Canada and the Canadians

S >> Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle >> Canada and the Canadians

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The president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick observed that in
Liverpool the poor emigrants were fleeced without mercy; and he gave as
one instance a fact that, by the representations of a packet agent, a
large number of emigrants were induced to embark on board a packet
without the necessary supply of provisions, being assured that for their
passage-money they would be supplied by the captain--an arrangement of
which the captain was wholly ignorant.

The president of the Welsh Society exhibited sixty dollars of trash in
bills of the Globe Bank, that had been palmed off upon an unsuspecting
Welshman by some rascal in Liverpool, in exchange for his hoarded gold,
and declared that this was only one of a series of like villanies
constantly occurring.

The ex-president of the St. George's Society, Mr. Fowler, mentioned a
curious circumstance connected with the history of New York. He said
that he remembered the city when it contained only fifty thousand
inhabitants, and not one paved side walk, excepting in Dock Street. Now
it had a population of nearly 400,000, and had so changed, that he could
no longer identify the localities of his youthful days.

Who, he asked, had done this? The emigrant! and it was protection they
needed, not charity. He should have added, that the great mass of the
emigrants who have made New York the mighty city it now is, were Irish,
and that the native Americans have banded themselves in another form of
protection against their increasing influence.

The republican notions which the greater portion of the lower classes
emigrating from the old country have been drilled into, lead them to
believe that in the United States all men are equal, and that thus they
have a splendid vault to make from poverty to wealth, an easy spring
from a state of dependency to one of vast importance and consideration.
The simple axiom of republicanism, that a ploughman is as good as a
president, or a quarryman as an emperor, is taken firm hold of in any
other sense than the right one. What sensible man ever doubted that we
were all created in the same mould, and after the same image; but is
there a well educated sane mind in America, believing that a perfect
equality in all things, in goods and chattels, in agrarian rights and in
education, is, or ever will be, practicable in this naughty world?

Has nature formed all men with the same capacities, and can they be so
exactly educated that all shall be equally fit to govern?

The converse is true. Nature makes genius, and not genius nature. How
rarely she yields a Shakespeare!--There has been but one Homer, one
Virgil, since the creation. There was never a second Moses, nor have
Solomon's wisdom and glory ever again been attainable.

Look at the rulers of the earth, from the patriarchs to the present day,
how few have been pre-eminent! Even in the earliest periods, when the
age of man reached to ten times its present span, the wonderful sacred
writ records Tubal-Cain, the first artificer, and Jubal, the lyrist, as
most extraordinary men; and with what care are Aholiab and Bezabel,
cunning in all sorts of craft, and Hiram, the artificer of Tyre,
recorded! Hiram, the king, great as he undoubtedly was, was secondary in
Solomon's eyes to the widow's son.

These men, says the holy record, were gifted expressly for their
peculiar mission; and so are all men, to whom the Inscrutable has been
pleased to assign extraordinary talent.

Caesar, the conqueror, Napoleon, his imitator, and Nelson, and
Wellington, are they on a par with the rabble of New York? Procul, O,
procul este profani!

Pure democracy is an utter and unattainable impossibility; nature has
effectually barred against it. The only thing in the course of a life of
more than half a century that has ever puzzled me about it is, that the
Catholic clergy should, in so many parts of the world, have lent it a
helping hand. The ministers of a creed essentially aristocratic,
essentially the pillars of the divine right of kings, have they ever
been in earnest about the matter? Perhaps not!

If that giant of modern Ireland, the pacificator citizen king, succeeded
in separating the island from Great Britain, would he, on attaining the
throne, or the dictatorship, or the presidency, or whatever it might be,
for the nonce, desire pure democracy? _Je crois que non_, because, if he
did, he would reign about one clear week afterwards.

Look at the United States, see how each successive president is bowed
down before the Moloch altar; he must worship the democratic Baal, if he
desires to be elected, or re-elected. It is not the intellect, or the
wealth of the Union that rules. Already they seriously canvass in the
Empire State perfect equality in worldly substance, and the division of
the lands into small portions, sufficient to afford the means of
respectable existence to every citizen. It is, perhaps, fortunate that
very few of the office-holders have much substance to spare under these
circumstances; but, if the President, Vice-President, and the
Secretaries of State, are to live upon an acre or two of land for the
rest of their lives, Spartan broth will be indeed a rich diet to theirs.

