winds. In a new country there is a general tendency to lavishness and waste trees have been recklessly cut down, and replanting has been neglected. Hitherto the chief products have been wheat and barley; but a deluge of grain is now pouring down from the North-West, ​while the M'Kinley Act, if it stands, will shut out the barley from the American market; and the Canadian farmer is turning his thoughts to cattle, which in this climate are free from disease. The aspect of the farm-houses and farms in Ontario will show even the passing traveller that agriculture has prospered, though just now it is depressed and the value of farm property has gone down. The Canadian farmer, however, to earn his living out of the land has to work hard and to bargain hard. Perhaps to the English gentleman who turns farmer in Canada the second is almost as unfamiliar as the first. The season of the Canadian farmer's hardest work is the short and hot summer by which his crops are brought rapidly on. In the winter he carries his grain to market in his sleigh over the good roads which the snow then makes for him, looks after his cattle, or gets his implements into order, and has more time for rest and social enjoyment. His diet is not so good as it ought to be; partly because he cannot bear to keep for himself anything that his farm produces if it will fetch a good price; partly because his cookery is vile. So say those who know him best.^[1] Fried pork, bread ill-baked, heavy pies, coarse and strong green tea, account for the advertisements of pills which everywhere meet the eye, and perhaps in part for the increase of lunacy. From liquor, however, the Canadian farmer abstains. He has become temperate without coercive law, and for him prohibition is an impertinence. He is altogether a moral man and a good citizen, honest, albeit close, as indeed he needs to be, in his dealings. He supports his minister and his schoolmaster, though both perhaps on a rather slender pittance. Such is the basis of society in British Canada. Apparently it is sound. The agrarian revolutionist, at all events, has little chance of disturbing a ​community of substantial freeholders, each of them tilling the land which his father or his not very remote ancestor won, not from a subjugated race with the Norman sword, but from the wilderness with the axe and the plough. Where the basis of society is sound, we can afford to think and speak freely about the rest.

In British Canada, as in the United States, we see that the world gets on without the squire or any part of the manorial system. In Canada, as in the United States, the rich live in cities; they have no country houses; they go in summer to watering-places on the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, or more commonly in the United States, to Europe, or to the cottages which stud the shores and islets of the Muskoka Lakes. Not that the total absence of the manorial system does not make itself felt in American civilisation. Wealth, at all events, is the worse for having no rural duties.

A yeoman proprietor of one or two hundred acres, let the agrarian reformers of England observe, is not a peasant proprietor or of kin to the peasant characters of Zola. Let them observe also that America has been organised for the system from the beginning. In England to introduce peasant proprietorship you would have to pull down all the farm buildings and build anew for the small holdings. In France you and only to burn the chateaux.

In this fundamental respect of yeoman proprietorship, without a landed gentry, the structure of society in British Canada is identical with its structure in the United States, It is identical in all fundamental respects. Canadian sentiment may be free from the revolutionary tinge and the tendency to indiscriminate sympathy with rebellion unhappily contracted by American sentiment in the contest with George III; but it is not less thoroughly democratic. In everything the ​pleasure and convenience of the masses are consulted. In politics everybody bows the knee to the people. Where there is wealth there will be social distinctions, and opulence even at Toronto sometimes ventures to put a cockade in the coachman's hat. Titled visitors who come either to Canada or to the United States have too much reason to know that the worship of rank is personal, and can survive under any social system. But aristocracy is a hateful word to the Canadian as well as to the American ear. It is politically a word wherewith to conjure backwards. Any exhibition of the tendency would be fatal to an aspirant. If a citizen has a pedigree, real or factitious, he must be content to feed his eyes on it as it hangs on his own wall.

Wealth everywhere is power, and everywhere to a certain extent commands social position. This is the case in Toronto and the other cities of British Canada. But wealth in Toronto society has not everything quite its own way. There is a circle, as there is a circle even at New York, which it does not entirely command. Nor does a young man forfeit his social position by taking to any reputable calling. In that respect we have decidedly improved on the sentiment of the Old World.

One sign of the pervading democratic sentiment is the servant difficulty, about which a continual wail from the mistresses of households fills the social air. The inexperience of masters and mistresses who have themselves risen from the ranks, the dulness of small households which makes servants restless, and the rate of wages in other employments, may in part be the causes of this; but the main cause probably is the democratic dislike of service. Rarely, if ever, will you see a native American servant, and in Canada the domestics are chiefly immigrants. The work in the factory ​may be much harder, and the treatment less kind than in the household; generally they are; but the hours of work over, the girl calls no one mistress, and she can do what she likes in the evenings and on Sundays. In the household the democratic scorn of service is unpleasantly apt to display itself by mutiny. Ladies complain that the parts of mistress and servant are reversed, and that it is the servant that requires a character of the mistress. People begin to wonder how the relation is to be kept up, and they talk of flats, hotels, and restaurants, a recourse to which would be very injurious to domestic life and affection. It has been suggested that the children of families may have again, as they did in former days, to help in the housework. They would probably like anything which gave vent to their bodily energies almost as well as play. Dishonesty on the other hand among domestics appears to be rare, and a Canadian servant is less punctilious than an English servant in mixing different kinds of work. Another unattractive manifestation of the democratic spirit is the behaviour, in cities at least, of the lower class of Canadian boys, of which even the most silver-tongued of governors-general could not bring himself to speak with praise. Neither the schoolmaster nor anybody else dares effectually to correct the young citizens. Something may perhaps be due to the extensive and increasing employment, from economical motives, of women as teachers. There are those at least who think that this practice is not favourable to subordination or to the cultivation of some manly points of character; while others contend that the gentler influence is the stronger. The question as to the effect likely to be produced on the character of a nation by the substitution of the schoolmistress for the schoolmaster is at all events worthy of consideration. Apart however from any special cause, no one can be surprised at ​hearing that in a new and crude democracy there is a want of respect for authority, and of courage in exercising it, which makes itself felt throughout the social frame, and on which the young rowdy soon learns to presume. No wonder juvenile crime is on the increase.

It was to be expected that in the democratic hemisphere fustian would at first be inclined to take its revenge on broadcloth for the predominance of broadcloth in the Old World. Roughnesses of this kind, with the servant difficulty and the boy anarchy, are the joltings in the ear of human progress on its road to the glorious era of perfect order and civilisation, combined with perfect equality, which the generation after next will see. Meantime the general texture and habits of society are not easily changed. The social ways of man, his social distinctions and his social courtesies, are still much the same in British Canada and the United States that they are in Old England.

