Canada and the Canadians

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

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Pursue a perfectly impartial course, as you ought and must do, towards
the Canadians, and show them that they are as much British citizens as
the people of Toronto are, and you may count upon their loyalty and
devotion without fear. They know they never can be an independent
nation; that folly has been dreamed out, and the fumes of the vision are
evaporating.

They now know and feel that annexation to the great Republic in their
neighbourhood will swamp their nationality more effectively than the red
or the blue coats of England can ever do, will desecrate their altars,
will portion out their lands, will nullify their present importance, and
render them an isolated race, forgotten and unsought for, as the
Iroquois of the last century, who, from being the children and owners of
the land, the true _enfans du sol_, are now--where? The soil, had it
voice, could alone reply, for on its surface they are not.

We must never in England form a false estimate of the French Canadian,
because a few briefless lawyers or saddle-bag medical men urged them
into rebellion. Their feelings and spirit are not of the same _genre_ as
the feelings and spirit which animated the hideous soul of the
_poissardes_ and _canaille_ of Paris in 1792. There is very little or no
poverty in Lower Canada; every man who will work there, can work; and it
is a nation rather of small farmers than of classes, with the ideas of
independence which property, however small, invariably generates in the
human breast; but with that other idea also which urges it to preserve
ancient landmarks.

It is chiefly in the large towns and in their neighbourhood that the
desire for exclusive nationality still exists, fostered by a rabid
appetite for distinction in some ardent and reckless adventurers from
the British ranks, who care little what is undermost so long as they are
uppermost.

The hostility of the British settlers to the French is by no means so
great as is so carefully and constantly described, and would altogether
cease, if not kept continually alive by Upper Canadian demonstration,
and that desire to rule exclusively which has so long been the bane of
this fine colony.

It reminds one always of the morbid hatred of France, which existed
thirty years ago in England, when Napoleon was believed, by the lower
classes--ay, and by some of the higher too--to be Apollyon in earnest.

I remember an old lord of the old school, whose family honours were not
of a hundred years, and whose ancestors had been respectable traders,
saying to me, a short time before he died, that Republican notions had
spread so much from our peace with infidel France, that he should yet
live to see those who possessed talent or energy enough among the middle
class, take those honours which he was so proud of, and with the titles
also, the estates.

Look, said he, at the absurd decoration showered on the _savans_ of
France, Baron Cuvier, for instance; and he fell into a passion, and,
being a French scholar, sang forth, in a paroxysm of gout, this
_refrain_:--

"Travaillez, travaillez, bon tonnelier,
Racommodez, racommodez, ton Cuvier."

And yet he was by no means an ignorant man--was at heart a true John
Bull, and had travelled and seen the world. He was blinded by an
unquenchable hatred of France, a hatred which has now ceased in England
in consequence of the facility of intercourse, but which is revived in
France against England by those who think _la gloire_ preferable to
peace and honour.

The miserable feudal system in Lower Canada has kept the French
population in abeyance; that population is literally dormant, and the
resources of the country unused; a Seigneur, now often anything but a
Frenchman, holds an immense tract, parcelled out into little slips
amongst a peasantry, whose ideas are as limited as their lands.
Generation after generation has tilled these patches, until they are
exhausted; and thus the few proprietors who have been able to emancipate
themselves from the Seignoral thraldom sell as fast as they can obtain
purchasers; and the Seignories lapse, by failure of descent or by
cutting off the entail, as it may be termed, under the dominion of
foreigners, to the people.

It is surprising that British capitalists do not turn their attention
more to Lower Canada, where land is thus to be bought very cheap, and
which only requires manuring, a treatment that it rarely receives from
a Canadian, to bring it into heart again, and where the vast extent of
the British townships, held in free and common soccage, opens such a
field for the agriculturist.

These townships are rapidly opening up and improving, and the sales of
the British American Land Company may in round numbers be said to
average L20,000 a year, or more than 40,000 acres, averaging ten
shillings an acre.

The day's wages for a labourer on a farm in Lower Canada may be stated
at two shillings currency, about one shilling and eightpence sterling,
with food and lodging; but, excepting in the towns and in the eastern
townships, the labourers are Canadians, elsewhere chiefly Irish. In the
large towns also they are Irish, and two shillings and sixpence is the
usual price of a day's work at Montreal.