When the sympathizers invaded Canada, in 1838-1839, the lands of the
Canadians were thus parcelled out amongst them, as the reward of their
extremely patriotic services, but in slices of one hundred, instead of
one or two, acres.

But, notwithstanding all this ultra-democracy, there is at present a
sufficient counterbalance in the sense of the people, to prevent any
very serious consequences; and the Irish, from having had their religion
trampled upon, and themselves despised, would be very likely to run
counter to native feeling.

If any country in the whole civilized world exhibits the inequality of
classes more forcibly than another, it is the country which has lately
annexed Texas, and which aims at annexing all the New World.

There is a more marked line drawn between wealth and pretension on the
one hand, poverty and impertinent assumption on the other, than in the
dominions of the Czar. Birth, place, power, are all duly honoured, and
that sometimes to a degree which would astonish a British nobleman,
accustomed all his life to high society. I remember once travelling in a
canal boat, the most abominable of all conveyances, resembling Noah's
ark in more particulars than its shape, that I was accosted, in the
Northern States too, and near the borders, where equality and liberty
reign paramount, by a long slab-sided fellow-passenger, who, I thought,
was going to ask me to pay his passage, his appearance was so shabby,
with the following questions:

"Where are you from? are you a Livingstone?" I told him, for I like to
converse with characters, that I was from Canada. "What's your name?" he
asked. I satisfied him. He examined me from head to foot with attention,
and, as he was an elderly man, I stood the gaze most valiantly. "Well,"
he said, "I thought you were a Livingstone; you have got small ears, and
small feet and hands, and that, all the world over, is the sign of
gentle blood."

He was afterwards very civil; and, upon inquiring of the skipper of the
boat who he was, I found that my friend was a man of large fortune, who
lived somewhere near Utica, on an estate of his own.

This was before the sympathy troubles, and I can back it with another
story or two to amuse the reader.

Some years ago, when it was the fashion in Canada for British officers
always to travel in uniform, I went to Buffalo, the great city of
Buffalo on lake Erie, in the Thames steamer, commanded by my good
friend, Captain Van Allen, and the first British Canadian steamboat
that ever entered that harbour. We went in gallantly, with the flag
flying that "has braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze." I
think the majority of the population must have lined the wharfs to see
us come in. They rent the welkin with welcomes, and, among other
demonstrations, cast up their caps, and cried with might and main--"Long
live George the Third!"--Our gracious monarch had for years before bid
this world good night, but that was nothing; the good folks of Buffalo
had not perhaps quite forgotten that they were once, long before their
city was a city, subjects of King George.

I and another officer in uniform were received with all honours, and
escorted to the Eagle hotel, where we were treated sumptuously, and had
to run the gauntlet of handshaking to great extent. A respectable
gentleman, about forty, some seven years older than myself, stuck close
to me all the while. I thought he admired the British undress uniform,
but he only wanted to ask questions, and, after sundry answers, he
inquired my name, which being courteously communicated, he said, "Well,
I am glad, that's a fact, that I have seen you, for many is the whipping
I have had for your book of Algebra." Now I never was capable of
committing such an unheard-of enormity as being the cause of
flagellation to any man by simple or quadratic equations; and it must
have been the binomial theorem which had tickled his catastrophe, for it
was my father's treatise which had penetrated into the new world of
Buffalonian education.

It is a pity, is it not, gentle reader, that such feelings do not now
exist?

Nevertheless, even now, the designation of a British officer is a
passport in any part of the United States. The custom-house receives it
with courtesy and good-will; society is gratified by attentions received
from a British officer; and it is coupled with the feelings which the
habits and conduct of a gentleman engender throughout Christendom.

At New York, I visited every place worth seeing; and, although
disliking gambling, races, and debating societies, _a outrance_, I was
determined to judge for myself of New York, of life in New York.

On one occasion, I was at a meeting of the turf in an hotel after the
races, where violent discussions and heavy champagning were going on. I
was then (it was in 1837) a major in the army, and was introduced to one
or two prominent men in the room as a British officer who had been to
see the racecourse; this caused a general stir, and the champagne flew
about like----I am at a loss for a simile; and the health of Queen
Victoria was drunk with three times three.