A city in British Canada differs in no respect from an American city of the second class. It is laid out in straight streets crossing each other at right angles, with trams for the street car—the family chariot of democracy, which by carrying the working man easily to and from his work enables him to live in the suburbs, where he gets a better house and better air. Nor does city life in Canada differ from that in the United States. It is equally commercial, and though the scale is smaller than that of Wall Street the strain is almost as great. People are glad to escape to the freshness of something like primitive life on a Muskoka islet, or even to get more entirely rid of civilisation and its cares by "camping out" on a lake side. Of late there has been in Canada as elsewhere a great rush of population to the cities. Toronto has grown with astonishing rapidity at the expense ​of the smaller towns and villages, and fortunes have been made by speculations in real estate. The cause of this is believed to be partly education, which certainly breeds a distaste for farm work. Another cause is the railway, which brings the people to the cities first to shop or see exhibitions, and, when they have thus tasted of city pleasures and shows, to live. The passion for amusement and excitement grows in Canada as fast as elsewhere. Railways, moreover, have killed or reduced some country employments, such as those of carriers and innkeepers. This tendency to city life is universal, and it may be said that what is universal is not likely to be evil. But the people cannot afford to be so well housed in the city as they are in the village; their children grow up in worse air, physical and moral; and though they have more of crowd and bustle they have really less of social life, because in the village they all know each other, while in the city they do not know their next-door neighbour. In the cities the people will be brought under political influences different from those of the country, and a change of political character, with corresponding consequences to the commonwealth, can hardly fail to ensue.

The learned professions, and not only the learned professions but all the callings above annual labour, such as those of clerks and of assistants in stores, are almost as much overstocked in Canada as they are in the United States. An advertisement for a secretary at £140 a year brings seventy-two applications. Let young Englishmen who think of emigrating note this. There has been many a sad case of disappointment. We have had educated gentlemen, when they had spent what they brought with them, reduced to manual labour, happy if they could get that.

​The Public School system in Canada is much the same as in the United States, and as in the United States is regarded as the sheet anchor of democracy. The primary schools are free; at the High Schools a small fee as a rule is paid.^[2] At Toronto University there are no fees for University lectures, but the youth during his course has to board himself, so that except to the people of the University town the education cannot be said to be free. If it were we should be in danger of having a population of penniless and socialistic graduates. As it is there are more than graduates enough. In the city of Toronto in one year $600,000 were levied for Public Schools, including the expenditure on sites, buildings, and repairs, besides the sum expended on High Schools and Separate Schools, amounting to nearly $100,000 more. Grumblers then began to challenge the principle of the system, and to ask why the man who has one child or none should be called upon for the schooling of the man who has six, when three-fourths probably of the people who use the schools are able to pay for themselves. The answer is that with a popular suffrage ignorance is dangerous to the commonwealth. Unluckily there is reason to believe that of the class likely to be dangerous a good many escape the operation of the system. It appeared from a recent report of the Minister of Education that 25 per cent of the children are not in school at all, while of those on the register the attendance was not more than half the roll. The attendance is higher in cities than it is in the country, where the weather in the winter season is a serious obstacle; but in the cities and towns it is only about 60 per cent. Attendance is legally ​compulsory, but the law is a dead letter; nor is the well-to-do artisan anxious to have the ragged waif in the school at his child's side. In the New England of early days, the first and classical seat of the system, the Common School would answer strictly to its name. It would be really common to a group of families, all of whom might take a personal interest in it. This would be a different thing from a great State machine maintained by taxing the whole community for the benefit of a certain portion of it, taking education entirely out of the hands of parents and extinguishing, as it must, the sense of parental duty in that respect. In American commonwealths, however, the system of free education, expedient or inexpedient, just or unjust, is a fixture. But British statesmen had better inquire before they take the leap. Some people it seems propose to give not only free education but free breakfasts. Bribery in the old days of corruption was petty; now it is being raised in scale and dignity by demagogues who bribe whole classes out of the public funds. When it is understood that instead of working and saving you may vote yourself the earnings and savings of other people, industry will lose some of its charm.

The Public Schools, saving the Separate Schools for Roman Catholics, are secular. To satisfy the religious feelings of the people some passages of Scripture of an undogmatic character are read without comment. This in strictness is a deviation from the secular principle: thoroughgoing secularists object, and there has been a good deal of controversy on the subject. The practice is defended on the ground that the moral code of the community is a necessary part of education, and that the ethics of the gospel, apart from anything dogmatic, are still the moral code of the community. ​Clergymen are by law allowed access at certain hours, but this privilege is not used. The organ of religious education is the Sunday School. Of these there are said to be in Ontario nearly 4000, more than half of the number being Methodists, with 40,000 unpaid teachers. The Sunday School is made attractive by entertainments, picnics, and excursions.