There is a great demand for English or Scotch labourers in the townships
where provisions are reasonable, and the materials for building, either
lime, stone, brick, or wood, also very moderate in price from their
abundance.

Cultivated, or rather cleared, farms may be purchased now near the
settlements for about six pounds per acre, with very often dwelling and
farms on them, and a clear title may be readily obtained, after inquiry
at the registry office of the county, to see whether any mortgage or
other encumbrance exist--a course always to be adopted, both in Upper
and Lower Canada. A settler must take the precaution of tracing the
original grant, and that the land, if he buys from an individual, is
neither Crown nor Clergy reserve, nor set apart for school or any other
public purposes. Never buy, moreover, of a squatter, or land on which a
squatter is located, for the law is very favourable to these gentry.

A squatter is a man who, axe in hand, with his gun, dog, and baggage,
sets himself down in the deep forest, to clear and improve; and this he
very frequently does, both upon public and private property; and the
Government is lenient, so that, if he makes well of it, he generally
has a right of pre-emption, or perhaps pays up only instalments, and
then sells and goes deeper into the bush. Every way there is difficulty
about squatted land, and very often the squatter will significantly
enough hint that there is such a thing as a rifle in his log castle.
Squatters are usually Americans, of the very lowest grade, or the most
ignorant of the Irish, who really believe they have a right to the soil
they occupy.

I do not profess to give an account of the Eastern Townships; the
prospectus of the British American Land Company will do that; and, as I
have never been through them entirely, so I could only advance
assertion; but I believe that they are admirably adapted for English and
Scotch settlers, and that, bounded as they are by the French Canadians
on one side, and by the United States on the other, with every facility
for roads, canals, and railways, they must become one of the richest,
most and important portions of Canada before half a century has passed
over; but it will take that time, notwithstanding railways and
locomotives, to make Jean Baptiste a useful agriculturist; and the fly
must be eradicated from the wheat before Lower Canada can ever come
within a great distance of competition in the flour market with the
upper province.

Take a steamboat voyage from Quebec to Montreal, and you pass through
French Canada; for, although there are very extensive settlements of the
race below Quebec till they are lost in the rugged mountains of
Gaspesia, yet the main body of _habitants_ rest upon the low and
tranquil shores of the St. Lawrence, for one hundred and eighty miles
between the Castle of St. Lewis and the Cathedral of Montreal. The
farm-houses, neat, and invariably whitewashed, line the river,
particularly on the left bank, like a cantonment, and go back to the
north for, at the utmost, ten or twelve miles into the then boundless
wilderness.

The cultivated ground is in narrow slips, fenced by the customary snake
fence, which is nothing more than slabs of trees split coarsely into
rails, and set up lengthways in a zig-zag form to give them stability,
with struts, or riders, at the angles, to bind them. These farms are
about nine hundred feet in width, and four or five miles in depth, being
the concessions or allotments made originally by the _seigneurs_ to the
_censitaires_, or tillers of the soil. Every here and there, a long road
is left, with cross ones, to obtain access to the farms, much in the
same way, but not near so conveniently, or well done, as the concession
lines in Upper Canada, which embrace large spaces of a hundred acre or
two hundred acre lots, including many of these lots, and giving a
sixty-six feet or a forty foot road, as the case may be, and thus
dividing the country into a series of large parallelograms, and making
every farm accessible.

Each Lower French Canadian farmer is an independent yeoman, excepting as
bound to the soil, and to certain seignorial dues and privileges, which
are, however, trifling, and far from burthensome. Taxes are unknown,
and they cheerfully support their priesthood.

It is not generally known in England that the feudal tenure--although
very laughable and absurd at this time of day, and from which some
seigneurs, but never those of unmixed French blood, are disposed to
claim titles equivalent to the baronage of England, with incomes of
about a thousand a year, or at most two, and manorial houses, resembling
very much a substantial Buckinghamshire grazier's chateau--was
originally established by the French monarchs for wise, highly useful,
and benevolent purposes.