On board a packet returning from England, we had several of the leading
characters of the United States as passengers. A very silly and
troublesome democrat, of the Loco-foco school, from Philadelphia, made
himself conspicuous always after dinner, when we sat, according to
English fashion, at a dessert, by his vituperations against monarchy and
an exhibition of his excessive love for everything American. The
gentlemen above alluded to, men who had travelled over Europe, whose
education and manners made them that which a true gentleman is all over
the world, were disgusted, and, to punish his impertinence, proposed
that a weekly paper should be written by the cabin passengers, in which
the occurrences of each day should be noted and commented upon, and that
poetry, tales, and essays, should form part of its matter.

They agreed to discuss the relative points and bearings of monarchy and
democracy; they to depute one of their number to be the champion of
monarchy; and we to chuse the champion of democracy from amongst the
English passengers.

Two drawings were fixed up at each end of the table after dinner; one,
representing a crowned Plum-pudding; and the other, Liberty and
Equality, by the well-known sign. The blustering animal was soon
effectually silenced; a host of first-rate talent levelled a constant
battery at his rude and uncultivated mind.

I shall never forget this voyage, and I hope the talent-gifted Canadian
lawyer who threw down the gauntlet of Republicanism, and who has since
risen to the highest honours of his profession which the Queen can
bestow, has preserved copies of the Saturday's Gazette of The Mediator
American Packet-ship.

The mention of this vessel puts me in mind of one more American
anecdote, and I must tell it, for I have a good deal of dry work before
me.

Crossing the Atlantic once in an American vessel, we met another
American ship, of the same size, and passed very close. Our captain
displayed the stars and stripes in true ship-shape cordial greeting.
Brother Jonathan took no notice of this sea civility, and passed on;
upon which the skipper, after taking a long look at him with his
spy-glass, broke out in a passion, "What!" said he, "you won't show your
b--d bunting, your old stripy rag? Now, I guess, if he had been a
Britisher, instead of a d--d Yankee, he would not have been ashamed of
his flag; he would have acted like a gentleman. Phew!" and he whistled,
and then chewed his cigar viciously, quite unconscious that I was
enjoying the scene.

But, if it be possible that one peculiar portion of the old countrymen
are more disliked or despised than another in any country under the sun,
connected by such ties as the United States are with Britain, there can
be no doubt that the condition of the Jews under King John, as far as
hatred and unexpressed contumelious feeling goes, was preferable to the
feeling which native Americans, of the ultra Loco-foco or ultra-federal
breed, entertain towards the labouring Catholic Irish, and would, if
they could with safety, vent upon them in dreadful visitation. They
would exterminate them, if they dared.

To account for such a feeling, it must be observed that a large portion
of these ignorant and misguided men have brought much of this animosity
upon themselves; for, continuing in the New World that barbarous
tendency to demolish all systems and all laws opposed to their limited
notions of right and wrong, and, whilst their senseless feuds among
themselves harass society, they eagerly seek occasions for that restless
political excitement to which they are accustomed in their own unhappy
and regretted country.

A body of these hewers of wood and drawers of water, who, when not
excited, are the most innocent and harmless people in the world--easily
led, but never to be driven--get employed on a canal or great public
work; and, no sooner do they settle down upon wages which must appear
like a dream to them, than some old feud between Cork and Connaught,
some ancient quarrel of the Capulets and Montagues of low life, is
recollected, or a chant of the Boyne water is heard, and to it they go
pell-mell, cracking one another's heads and disturbing a peaceful
neighbourhood with their insane broils.

Or, should a devil, in the shape of an adviser, appear among them, and
persuade these excitable folks that they may obtain higher wages by
forcing their own terms, bludgeons and bullets are resorted to, in order
to compel compliance, and incendiarism and murder follow, until a
military force is called out to quell the riots.

The scenes of this kind in Canada, where vast sums are annually expended
on the public works, have been frightful; and such has been the terror
which these lawless hordes have inspired, that timid people have quitted
their properties and fled out of the reach of the moral pestilence; nay,
it has been carried so far, that a Scotch regiment has been marked on
account of its having been accidentally on duty in putting down a canal
riot; and, wherever its station has afterwards been cast, the vengeance
of these people has followed it.