The New World has produced no important novelty in religion. Universalism, the only new sect of importance, is but Methodism with Eternal Punishment left out. Upon that doctrine in almost all the Churches, as well of Canada as of the United States, the humanitarianism of democracy has acted as a solvent. Perhaps the Presbyterian Church should be excepted. At least a very eminent preacher of that church in Toronto, who had breathed a doubt some years ago, was compelled to explain, after a debate in Knox Church which recalled the debates of the primitive councils. The two Presbyterian Churches had just united, but their distinctive characters were still visible, like those of two streams which have run together yet not perfectly commingled, and the men of the Free Kirk exceeded those of the Old Kirk in orthodox rigour. Freedom from an Establishment begets tolerance as well as equality: the co-operation of the ministers, of all Protestant Churches at least, in good works is almost enforced by public opinion; dogmatic differences are softened or forgotten, and among the masses of the laity practically disappear. There is even talk of Christian union. Old-standing organisations, with the interests attached to them, are in the way; but economy may in time enforce, if not union, some arrangement which, by a friendly division of the spiritual field, shall enable a village, which neither knows nor cares anything about dogma, to ​feed one pastor instead of starving three. Of the Protestant Churches in Ontario the largest and the most spreading is Methodism, strong in its combination of a powerful clergy with a democratic participation of all members in church work; strong also in its retention of the circuit system, which saves it from the troubles bred in other voluntary churches by the restlessness of congregations which grow weary of hearing the same preacher. The Presbyterian Church is that of the Scotch, here, as everywhere, a thrifty, wise, and powerful clan. The Baptists also maintain their ground by their austere and scriptural purity, though the great principle of which they were the first champions and martyrs, separation of the Church from the State, is no longer in so much need of champions or in any need of martyrs. Amidst the growing indifference about dogma, the question between infant and adult baptism would not in itself be enough to support a church. The Anglican Church in Canada, as in England, may almost be said to be two churches—one Protestant, the other neo-Catholic—under the same roof. The two live in uneasy union, and hard is the part of their bishop. They are held together by a body of laity unspeculative and attached to the Prayer-book. Neo-Catholicism gains ground fast among the clergy; even a college founded by Low Churchmen to stem the movement finds itself turning out High Churchmen. The Mass, the Confessional, the monastic system, Protestants say, are creeping in. Still the English of the wealthier class, whatever their opinions, generally adhere to their old Church: so do the English of the poorest class, who are unused to paying for their religion, and among whom the Anglican clergy are very active. All the Protestant Churches, even that of the Baptists, have relaxed their Puritanism of form and become æsthetic: church archi​tecture, music, flowers, have generally been introduced. The metropolitan church of the Methodists at Toronto is a Cathedral. There is a tendency also in preaching to become lively, perhaps sensational. The most crowded church on Sunday evenings in Toronto is one in which the preacher handles the topics of the day with the freedom of the platform, and amidst frequent applause and laughter. The Church of Rome, of course, stands apart with the Encyclical and Syllabus in her hand waiting till the time for putting them in execution shall arrive. In Ontario she is mainly the church of the Irish, the race which is now nearly her last hope. She does not appear to gain by conversion. She must be gaining, however, in wealth, for her churches and convents continue to rise. Her prelates affect hierarchical state, go about in the insignia of their order, and claim a social rank as princes or nobles of a Universal Church, which the other clergies are now inclined to challenge. In Ontario she has succeeded in obtaining for herself Separate Schools supported by the State. Upon this question also issue is about to be joined. Apart from ecclesiastical pretensions, and the desire to make the child a churchman first and a citizen afterwards, there seems to be no justification for the privilege. Roman Catholic children attend public schools in the districts where their sect is not numerous enough to claim a division of the rates without the slightest prejudice to their religion. There is no feeling whatever against Roman Catholicism apart from the feeling against priestly domination or aggression, while in polities the Church is only too strong. A Protestant holding high offices has been seen on his knee before a Cardinal. Orangeism itself in Canada is political, not religious: it still carries in its processions the effigy of William of Orange; but it is ​a bulwark not of Protestantism, but of a Tory Government; and it goes to the poll and eats at the same party-table with the Roman Catholic, and even with the Ultramontane. North America has had no Torquemada or Alexander Borgia, and has not been the scene of priestly persecution or of papal crime.

In the streets of Toronto the drum of the Salvation Army is still heard. Other revivals have for the most part quickly passed away, but this endures. So far at all events it has in it the genuine spirit of Christianity that it points the road to excellence and happiness not through the reform of others, much less through dynamite, blood, and havoc, but through self-reform.

Wherever books find their way criticism and scepticism must now go with them. There is in Toronto an Agnostic circle, active-minded and militant. What is at work in minds beyond that circle nobody can tell. But there is no falling off in the outward signs of religion. Churches are built as fast as the city grows; their costliness as well as their number increases, and they are wonderfully well filled. Sunday is pretty strictly kept, though there is an agitation for Sunday street cars and the strong Sabbatarians have failed to put down Sunday boats. With regard to the whole of the American continent this appearance not only of undiminished but of increased life in the Churches while free inquiry is making inroads, of which those who read cannot help being conscious, on old beliefs, is an enigma which the result alone can solve. Revision of creeds is in the air, and it is probable that among the laity of all the Protestant Churches there has been formed a sort of Christian Theism in which many, without formulating it, repose. The tide of scepticism does not beat so fiercely ​against Free Churches as against an Establishment. To suppose that all the religion is hollow or mere custom would be absurd. We must conclude that people in general still find comfort in worship. Nor can it be doubted that belief in God and in conscience as the voice of God is still the general foundation of Canadian morality.

With the British are mingled in Ontario a large number of Irish, who, as in the United States and everywhere else, cling to the cities, follow the priest to the third generation, band together, do a great deal of the political as well as of the liquor trade, and cherish a hatred of England not so bitter, at least not so violent in its manifestations, as that which is cherished by their race in the United States. There are also Scotch-Irish, whose ways are those of the Scotch. There is a settlement of Germans in Waterloo County who remain German, and make excellent farmers and citizens, though they would vote against the prohibition of lager. Gaelic is still spoken in Highland settlements. There is a French settlement in Essex county, beside the Detroit river, a relic of the era of old French fur-trading and adventure. Before the fall of slavery Canada was the asylum of the fugitive slave, as was made known to the world by the famous case of Anderson the slave who had killed a man in escaping from bondage, and whose extradition when demanded was refused, or at least evaded, by the Canadian Courts, the Home Government showing its resolution to support Canada in upholding the right of asylum. Hence there are in Canada a number of negroes, of whom some have done well, in spite of the obstacles of race and climate, and one has attained wealth by an invention. There are scatterings of other races, the last arrival being the Italian with his grinding organ and, we hope, without his knife. The increase of ​wealth and speculation has not failed to attract the Jew, who brings with him his tribal exclusiveness, his tribal code, his tribal ways in trade. If there is a feeling against him here it is not religious, for on the American continent, while open irreligion still gives offence, each man is free in every respect to choose his own religion.

In the Eastern part of the Province, a non-British element of a more ominous kind appears. The French population of Quebec is overflowing that district and has already in two or three counties almost supplanted the British. It introduces its own ecclesiastical system, and imports its own language into the public schools. Opposition has been aroused, and the advance of the French language in the schools has been for the moment checked, but it is difficult to get party politicians to act with vigour against an invader who has the power of turning several elections. The French press on compactly, acting as a unit in their own interest; and it is not likely that the limit of their extension in Ontario has yet been reached.