These seigneuries were parcelled out in very large tracts of forest
along the banks of the St. Lawrence, or the rivers and bays of Lower
Canada, on the condition that they should be again parcelled out among
those who would engage to cultivate them in the strips above-mentioned.
Thus re-granted, the _seigneur_ could not eject the _habitant_, but was
allowed to receive a nominal or feudal rent from the vassal, and the
usual droits. These droits are, first, the barbarous "_lods et
ventes_," or one thirteenth of the money upon every transfer which the
_habitant_ makes by sale only; but the original rent can never be
raised, whatever value the land may have attained. The rights of the
mill, that old European appanage of the lord of the soil, were also
reserved to the seigneur, who alone can build mills within his domain,
or use the waters within his boundaries for mechanical purposes; but he
must erect them at convenient distances, and must make and repair roads.
The miller, therefore, takes toll of the grist, which is another source
of seignorial revenue, although not a very great one, for the toll is,
excepting the miller's thumb rights, not very large.

The crown of England is the lord paramount or suzerain, and demands a
tax of one fifth of the purchase-money of each seignory sold or
transferred by the lord of the manor.

By law, the lands cannot be subdivided, and if a seigneurie is sold it
cannot be sold in parts, nor can any compromise with the habitants for
rent, or any other claim or incumbrance, be made.

An institution like this paralyzes the resident, paralyzes the settler,
and destroys that aristocracy for whose benefit it was created; for it
prevents the lord of the manor from ever becoming rich, or taking much
interest in the improvement of his domain; and thus every thing
continues as it was a hundred years ago. The British emigrant pauses ere
he buys land thus enthralled; and almost all the old French families,
who dated from Charlemagne, Clovis, or Pepin, from the Merovingian or
Carlovingian monarchies, have disappeared and dwindled away, and their
places have been supplied by the more enterprising, or the _nouveau
riche_ men of the old world, or by restless, acute lawyers, and
metaphysical body-curers.

It was no wonder, therefore, that, upon the removal of the seat of
government from Toronto, and the appointment of a governor-general
untrammelled by the lieutenant governorship of Western Canada, over
which he had had before no control, that it should be considered
desirable by degrees to introduce the English land system throughout
Canada, and that parliamentary inquiry should be made into the necessity
of abolishing all feudal taxation. In Montreal this has been done, and,
as the seignoral rights of succession lapse, it will soon be done every
where, for the recent enactments have emancipated many already.

But no sensible or feeling mind will desire to see the French Canadian
driven to break up all at once habits formed by ages of contentment;
and, as it does not press upon them beyond their ready endurance, why
should we, to please a few rich capitalists or merchants, suddenly force
a British population into the heart of French Canada?

Jean Baptiste is too good a fellow to desire this. On our part, we
should not forget his truly amiable character; we should not forget the
services he rendered to us, when our children fought to drive us from
our last hold on the North American continent; we should not forget his
worthy and excellent priesthood; nor should we ever lose sight of the
fact, that he is contented under the old system. Above all, we should
never forget that he fought our battles when his Gallic sires joined our
revolted children.

I feel persuaded that, if an unhappy war must take place between the
United States and England, the French Canadians will prove, as they did
before on a similar occasion, loyal to a man.

All animosity, all heart-burning, will be forgotten, and the old French
glory will shine again, as it did under De Salaberry.

Ma foi, nous ne sommes pas perdus, encore; and some hero of the war has
only to rouse himself and cry, as Roland did,

Suivez, mon panage eclatant,
Francais ainsi que ma banniere;
Qu'il soit point du ralliement,
Vous savez tous quel prix attend
Le brave, qui dans la carriere,
Marche sur le pas de Roland.
Mourons pour notre patrie
C'est le sort le plus beau et le plus digne d'envie.

CHAPTER III.

A journey to the Westward.

We must leave Roncesvalles and La Gloire awhile, and, instead of riding
a war horse, canter along upon the hobby, or a good serviceable Canadian
pony, the best of all hobbies for seeing the Canadian world, and on
which mettlesome charger we can much better instruct the emigrant than
by long prosings about political economy and systematic colonisation.

So, _en avant_! I am going to relate the incidents of a journey last
summer to the Westward, and to give all the substance of my observations
on men and things made therein.

I left Kingston on the 26th of June, in the Princess Royal mail steamer,
at 8 p.m., the usual hour of starting being seven, for Toronto; the
weather unusually cold.

This fine boat constitutes, with two others, the City of Toronto and the
Sovereign, the royal mail line between Kingston and Toronto. All are
built nearly alike, are first class seaboats, and low pressure; they
combine, with the Highlander, the Canada, and the Gildersleave, also
splendid vessels, to form a mail route to Montreal--the latter boats
taking the mail as far as Coteau du Lac, forty-five miles from Montreal,
on which route a smaller vessel, the Chieftain, plies, wherein you
sleep, at anchor, or rather moored, till daylight, if going down, or
going upwards, on board the mail boat.

