Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

CHAPTER X

MONTREAL: QUEBEC

I

Montreal was not actually in the schedule. In the program of the Prince's tour it was put down as the last place he should visit. This, in a sense, was fitting. It was proper that the greatest city in Canada should wind up the visit in a befitting week.

All the same, as the Prince himself said, he could not possibly start for the West without making at least a call on Montreal, so he rounded off his travels among the big cities of the Canadian East by spending the inside of a day there.

I wonder whether there was ever an inside of a day so crowded? I was present when Manchester rushed President Wilson through a headlong morning of events, and the Manchester effort was pedestrian beside Montreal's. Even the Prince, who himself can put any amount of vigour into life, must have found nothing in his experience to equal a non-stop series of ceremonies carried on, at times, at a pace of forty-miles an hour.

That is what happened. Montreal was given about four hours of the Prince. Montreal is a progressive city; it has an up-to-date and "Do-It-Now" sense. Confronted at very short notice with those four hours, it promptly set itself to make the most of them. It packed about four days' program into them.

It managed this, of course, by using motor-cars. The whole of the American Continent, I have come to see, has a motor-car method of thinking out and accomplishing things. Montreal certainly has. Montreal met the Prince in an automobile mood, whipped him from the train and entertained him on the top gear for every moment of his stay.

II

He arrived at the handsome Windsor Station of the C.P.R. on the morning of Tuesday, September 2nd, and was at once taken to a big, grey motor. His guide, the Mayor of the city, then began to show him how time could be annihilated and days compressed into hours.

In those few hours he was shown not a section of the great commercial city, not merely the City Hall, and a street or two, and a place wherein to lunch. He was shown all Montreal. He was shown the city of Montreal and the suburbs of Montreal, and verily I believe he was shown every man, woman, and certainly every child of flag-wagging age, in Montreal.

And when he had seen the high, fine business blocks of Montreal, and the pretty residential districts, where the well-designed homes seem to stand on terrace over terrace of the smoothest, greenest grass, he was shown the country-side about Montreal, the comely little habitant parishes and holiday places that make outlying Montreal, and the convents and the colleges where Montreal educates itself, the Universities where that education is rounded off, and the long, wide, straight speedways over which Montreal citizens get the best out of their motor-car moments—and he was shown how it was done.

And after showing him the rivers that make the hilly country about Montreal beautiful, and the little pocket villages, he was swung back out of the green of the summer country and shown more business blocks, and just a hint of the great wharves and docks that fringe the St. Lawrence and give the city its great industrial power and fame. Then when they had shown him all the things that man usually sees only after weeks of tenacious exploration, they spun him up a corkscrew drive that goes first among charming houses, then among beautiful deep trees and grass, and sat him down in a glowing pavilion on the top of this hill, Mount Royal—the Montreal that gives the city its name—and gave him lunch.

There, as he ate, he looked down over one of the great views of the world. Below him was the splendid vista of a splendid city; the mass of tall offices, factories and the high fret of derricks and elevators along the quays that covered the site of the Indian lodges of Hochelaga that Jacques Cartier first found; the mass of spires from a thousand churches, the swelling domes and hipped roofs of basilica and college that had grown up from the old religious outpost, the nucleus of Christianity in the wilds that was to convert the wilds, the Ville Marie de Montreal that Maisonneuve had founded nearly three centuries ago.

And beyond this swinging breadth of city that was modernity, as well as history, the Prince saw the grey, misty bosom of the St. Lawrence, winding broad and significant beneath the distant hills.

III

Truly it had been a mighty day, worthy of a mighty city. And a day not merely big in achievement, but big in meaning also. In his drive the Prince had covered no less than thirty-six miles in and about the city, and on practically the whole of that great sweep there had been crowds, and at times big crowds, all friendly and with an enthusiasm that was French as well as Canadian.

There were naturally tracts of road in the country where people did not gather in force, but almost everywhere there were some. Sometimes it was a family gathered by a pretty house draped with flags. Sometimes it was a village, making up with the flags in their hands for the hanging flags short notice had prevented their sporting.

On an open stretch of road the Prince would come abreast of a convent in the fields. By the fence of the convent all the little girls would be ranked, dressed, sometimes, in national ribbons, and anyhow carrying flags, and with them would be the nuns. Or if the convent was not a teaching order, the nuns would be by themselves, forming a delightful picture of quiet respect on the porch or along the garden wall.

Boys' schools had the inmates gathered at the road-edge in jolly mobs, though some of these had a semi-military dignity, because of the quaint and kepi-ed uniform of the school, that made the boys look like cadets out of a picture by Detaille.

The seminaries had their flocks of black fledglings drawn up under the professor-priests, and the sober black of these embryo priests had not the slightest restriction on their enthusiasm.

There were crowds everywhere on that extraordinary ride, but it was in Montreal itself that the throngs reached immense proportions. From the first moment of arrival, when the Prince in mufti rode out from under the clangour of "God Bless the Prince of Wales" played on the bells of St. George's Church, that hob-nobs with the station, crowds were thick about the route. As he swung from Dominion Square (in which the station stands) into the Regent Street of Montreal, St. Catherine Street, crowds of employés crowded the windows of the big and fine stores, and added their welcome to the mass on the sidewalks.