Nationalities are not so easily ground down in a small community as they are when thrown into the hopper of the mighty American mill. National societies, or societies which partake of the nationalist character, such as the St. George's Society, the Sons of England, the St. Andrew's Society, the Catholic Celtic League, and the Orange Order, are strong, and their strength gives umbrage to those who see in it a detraction from loyalty to the commonwealth. The passion for association is powerful over the whole continent and gives birth, besides the National Societies, the Orange Order, and the Freemasons, to Knights of Pythias, Good Templars, Odd-fellows, Knights of the Maccabees, Foresters, Royal Black Knights of Ireland, and other brotherhoods, benevolent and ​social. High-sounding titles of office and resplendent regalia probably form part of the attraction. On a wide continent, however, without ancient centres or bonds of union, a man would feel almost like a grain in a vast heap of shifting sand if he did not attach himself to some brotherhood. Some of the brotherhoods march through the streets in military array and go through drill. In industrial communities there is a paradoxical union of love of military show and glory with dislike of standing armies and of military service. The Americans have elected four or five soldiers to the Presidency, besides nominating others as candidates, while England has had only two military Prime Ministers, Stanhope, who did not owe his position to achievements in war, and the Duke of Wellington, who was a great European diplomatist and the real head of his political party. The reception of the Canadian Volunteers when they returned from Fish Creek, Cut Knife, and Batoche, eclipsed the reception of the British army when it returned from the Alma and Inkerman.

The respect for law which prevails in all States of the Union on which slavery has not left its taint, and which is the salt of American democracy, prevails not less among British Canadians. It extends to the judges, who, as a body, have well deserved the confidence of the people. When a master of the press who had trampled at his pleasure on the characters and feelings of his fellow-citizens in general assailed a judge whose decision had offended him, he was made at once to feel that opinion was against him and he slunk away. Some time ago a little clan of local desperadoes was lawlessly slain by some of the people whom its outrages had provoked, and the local jury refused to convict the slayers. This is about the only case of the kind, and though deplorable in itself and generally deplored, it was ​like some of the cases of lynching in the United States, in part a proof not so much of lawlessness as of the general respect for law. Where no rural police is needed, and none consequently is maintained, when brigandage does appear there is no way of dealing with it except through the Vigilance Committee. Justice in all Canadian courts keeps her gown though not her wig, while in the United States the gown is worn by the Judges of the Supreme Court only. The American or Canadian citizen does not need to be impressed so much as the British peasant; but everybody needs to be impressed, and the Canadian custom is the better. Canadian judges are underpaid. One eminent advocate, after taking a seat on the Bench, found his income so much reduced that he returned to the Bar. It is needless to say that this is false economy, and that there can be no expedition of business without a presiding judge of sufficient eminence thoroughly to control his Court. Democracy, though lavish in general expenditure, which it does not count, is niggardly in salaries, which each man compares with his own earnings. Canada, like the United States, has discarded the Old World distinction between barrister and solicitor. Both sorts of work are taken by the same firm. The system of firms saves a barrister at all events from the sadness of waiting year after year in solitary chambers for briefs which do not come.

Canada flatters herself that in her Courts, as in those of England, criminal justice is more prompt and sure than it is in the United States, where such are the chicaneries, the delays, and the weakness of opinion that to get a murderer hanged is very difficult, however certain his guilt may be. It must be owned, however, that in the recent Birchall case we had a display of sensationalism which showed how faint is the boundary which divides our society from the society of the United States.

​Toronto is said to be English, and likes to have that reputation. Of the leaders of society some are English by birth, and all of them keep up the connection by going a good deal to England. This habit grows with the shortening of the passage and the cheapness of the sojourn; not with the best results to Canada, for unless the chiefs of society everywhere will remain at their posts and do their duty, the edifice cannot stand. Canadian boys and youths are sometimes sent to the public schools and universities of England, but seldom, it is believed, with good results. What the boy or youth gains by superior teaching he is likely to lose by estrangement from the social and industrial element in which his life is to be spent, and by contracting tastes suitable rather to the mansions of the British gentry than to Canadian homes. English fashion perhaps presses rather heavily on us. We are apt to outvie London in the heaviness of our dinners anıl the formality with which they are exchanged, and the once pleasant afternoon tea has become a social battue. Mrs. Grundy has too much power. The easy sociability, however, which delights and refreshes is everywhere with difficulty attained. The man who said that others might make the laws of a nation if they would let him make its ballads ought to have bargained also for the making of the games. English games and sports are the fashion in Canada, as indeed they are among the young men of wealth in the United States. Cricket is kept up in face of great difficulties, for in a commercial community men cannot afford to give two days to a game, while Canadian summer scorches the turf, and there are few school playing-fields and no village greens. Baseball, which is the game of the continent, is played in two hours, and requires no turf. Lacrosse is called the Canadian game, but it is Indian in its origin, and some think that to Indians ​it belongs. Football is also much played, and under the regular English rule, everything being kicked except the ball. In Toronto the red coat of the English fox-hunter is seen, though it is not to be supposed that foxes can be preserved among democratic hen roosts or freely chased over democratic farms. At Montreal, under the theocracy, you may see a real fox chased over fences as stiff as an English fox-hunter could desire. The Turf, the gambling table of England, has its minor counterpart in her colony. Yachting and rowing are popular, and Toronto has produced the first oarsman of the world: unhappily these also have brought betting in their train. The Scotchman keeps up his Scotch love of curling and of golf. Imitations are generally unsuccessful, and it was not likely that an imitation of the British sporting man or anything British would be an exception to the rule. But Anglomania, whatever it may be worth either to the imitators or to the imitated, is as strong among the same class in the United States as it is in Canada. It angers the loyal Republican and draws from him bitter jests. Nor can the rich men of Toronto be fonder of tracing their pedigrees to England than are the rich men of the United States.

A winter of five months or more, during which cattle must be housed, the thermometer falling sometimes to fifteen or twenty below zero; a vast thaw; a joyous rush into bud and leaf, unlike the slow step of English spring; a summer which, after two or three weeks, turns the country from green to brown, ripens the best of apples, in favoured spots peaches, and brings the humming bird; a clear bright autumn—such is Ontario's year. The great lakes temper the extremes in their neighbourhood while they cloud the winter brightness. The stillness of Canadian winter has departed with the sheltering forests. After winter has set in there is generally ​a recurrence of the warm weather, with a golden haze in the air, which fancy styles Indian summer. Canadians do not wish to have Canada regarded as a winter country, nor do they quite like to see pictures of the toboggan or snow-slide, the snow-shoe, and the ice-boat sent to England as the symbols of their life. It is true, however, that the winter is long, and that a good deal of the pastime is connected with it. To snit the climate a Canadian house ought to be simple in form, so as to be easily warmed, with broad eaves to shed the snow, and a deep veranda as a summer room; and what is suitable is also fair to the eye. But servile imitation produces gables, mansard roofs, and towers, just as fashion clothes Canadian women in Parisian dresses. Canadians are often told by those who wish to flatter them that as a northern race they must have some great destiny before them. But stove heat is not less enervating than the heat of the sun. The Northern tribes which conquered the Roman Empire had no stoves, and they had undergone the most rigorous process of natural selection, both by exposure to frost and by tribal war.