At Montreal, the elections have been disgraced by bodies of these
canallers having been employed to intimidate and overawe voters; and,
were it not that a large military force is always at hand there, no
election could be made of a member, whose seat would be the unbiassed
and free choice of his constituents.

It is, however, very fortunate for Canada that these canallers are not
usually inclined to settle, but wander about from work to work, and
generally, in the end, go to the United States. The Irish who settle are
fortunately a different people; and, as they go chiefly into the
backwoods, lead a peaceful and industrious life.

But it is, nevertheless, very amusing, and affords much insight into the
workings of frail human nature to observe the conduct of that portion of
the Irish emigrants who find that they have neither the means of
obtaining land, nor of quitting some large town at which they may
arrive. Their first notion then is to go out to service, which they had
left Ireland to avoid altogether. The father usually becomes a
day-labourer, the sons farm-servants or household servants in the towns,
the daughters cooks, nursery-maids, &c.

When they come to the mistress of a family to hire, they generally sit
down on the nearest chair to the door in the room, and assume a manner
of perfect familiarity, assuring the lady of the house that they never
expected to go out to service in America, but that some family
misfortune has rendered such a step necessary. The lady then, of course,
asks them what branch of household service they can undertake; to which
the invariable reply is, anything--cook or housemaid, child's-maid or
housekeeper, and that indeed they lived in better places at home than
they expect to get in America, such as Lord So-and-so's, or Squire
So-and-so's.

The end of this is obvious; and a lady told me, the other day, she hired
a professed cook, who was very shortly put to the test by a dinner-party
occurring a day or two after she joined the household. Her mistress
ordered dinner; and one joint, or _piece de resistance_, was a fine
fillet of veal. The professed cook, it appeared, laboured under a little
_manque d'usage_ on two delicate points, for she very unexpectedly burst
into her lady's boudoir just as she was dressing for dinner, and
exclaimed, "Mistress, dear, what'll I do with the vail?"--"The veil?"
said the dame, in horror; "what veil?"--"Why, the vail in the pot, marm;
I biled it, and it swelled out so, the divil a get it out can I git it."

So with the farm-servants, they can all do everything; and an Irish
gentleman told me that he lately hired a young man, an emigrant, to
plough for him; and, on asking him if he understood ploughing, the
good-natured Paddy answered, offhand, "Ploughing, is it? I'm the boy for
ploughing."--"Very well, I'm glad of it," said the gentleman, "for you
are a fine, likely young fellow, so I shall hire you." He hired him
accordingly at high wages--ten dollars a month and provisions and
lodging found. The first day he was to work, my friend told him to go
and yoke the oxen. Paddy stared with all his eyes, but said nothing, and
went away. He staid some time, and then returned with a pair of oxen,
which he was driving before him. "Here's the oxen, master!"--"Where are
the yokes, Paddy?"--"The yokes! by the powers, is that what they call
beef in Canady?" Poor Paddy had been a weaver all his live-long days.

The Irish are almost exclusively the servants in most parts of the
northern states and throughout Canada, excepting the French Canadians,
and very attached, faithful servants they frequently are; but notions of
liberty and equality get possession of their phrenological developments,
and they are almost always on the move to better their condition, which
rarely happens as they desire.

Then another crying evil in Canada and in the States is the rage for
dress. An Irish girl no sooner gets a modicum of wages than all her
thoughts are to go to chapel or church as fine or finer than her
mistress. Nearly every servant-girl in the large towns has a _ridicule_
(that must be the proper way of spelling it), a bustle, a parasol, an
expensive shawl, and a silk gown, and fine bonnet, gloves, and a white
pocket-handkerchief. The men are not so aspiring, and usually don on
Sundays a blue coat and brass buttons, white pantaloons, white gloves,
and a good fur cap in winter, or a neat straw hat or brilliant beaver in
summer. The waistcoat is nondescript, but the boots are irreproachable.
A cigar has nearly replaced the pipe in the streets.