Short notice had curtailed decoration, but the enthusiastic employés (mainly feminine) of one tall store strove to rectify the lack by arming themselves with flags and stationing themselves at every window. Balancing perilously, they waited until the Prince came level, and then set the whole face of the tall building fluttering with Union Jacks.

From these streets, impressive in their sense of vigour and industry, the procession of cars mounted through the residential quarter to Mount Royal Park. Here in the presence of a big crowd that surrounded him and got to close quarters at once, the Prince alighted and stayed a few minutes at the statue of Georges Etienne Cartier, the father of Canadian unity, whose centenary was then being celebrated, since the war forbade rejoicing on the real anniversary in 1914.

Cartier's daughter, Hortense Cartier, was present at this little ceremony, and she was, as it were, a personal link between her father and the Prince, who is himself helping to inaugurate a new phase of unity, that of the Empire.

From this point the Prince's route struck out into the country districts that I have described, but the crowds had accumulated rather than diminished when he returned to the streets of the city, about one o'clock, and he drove through lanes of people so dense that at times the pace of his car was retarded to a walk.

The crowd was a suggestive one. All ranks and conditions were in it—and conditions rather than ranks were apparent in the dock-side area, which is a dingy one for Canada. But in all the crowds the thing that struck me most was their proportion of children. Montreal seemed a veritable hive of children. There were thousands and thousands of them.

The streets were bursting with kiddies. And not merely were there multitudes of girls and boys of that thoroughly vociferous age of somewhere under twelve, but there were ranked battalions of boys and maids, all of an age obviously under twenty.

Quebec is the province of large families. Ten children to a marriage is a commonplace, and twenty is not a rarity. A man is not thought to be worth his salt unless he has his quiver full. And the result of this as I saw it in the streets gives food for thought.

That huge marshalling of the citizens of tomorrow gives one not merely a sense of Canada's potentiality, but of the potentiality of Quebec in the future of Canada. With a new race of such a healthy standard growing up, the future of Montreal has a look of greatness. Montreal is now the biggest and most vigorous city in Canada, it plays a large part in the life of Canada. What part will it play tomorrow?

A good as well as great part, surely. Discriminating Canadians tell you that the French-Canadian makes the best type of citizen. He is industrious, go-ahead, sane, practical; he is law-abiding and he is loyal. His history shows that he is loyal; indeed, Canada as it stands today owes not a little to French-Canadian loyalty and willingness to take up arms in support of British institutions.

French-Canada took up arms in the Great War to good purpose, sending 40,000 men to the Front, though its good work has been obscured by the political propaganda made out of the Anti-Conscription campaign. Sober politicians—by no means on the side of the French-Canadians—told me that there was rather more smoke in that matter than circumstances created, and in Britain particularly the business was over-exaggerated. There was a good deal of politics mixed up in the attitude of Quebec, "And in any case," said my informant, "Quebec was not the first to oppose conscription, nor yet the bitterest, though she was, perhaps, the most candid."

The language difficulty is a difficulty, yet that has been the subject of exaggeration, also. Those who find it a grave problem seem to be those who have never come in contact with it, but are anxious about it at a distance. Those who are in contact with the French-speaking races say that French and English-speaking peoples get on well on the whole, and have an esteem for each other that makes nothing of the language barrier.

Concerning the Roman Catholic Church, which is certainly in a very powerful position in Quebec, I have heard from non-Catholics quite as much said in favour of the good it does, as I have heard to the contrary, so I concluded that on its human side it is as human as any other concern, doing good and making mistakes in the ordinary human way. As far as its spiritual side is concerned there is no doubt at all that it holds its people. Its huge churches are packed with huge congregations at every service on Sunday.

On the whole, then, I fancy that that part of Canada's future which lies in the hands of the children of Montreal, and the Province of Quebec generally, will be for the good of the Dominion. Certainly the attitude of the people as shown in the packed and ecstatic streets of Montreal was a very good omen.

The welcome had had its usual effect on the Prince. The formal salute never had a chance, and from the outset of the ride he had stood up in his car and waved back in answer to the cheering of the crowd. When standing for so many miles tired him, he sat high up on the folded hood, with one of his suite to hold him, and he did not stop waving his hat. In this way he accomplished the thirty-six miles ride, only slipping down into his seat as the car mounted the stiff zig-zag that led up Mount Royal to the luncheon pavilion.

The slowness of this climb was, in a sense, his undoing. As his car neared the top of the hill, two Montreal flappers, whose extreme youth was only exceeded by their extreme daring, sprang on to the footboard and held him up with autograph books. He immediately produced a fountain pen, and sitting once more on the back of the car, wrote his name as the car went along, and the young ladies from Montreal clung on to it.

This delightful act was too much for one of the maidens, for, on getting her book back, she kissed the Prince impulsively, and then in a sudden attack of deferred modesty, sprang from the car and ran for her blushes' sake.

From the luncheon pavilion the Prince was whirled to the Royal train, and in that, after a recuperative round of golf at a course just outside Montreal, he set out for the comparative calm of the great West.