Considering that of all the banks of British Canada not one in the last twenty years has failed to pay its depositors in full, and that only of one have the notes been at a discount, and this only for a few hours, it may safely be said that Canadian commerce is sound. Englishmen who have speculated have lost; especially if their concern was owned on one side of the Atlantic and managed on the other. But those who have invested in known banks or companies have, it is believed, seldom had reason to complain. The banks everywhere, as the great organs of the commercial system, have enemies in the Socialists, who would wreck and plunder them if they could. Governments also everywhere are haunted by the fancy that, because it is their duty to ​stamp the coin, they have a right to the profits of the money trade, and they are sometimes inclined to legislate accordingly.^[3] But their inclination has been hitherto kept within bounds.

Canadian industry can hardly be said to present any special feature, saying that, owing to the severity of the winter, there is more or less of a close season in out-of-door trades, which, with high wages during the rest of the year, must always be trying to industrial character. Industrial questions, trade unionism, its aims and methods, its conflict with capital and free labour, the upheaval of the labour world by strikes, are the same in Canada as in the United States and England. Canada is, in fact, included in the American organisation of the Knights of Labour, which has thus in a way industrially annexed her. Toronto has her anti-poverty society, for the nationalisation of land. She has Socialism more er less pronounced. She has her Socialistic journalists instilling class hatred into the heart of the working man, inciting the "toiler" to an attack on the "spoiler," and blowing the trumpet of industrial war. The storm may be less violent in the bay than on the wide ocean, but it is part of the universal storm.

Toronto was startled at hearing that four per cent of her people had been receiving some kind of relief. Not a few of the recipients probably were new-comers or wanderers, and few were actual paupers, But these cities have lived fast, and the cares and problems of maturity are already upon them, Still they recoil from the idea of a poor law, and indeed from any regular fourm of public relief. There is a notion that public relief pauperises. The sentiment is to be ​respected, but that which really pauperises is relief unwisely given, as private charity is too apt to be. What, after all, is free education but a vast system of public relief, though received for the most part by those who are not in need?

City government in Canada presents the same problems which it presents in the United States, and is likely soon to present on the grandest scale in London, now endowed with representative administration. These elective governments of cities are survivals from the Middle Ages, when each city was a little commonwealth in itself, when its rulers were concerned chiefly with the guardianship of franchises and the regulation of trade, when there was little thought of anything sanitary or scientific, when every man was his own policeman, and when, moreover, the city was a social unit, and the chief men lived in the heart of it, took the lead, and were mayors and aldermen. A city is now merely a densely peopled district in special need of scientific administration. Its social unity is gone, and the chief men live in suburban mansions and are above taking part in municipal affairs, while nobody knows the citizens of his street. Combination for the purpose of selecting aldermen is out of the question, and you come by a fell necessity under the rule of the ward politician, which means in administration, waste, neglect of public health, and too often jobbery and corruption. New York with its Tammany is the climax to which city government of this kind tends. Toronto has no Tammany, and has had no Tweed. But her debt is heavy, and she is just now much exercised by the problem of administration. Even if there is nothing worse, the ephemeral character of a government annually elected, and with the minds of its members always set on re-election, would preclude foresight and system. Spasmodic attempts at reform ​are made, but their effect dies away. No one looks for a radical change. A board of commissioners, which some propose, would no doubt be a vast improvement; but it would be very difficult to get the people to part to that extent with their power, though they would be amply repaid in assurance of health and comfort, while the power after all really resides not in the people, as they fancy, but in those who manage the elections. Something, however, is being done in the way of a devolution of the aldermanic power on skilled health officers and engineers. Economy there can hardly be where the money and the power of voting it away are in different hands. There is one city on the continent with the administration of which now everybody, at least everybody who has anything to lose, seems to speak with confidence and satisfaction: this is Washington, which as a Federal district is administered by three commissioners appointed by the President of the United States. Washington has a heavy debt, but this was contracted some time ago. The counties are governed by elective councils, with reeves, which have not very much to do or to spend. Against these no complaint is heard. Of provincial legislation and politics there will be something to be said presently in connection with those of the Dominion.

Canada is a political expression. This must be borne in mind when we speak of Canadian Literature. The writer in Ontario has no field beyond his own Province and Montreal. Between him and the Maritime Provinces is interposed French Quebec. Manitoba is far off and thinly peopled. To expect a national literature is therefore unfair. A literature there is fully as large and as high in quality as could be reasonably looked for, and of a character thoroughly healthy. Perhaps a kind critic might say that it still retains something of the ​old English sobriety of style, and is comparatively free from the straining for effect which is the bane of the best literature of the United States. The area is not large enough to support a magazine, though the attempt has more than once been made. It is hardly large enough to support a literary paper. Ontario reads the magazines of the United States, especially the illustrated magazines in which New York leads the world. Canada has been at a disadvantage alongside of the United States in falling under British copyright law, and also in having her booksellers cut off by the tariff from their natural centre of distribution at New York. To fill an order at once a double duty must be paid. Let it be remembered also that it is difficult for the sapling of Colonial literature to grow beneath the mighty shadow of the parent tree. It is not so long since the United States were without writers of mark. Even now have they produced a great poet?

To make a centre of Art is still harder than to make a literary centre, because art requires models. There can barely be said to be an art centre in the United States. For art, people are likely long to go to Europe. Of millionaires Canada has not many, and such as there are can hardly be expected to give high prices for pictures and statues where they have no connoisseurs to advise them. Ontario, however, has produed a school of landscape painters the merit of which has been recognised in England. For subjects the painter has to go to the Rocky Mountains, the more poetic Selkirks, the magnificent coast-scenery of British Columbia, the towering cliffs of the Saguenay, or the shores and shipping of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Ontario has pleasant spots, but little of actual beauty or of grandeur, if we except Thunder Bay, with some other points on the shore ​of Lake Superior, and the unpaintable Niagara.^[4] In a new country there can be few historic or picturesque buildings, so that the painter's landscape must lack historic or human interest. Nor can there be anything like the finished loveliness of England. The gorgeous Ines of Canadian autumn and the glories of Canadian sunset are nearly all, and these often reproduced will tire. That the love of beauty and the desire to possess objects of beauty are not wanting, the stranger may learn by a glance at the display in the Toronto stores or at the house architecture of the new streets, which, whether the style be the best or not, unquestionably aspires to beauty and does not always miss its aim. The rows of trees planted along all the streets and the trim little lawns are proof of taste and refinement which cannot fail to please.