I will defy a short-sighted person to distinguish her nursery-maid from
her own sister at a little distance; and, being somewhat afflicted that
way myself, I frequently nod to a well-dressed soubrette, thinking she
is at least a leading member of the aristocracy of the town; and this is
the more amusing, as in all colonial towns and in the _haute societe_ of
the Republic very considerable magnificence is affected, and a rage for
rank and pseudo-importance is not a little the order of the day.
"Nothing," says a distinguished writer upon that most frivolous of all
threadbare subjects, etiquette, "nothing is more decidedly the sign of a
vulgar-born or a vulgar-bred person than to be ready to practise the
art of cutting." I therefore bow to the well-dressed grisettes, upon the
principle of avoiding to be thought vulgar in mixed society by cutting a
lady of tremendous rank; as I would rather take a cook for a Countess,
or a chambermaid for an Honourable, than be guilty of so much rudeness.

You must not smile, gentle reader, and say cooks are often handsomer
than Countesses, or chambermaids prettier than Honourables; I am like
the old man of the Bubbles of Brunnen, insensible to anything but the
beauties of nature. Neither must you think we have no Countesses nor
Honourables in Canada. The former are in truth _rarae aves_, but the
latter--why, every change of ministry creates a batch of them.

CHAPTER II.

The Emigrant and his Prospects.

Those who really wish Canada well desire it to become a second Britain,
and not a mere second Texas. Those who wish it evil, and these comprise
the restless, unprovided race of politicians under whose incessant
agitation Canada has so long groaned, desire its Texian annexation to
the already overgrown States in its vicinity.

That it may become a second Britain and hold the balance of power on the
continent of America is my prayer, and the prayer too of one who
entertains no enmity towards the people of the United States, but who
admires their unceasing exertions in behalf of their country, who would
admire their institutions, based as they are upon those of England, if
the grand design of Washington had been carried out, and perfect freedom
of thought and of action had been secured to the people, instead of a
slavish awe of the mob, an absolute dread of the uneducated masses, a
sovereign contempt of the opinion of the world in accomplishing any
design for the aggrandizement of the Union, the most despotic and
degrading oppression of all who presume to hold religious opinions at
variance with those of the masses, and the chained bondsman in a land of
liberty!

To guard the respectable settler, who has a character at stake, and a
family with some little capital to lay out to better advantage than he
can at home, against the grievous and often fatal errors which have been
propagated for sinister motives by needy adventurers who have written
about Canada, or who are or have been agents for the sake only of the
remuneration which it brings, caring but little for the misery they have
entailed, I have undertaken to continue an account of this fine
province, where nothing is provided by Nature except fertile soil and a
healthy climate; the rest she leaves to unremitting labour and to the
exercise of judgment by the settler.

As I have already inferred, this work will contain nothing vituperative
of the United States, of that people who are the grandchildren of
Britannia, and whose well-being is so essential to the peace and
security of Christendom.

I shall endeavour to render it as plain and unpretending as possible,
and shall not confine myself to studied rules or endeavours to make a
book, taking up my subject as suits my own leisure, which is not very
ample, and resuming or interrupting it at pleasure or convenience.

It will be necessary to enter more at large than in my preceding volumes
into the resources of Canada, and, for this end, Geology and other
scientific subjects must be introduced; but, as I dislike exceedingly
that heavy and gaudy veil of learning, that embroidered science, with
which modern taste conceals those secrets of Nature which have been so
partially unfolded, I shall not have frequent recourse to absurd Greek
derivations, which are very commonly borrowed for the occasion from
technical dictionaries, or lent by a classical friend; but, whenever
they must occur, the dictionary shall explain them, for I really think
it beneath the dignity of the lights of modern Geology to talk as they
do about the Placoids and the Ganoids, as the first created fishlike
beings, and of the Ctenoids and the Cycloids as the more recent finners.
It always puts me in mind of Shakespeare's magniloquence concerning "the
Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, of
antres vast and deserts idle," when he exhibited his learning in
language which no one, however, can imitate, and which he makes the lady
seriously incline and listen to, simply because she did not understand a
word that was said. So it is with the overdone and continual changing of
terms that now constantly occurs; insomuch that the terms of plain
science, instead of being simplified and brought within the reach of
ordinary capacities, is made as uncouth and as unintelligible as
possible, and totally beyond the reach of those who have no collegiate
education to boast of, and no good technical dictionary at hand to refer
to.

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