Passengers go from Montreal to Kingston by the mail route in twenty-four
hours, a distance of 180 miles; a small portion, between the Cascades
Rapids and the Coteau being traversed in a coach, on a planked road as
smooth as a billiard-table.

From Kingston to Toronto, or nearly the whole length of Lake Ontario,
takes sixteen hours, the boat leaving at seven, and arriving about or
before noon next day; performing the passage at the rate of eleven miles
an hour, exclusively of stoppages.

The transit between Montreal and Kingston is at the rate, including
stoppage for daylight, the river being dangerous, of eight miles an
hour; thus, in forty hours, the passenger passes from the seat of
government to the largest city of Western Canada most comfortably, a
journey which twenty years ago it always took a fortnight, and often a
month, to accomplish, in the most precarious and uncomfortable
manner--on board small, roasting steamers, crowded like a cattle-pen--in
lumbering leathern conveniences, miscalled coaches, over roads which
enter not into the dreams of Britons--by canoes--by bateaux, (a sort of
coal barges,)--by schooners, where the cabin could never permit you to
display either your length, your breadth, or your thickness, and thus
reducing you to a point in creation, according to Euclid and his
commentators.

Your _compagnons de voyage_, on board a bateau or Durham boat, which was
a _monstre_ bateau, were French Canadian voyageurs, always drunk and
always gay, who poled you along up the rapids, or rushed down them with
what will be will be.

These happy people had a knack of examining your goods and chattels,
which they were conveying in the most admirable manner, and with the
utmost _sang-froid_; but still they were above stealing--they only
tapped the rum cask or the whiskey barrel, and appropriated any cordage
wherewith you bound your chests and packages. I never had a chest, box,
or bale sent up by bateau or Durham boat that escaped this rope mail.

By the by, the Durham boat, a long decked barge, square ahead, and
square astern, has vanished; Ericson's screw-propellers have crushed it.
It was neither invented by nor named after Lord Durham, but was as
ancient as Lambton House itself.

The way the conductors of these boats found out vinous liquors was, as
brother Jonathan so playfully observes, a _caution_.

I have known an instance of a cask of wine, which, for security from
climate, had an outer case or cask strongly secured over it, with an
interior space for neutralizing frost or heat, bored so carefully that
you could never discover how it had been effected, and a very
considerable quantum of beverage extracted.

I once had a small barrel, perhaps twenty gallons of commissariat West
India ration rum, the best of all rum for liqueurs, sucked dry. Of
course, it had leaked, but I never could discover the leak, and it held
any liquid very well afterwards.

I know the reader likes a story, and as this is not by any means an
historical or scientific work, excepting always the geological portion
thereof, I will tell him or her, as the case may be, a story about
ration rum.

There was a funny fellow, an Irish auctioneer at Kingston, some years
ago, called Paddy Moran, whom all the world, priest and parson, minister
and methodist, soldier and sailor, tinker and tailor, went to hear when
he mounted his rostrum.

He was selling the goods of a quarter-master-general who was leaving the
place. At last he came to the cellar and the rum. "Now, gintlemin," says
Moran, "I advise you to buy this rum, 7s. 6d. a gallon! going, going!
Gintlemin, I was once a sojer--don't laugh, you officers there, for I
was--and a sirjeant into the bargain. It wasn't in the Irish
militia--bad luck to you, liftenant, for laughing that way, it will
spoil the rum! I was the tip-top of the sirjeants of the regiment--long
life to it! Yes, I was quarter-master-sirjeant, and hadn't I the sarving
out of the rations; and didn't I know what good ration rum was; and
didn't I help meself to the prime of it! Well, then, gintlemin and
ladies--I mane, Lord save yees, ladies and gintlemin--if a
quarter-master-sirjeant in the army had good rum, what the devil do you
think a quarter-master-general gets?"

The rum rose to fifteen shillings per gallon at the next bid.