Science, as well as literature and art, has its centres in old countries. But from these, unlike literature and art, it can be imported by the student. Medical science is imported into Canada, as is believed, in full perfection. Canadian surgery performs the most difficult operations with success. The traveller who is borne safely on the Canadian Pacific Railroad along the gorges and over the chasms of the Rocky Mountains will acknowledge the skill and daring of the Canadian engineer as he will acknowledge in all details of the service the excellence of Canadian railway administration. In the International Bridge at Buffalo is seen another Canadian achievement. Ontario is a network of railways; ​probably she has more miles of them in proportion to her population than any other district in the world; and if they pay no dividends on their stock the British capitalist who has been the chief investor may have the satisfaction of thinking how much he has done to promote the material civilisation of a great colony. In the use of agricultural machinery the Province, it has already been said, believes herself to have outrun the mother country. The dearness of labour here, as in the United States, has stimulated the invention or adoption of its substitutes. The streets of Toronto are a maze of wires, telegraphic and telephonic, and the chief thoroughfares are lit with the electric light. Every office, almost every house, of any pretensions, has its telephone, and converses not only with the rest of the city but with places fifty miles off. In what some people are still pleased to call Canadian wilds life is almost vexed with improvements.

Journalism labours under the same disadvantage as literature in respect to the smallness of the area. With less than two millions of people, with an attainable circulation for any one paper of hardly more than twenty-five thousand, and considering the expense of telegraphic intelligence, how can a provincial press be maintained on a metropolitan scale? In fact, journalism, so far as the morning papers are concerned, has a hard life. It bears up however, and Toronto reads at breakfast time the debates in the British House of Commons of the evening before, looks on as well as the Londoner at all that is going on in the world, and shares in full measure the unification of humanity by the electric wire. The Canadian Press is, in the main, American not English in its character. It aims at the lightness, smartness, and crispness of New York journalism ​rather than at the solidity of the London Times. There is an interchange of writers with New York. Enterprise in the collection of gossip and scandal is now a feature of the press in all countries and everywhere bears the same relation to taste and truth.

Canada, when the value of the connection is under discussion, is always set down as a place where an Englishman can find a home. A sudden change has come over the attitude of the occupants of the American continent on the subject of Emigration. Till lately the portals were opened wide and all the destitute of the earth were bidden to come in. It was the boast of America that she was the asylum of nations. Now the door is half shut, and there are a good many who, if they could, would shut it altogether. Malthus has his day again. The world has grown afraid of being over-peopled. Moreover, the Trade Unions want to close the labour market. They have forced the Canadian Government to give up assisting emigration, and they watch with a jealous eye anything like assistance to emigration on the other side of the water. There is, however, still a demand in Canada for farm labourers, and the labourer if he is steady and industrious will do well and earn wages which in a few years will enable him to own a farm. There is a demand also for domestic servants, if they come prepared to be useful, and not with the notion that a colony is a place of high wages and no work. For teachers or clerks, it has already been said, there is absolutely no room unless they have been engaged beforehand. The Trade Unions declare that there is no room for mechanics and take every one by the throat who says that a good mechanic may still do well. Setting the cost of living against the higher rate of wages, it is doubtful whether a British mechanic improves his lot by coming to ​Canada. House rent is high, clothes are dear, and a great deal of fuel is required. The difference in the cost of fuel would soon equal the difference between the price of a ticket to Canada and a ticket to New Zealand. One cannot help wondering that a poor man who works out of doors and who does not dream of repeating the exploits of Attila and Clovis should choose a country where the winter is severe.

The notion that an Englishman enjoys a preference in Canada is pleasant, but not well founded. He is rather apt to be an object of jealousy. Anything like favour shown to him gives umbrage. The appointment of three English Professors in Toronto University roused a feeling which lingered long. From the political abuse of England which constantly offends an Englishman in the American Press, and which is largely a homage paid to Irish sentiment, the Canadian Press of course is free; but social allusions may be sometimes seen not of a friendly kind. If the writers are Irish or Socialists, still the allusions appear. The jealousy is, perhaps, a legacy of the times when most of the high places and good things were in the hands of emigrants from the Imperial country.^[5] At all events, it has been with truth said that in any candidature no nationality is so weak as the English. In the United States, on the contrary, while there is a traditional prejudice against England, against the individual Englishman there is none. He is perfectly welcome to any employment or appointment that he can get. How-ever, an Englishman intending to emigrate had better turn ​his thought first to Australia and New Zealand where there is no prejudice either against him or his country, and the Irish are not so strong. These remarks have reference, of course, only to the emigrant who goes to a colony to push his fortunes in competition with the natives, not to him who goes to live on his own patrimony or the farm which he has bought, seeking nothing beyond. Nor does what has been said apply to Manitoba, and the recent settlements of the North-West. There all alike are newcomers, and no one has to encounter any jealousy or prejudice whatever.

Lord Durham said in his famous Report on Canada: "There is one consideration in particular which has occurred to every observant traveller in these our colonies, and is a subject of loud complaint within the colonies. I allude to the striking contrast which is presented between the American and the British sides of the frontier line, in respect to every sign of productive industry, increasing wealth, and progressive civilisation. By describing one side, and reversing the picture, the other would be also described." That this was so in Lord Durham's day was not the fault of Canadian hands, brains, or hearts. It is not the fault of Canadian hands, brains, or hearts if the contrast, though softened, still exists and is noticed by the stranger who passes from the southern to the northern shore of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, as he compares Windsor, Hamilton, London, Kingston, and even Toronto, with Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester, and Oswego. The cause is the exclusion of Canada from the commercial pale of her continent, and the result would be the same if an equal portion of England were cut off from the rest. The standard of living and of material civilisation is necessarily higher in the wealthier country. Let the traveller ​make due allowance for this if he misses an air of homelike comfort in a Canadian house or if he does not find luxury in a Canadian country inn.

It has been said that the want of duties, such as country life provides for the rich in England, is felt in Canada; though it is of course not felt nearly so much in a country where millionaires are rare as it is in the United States, where they abound in every great city. Polities unhappily are repulsive, and a man born to independence is not inclined to put his neck under the galling yoke of party; otherwise the public service would be the natural occupation of the rich. They might still take part in social effort; they might help to keep the press in good hands; they might even exercise a political influence outside party, and corrective of its spirit. As it is, the heirs of wealth on the American continent are too often men of pleasure, spending half their time and money in London or Paris, while as their wealth excites envy they are a dangerous class. But men who have no duty laid upon them will seldom make duties for themselves, and in this sense at least the Gospel is still true, which says that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

From British as well as from French Canada there is a constant flow of emigration to the richer country, and the great centres of employment. Dakota and the other new States of the American West are full of Canadian farmers; the great American cities are full of Canadian clerks and men of business, who usually make for themselves a good name. It is said that in Chicago there are 25,000. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians have relatives in the United States. Canadians in great numbers—it is believed as many ​as 40,000—enlisted in the American army during the civil war. There is a Lodge of the Grand Army at Ottawa. A young Canadian thinks no more of going to push his fortune in New York or Chicago than a young Scotchman thinks of going to Manchester or London. The same is the case in the higher callings as in the lower: clergymen, those of the Church of England as well as those of other churches, freely accept calls to the other side of the Line. So do professors, teachers, and journalists. The Canadian churches are in full communion with their American sisters, and send delegates to each other's Assemblies. Cadets educated at a Military College to command the Canadian army against the Americans, have gone to practise as Civil Engineers in the United States. The Benevolent and National Societies have branches on both sides of the Line, and hold conventions in common. Even the Orange Order has now its lodges in the United States, where the name of President is substituted in the oath for that of the Queen. American labour organisations, as we have seen, extend to Canada. The American Science Association met the other day at Toronto. All the reforming and philanthropic movements, such as the Temperance movement, the Women's Rights' movement, and the Labour movements, with their conventions, are continental. Intermarriages between Canadians and Americans are numerous, so numerous as scarcely to be remarked. Americans are the chief owners of Canadian mines, and large owners of Canadian timber limits. The railway system of the continent is one. The winter ports of Canada are those of the United States. Canadian banks trade largely in the American market, and some have branches there. There is almost a currency union, American bank-bills commonly passing at par in ​Ontario, while those of remote Canadian Provinces pass at par only by special arrangement. American gold passes at par, while silver coin is taken at a small discount: in Winnipeg even the American nickel is part of the common currency. The Dominion bank-bills, though payable in gold, are but half convertible, because what the Canadian banks want is not British but American gold. Canadians go to the American watering-places, while Americans pass the summer on Canadian lakes. Canadians take American periodicals, to which Canadian writers often contribute. They resort for special purchases to New York stores, or even those of the Border cities. Sports are international; so are the Base Ball organisations; and the Toronto "Nine" is recruited in the States. All the New-World phrases and habits are the same on both sides of the Line. The two sections of the English-speaking race on the American continent, in short, are in a state of economic, intellectual, and social fusion, daily becoming more complete. Saving the special connection of a limited circle with the Old Country, Ontario is an American State of the Northern type, cut off from its sisters by a customs line, under a separate government and flag.

The Maritime Provinces,—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island,—cover, at least the first two of them cover, the area of the old French Acadie, which, submerged by the tide of conquest, shows itself only in the ruined fortifications of Louisbourg, once the Acadian Gibraltar, in remains of the same kind at Annapolis, and in a relic of the French population. The name, with the lying legend of British cruelty connected with it, has been embalmed not in amber, but in barley-sugar, by the writer of ​Evangeline.^[6] The Maritime Provinces—the cultivable and habitable parts of them at least—lie a thousand miles away from Ontario, with the French Province between. But they are, like Ontario, British colonies, and in the main identical with it in all social and political respects. Allowance has only to be made, in the eases of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, for less of farming and more of mining, of shipping, and, in proportion, of lumbering. Prince Edward Island is a farming community with rich lands, almost cut off from the mainland in winter, insular in character, keeping in the ancient paths, and well satisfied with itself. Nova Scotia has a source of wealth specially her own, in her rich mines of bituminous coal. She is also a great fruit-growing country, and Burke would not have called her "a hard-featured brat," at least he would have confined his epithet to her Atlantic front, if he had been eating Annapolis apples. Halifax and St. John are the two winter ports of the Dominion. The harbour of St. John, the tide being here strong, is always open; the magnificent basin of Halifax is very seldom closed. To society at Halifax the presence of the garrison and the squadron lend a military and naval hue.