You can have every convenience on board a Lake Ontario mail-packet,
which is about as large as a small frigate, and has the usual sea
equipment of masts, sails, and iron rigging. The fare is five dollars in
the cabin, or about L1 sterling; and two dollars in the steerage. In the
former you have tea and breakfast, in the latter nothing but what is
bought at the bar. By paying a dollar extra you may have a state-room on
deck, or rather on the half-deck, where you find a good bed, a large
looking-glass, washing-stand and towels, and a night-lamp, if required.
The captains are generally part owners, and are kind, obliging, and
communicative, sitting at the head of their table, where places for
females and families are always reserved. The stewards and waiters are
coloured people, clean, neat, and active; and you may give
sevenpence-halfpenny or a quarter-dollar to the man who cleans your
boots, or an attentive waiter, if you like; if not, you can keep it, as
they are well paid.

The ladies' cabin has generally a large cheval glass and a piano, with a
white lady to wait, who is always decked out in flounces and furbelows,
and usually good-looking. All you have got to do on embarking or on
disembarking is to see personally to your luggage; for leaving it to a
servant unacquainted with the country will not do. At Kingston, matters
are pretty well arranged, and the carters are not so very impudent, and
so ready to push you over the wharf; but at Toronto they are very so so,
and want regulating by the police; and in the States, at Buffalo
particularly, the porters and carters are the most presuming and
insolent serviles I ever met with; they rush in a body on board the
boat, and respect neither persons nor things.

I knew an American family composed chiefly of females, travelling to the
Falls; and these ladies had their baggage taken to a train going inland,
whilst they were embarking on board the British boat which was to convey
them to Chippewa in Canada.

The comfort of some of these boats, as they call them, but which ought
to be called ships, is very great. There is a regular drawingroom on
board one called the Chief Justice where I saw, just after the
horticultural show at Toronto, pots of the most rare and beautiful
flowers, arranged very tastefully, with a piano, highly-coloured
nautical paintings and portraits, and a _tout ensemble_, which, when the
lamps were lit, and conversation going on between the ladies and
gentlemen then and there assembled, made one quite forget we were at sea
on Lake Ontario, the "Beautiful Lake," which, like other beautiful
creations, can be very angry if vexed.

The Americans have very fine steam vessels on their side of the lake,
but they are flimsily constructed, painted glaringly, white, and green,
and yellow, without comfort or good attendance, and with a
devil-may-care sort of captain, who seems really scarcely to know or to
care whether he has passengers or has not, a scrambling hurried meal,
and divers other unmentionables.

The American gentry always prefer the British boats, for two good
reasons; they see Queen Victoria's people, and they meet with the utmost
civility, attention, and comfort. They sit down to dinner, or
breakfast, or tea, like Christian men and women, where there is no
railway eating and drinking; where due time is spent in refreshing the
body and spirits; and where people help each other, or the waiters help
them, at table, without a scramble, like hogs, for the best and the
most--a custom which all travelled Americans detest and abominate as
much as the most fastidious Englishman.

It is not unusual at hotel dinners, or on board steamers, to see a man,
I cannot call him a gentleman, sitting next a female, totally neglect
her, and heap his plate with fish, with flesh, with pie, with pudding,
with potato, with cranberry jam, with pickles, with salad, with all and
every thing then within his reach, swallow in a trice all this jumble of
edibles, jump up and vanish.

Can such a being have a stomach, or a digestion, and must he not
necessarily, about thirty-five years of age, be yellow, spare, and
parchment-skinned, with angular projections, and a prodigious tendency
to tobacco?

An American gentleman--mind, I lay a stress upon the second word--never
bolts his victuals, never picks his teeth at table, never spits upon the
carpet, or guesses; he knows not gin-sling, and he eschews mint-julep;
but he does, I am ashamed to say, admire a sherry cobbler, particularly
if he does not get a second-hand piece of vermicelli to suck it through.
Reader, do you know what a sherry cobbler is? I will enlighten you. Let
the sun shine at about 80 deg. Fahrenheit. Then take a lump of ice; fix it
at the edge of a board; rasp it with a tool made like a drawing knife or
carpenter's plane, set face upwards. Collect the raspings, the fine
raspings, mind, in a capacious tumbler; pour thereon two glasses of good
sherry, and a good spoonful of powdered white sugar, with a few small
bits, not slices, but bits of lemon, about as big as a gooseberry. Stir
with a wooden macerator. Drink through a tube of macaroni or vermicelli.
_C'est l'eau benite_, as the English lord said to the _garcon_ at the
Milles Colonnes, when he first tasted real _parfait amour_.--_C'est
beaucoup mieux_, _Milor_, answered the waiter with a profound
reverence.

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