The newly-opened region of the North-West is as far from Ontario as Italy is from England, while it forms an integral part of the great prairie region to which belong Minnesota and Dakota. It now embraces the province of Manitoba and the districts of Alberta, Athabasca, Assiniboia, and Saskatchewan, carved out of the North-West, and administered ​as Territories on a system borrowed from the American Constitution. The North-West was the vast hunting-ground of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the field of a singular and noble service, the members of which passed a great part of their lives in lonely arctic posts far away from civilisation and human intercourse, save with wild Indians, getting one mail from England in the year, yet losing nothing of their character as highly civilised men. The Company was one of that great group formed in the early days of commercial adventure, most of which outlived their usefulness and have now quitted the scene, but without the support of which, in an age when the globe was unexplored, when international law was hardly known, when piracy and brigandage were rife, when on barbarous shores the trader could look only to his fellow-trader for protection, commerce would scarcely have ventured to put off into the unknown. That the Company should try to keep its hunting-ground intact and bar out settlement from it, by representing it as unfit for cultivation, was no more than might have been expected. The region is a series of vast steppes. It is a sensation not to be forgotten which you experience as, standing upon the platform of the railway car on the road from St. Paul, you shoot out upon that oceanic expanse of prairie, purple with evening, while an electric light perhaps shines on the horizon like a star of advancing civilisation. What is the extent of the fertile land in the North-West, and how great are the capabilities of the region. is hardly yet known, but it is known that they are vast. The balance wavered at first between the fertility of the soil on one hand, and the rigour of the climate on the other. The discovery of abundant fuel was required to turn the scale, and coal in abundance, though not of the first quality, has been found. The wheat is the very best, the root crops and ​vegetables are superb. The enemies of the farmer are the late and early frosts. The grasshopper, another old enemy, has hardly appeared in force since the settlement. Just before harvest time the weather is no commonplace topic, and a deep anxiety broods over the land. More than once the hope of a rich harvest has been blighted. It is idle to deny that the summer is short. But the yield is so abundant that fat years make up for lean years. Experience will teach its lessons, and already the farmer is learning not to trust too much to wheat-growing, but to mix with it the keeping of cattle, which, notwithstanding the cold, are said to do well. The prairie grass turns to a natural hay, which furnishes winter food. In summer nothing can be balmier or more life-giving than the prairie air, nothing more charming than the prairie gay with flowers. In winter the glass falls sometimes to forty below zero, or even lower, but the people tell you that the cold is not felt because it is dry; perhaps also because all the settlers there being young, their blood is warm. If they do not want the thread of aged lives to be cut by the winter's shears they will have to build solid houses, for which happily, in Manitoba at least, they have good building stone and brick. Not to feel the cold in a wooden shanty, with the snow driving through its chinks in forty below zero, blood must be warm indeed. Emigrants should not go to the North-West without the means of providing themselves with good houses, warm clothes, and fuel. This region, however, does not, like Minnesota, lie in the zone of blizzards. It might have been thought that on the prairie, where agricultural machines have full swing, in a climate where close dwelling has advantages, material and social, huge farming would, if anywhere, have succeeded, while its success might have been the inauguration of a new industrial and social ​system. But on the Bell Farm it was tried in the ablest hands, and did not pay. It seems that nothing will make farming pay but the sweat of the owner's brow and the closeness of the owner's fist. Winnipeg shows by the mixture of rough shanties with buildings of a better class and some of the highest class, that she rose but yesterday out of the prairie. She has only just recovered from the demoralisation of commerce by "the boom," a wild burst of gambling in real estate which raged at her birth and drew to her a loose population. But as the centre of distribution, of government, of law, of education, and above all of railways, she can hardly fail to thrive. If Manitoba and the rest of the region fill up slowly, the fault lies, as will hereafter appear, not in anything that nature has failed to do, but in things which man has done. In situation Brandon is superior to Winnipeg. The dead level of the prairie line is broken, and there is a general cheerfulness in the landscape which cradles the thriving young town. The journey seems long over a steppe monotonous as the sea, and with a horizon equally level, to Calgary, where you find yourself in the ranch country, undulating and park-like, with the range of the Rockies full in view.

The immigration has been of a motley sort, and not all of the kind which forms the best material for a new community. The Mennonites work very hard, are thrifty, and will no doubt give up their exclusiveness and become citizens in time, since military service, conscientious dislike of which was the ground of their isolation, has no existence in their new home. The Icelanders, used to such a climate, do well. The Skye crofters have hardly been farmers; they are children of a mild though damp climate; and it was not to be expected that their settlements would look more prosperous than they ​do. It is lucky that the idea of importing Irish and planting them in shanties over a large district was given up. The Irish are not farmers; they are spade husbandmen, who have hardly handled a plough and have never seen a machine. Nor are they pioneers. Their hearts would have sunk in the solitude, and they would have gone off to their kinsmen in the United States. Young Englishmen as a class have not done well; they have energy and pluck, but not steady industry, self-denial, or the habit of saving. The jesters of the North-West call "remittances from home" the Englishman's harvest. Of a good many the Mounted Police is the last haven. What the North-West needs is the floating population of the continent, farmers to the manner born. To send East-Londoners, who have hardly seen a plough, to the climate and the life of the North-West, is cruel kindness, and so it has proved.

If the North-West fills up, Old Canada will be dwarfed, and, supposing Confederation to endure, the centre of power will shift westward, though the loss by Ottawa of all control over the North-West is perhaps the more likely result.

British Columbia again is separated from the North-West by a triple range of mountains, the Rookies, the Selkirks, the Golden or Coast range, in traversing which the Pacific Railway proclaims the glory of Canadian science. This Province is the Pacific slope of the mountain range, clothed with pine of the noblest size, though not deemed equal in quality to that of Nova Scotia, but hardly within reach of the lumberman except on the lower fringe. Her flora is Pacific, so completely does she belong to that side of the world. Of unwooded land British Columbia has not much, while clearing. where the timber is so heavy, would be too costly; but she has coal at Nanaimo, she has plenty of salmon for canning, ​and she is understood to be very rich in minerals. There is a project for opening her mineral wealth by a railway carried through the mountain region in concert with the American government. Her climate is warm compared with that of other provinces in the same latitude, and she has an open though damp, and raw winter. The vegetation is tropical, not in variety, but in luxuriance. Nothing can be more impressive than a ride in the forest, through the vast and silent arcade of pines and cedars, so gigantic that they almost shut out the sky. The coast scenery, with views of the American Snow mountains, is superb, though one might wish that the "Olympian Range" had a less pedantic name.^[7] Vancouver is the leading port of British Columbian commerce. She hopes to have a great Asiatic trade and become a mighty city. Land is accordingly held in that city at fabulous prices, which those will pay who share the gorgeous dream. Victoria sleeps in beauty over her little pile of earnings from the gold-washings and from the trade of early days. Her cottage villas with their rose gardens have an English look, and she prides herself on being English in character and spirit. As she is on an island where the railway cannot reach her there seems to be not much chance of her reawakening to any active commercial life. The most lively thing about her at present is the Chinese Colony, where we come into contact with the advance guard of that countless host which, bar it out with laws and poll-taxes on immigration as you will, hunger driving it on and capital craving for its cheap labour, can hardly be arrested in its march, and may some day possess the coast of the Pacific.

​It is in the North-West and in British Columbia that the Red Indian is now chiefly to be seen; for among those on the Eastern Reserves there is little of the pure blood. The race, every one says, is doomed. It has fallen into the gulf between the hunter state and that of the husbandman. Whisky has contributed to its ruin. The sudden disappearance of the buffalo, which is the most surprising event in natural history, has deprived the hunter of subsistence. Little will be lost by humanity. The Red Indian has the wonderful powers of enduring hunger and fatigue which the hunter's life engenders; he has the keenness of sense indispensable in tracking game: he seems to have no other gift. Ethnologists may find it instructive to study a race without a history and without a future; but the race will certainly not be a factor in New World civilisation. Musical Indian names of places and rivers, Indian relics in museums, Indian phrases, such as "going on the warpath" and "burying the hatchet"—these and nothing more apparently will remain of the aborginal man in North America. His blood is not on the head of the British Government, which has always treated him with humanity and justice.