I think Canada’s chief charm is her people, with their delightful freedom from snobbishness and their sense of the dignity of labour. Prime Ministers of Provinces give themselves no airs of superiority, and, so far as manner is concerned, there is nothing to distinguish a railway director from a railway porter. One class, however, does seem to occupy a position of some superiority. I refer to shoe-blacks. It is not in my heart to begrudge them their exaltation of spirit. They are artists. Canadians, not particularly concerned about dress in a general way, have agreed in attaching great importance to a well-polished boot. In the haphazard British Isles almost anyone is considered capable of applying blacking and brushes to footgear, but in Canada the operation ranks as an art, whose professors are understood to have been born with their special aptitude. Britishers on a first visit to the Dominion mechanically place their boots outside their bedroom doors on retiring for the night. How the bell boys smile! The desired end is not to be attained that way. In the morning you must go yourself, with your boots on your feet, to one of the palatial saloons where the art is practised. The result, attained by protracted and cunning exertions, is sure to surprise and please you. Nay, in the joy of finding your boots transformed to mirrors, it is likely you will not bewail the substantial fee demanded.
It is, by the way, a curious feature of the country that it dispenses with small payments. A box of matches, a newspaper, a tram ride—for each of these, five cents is the charge. A bronze coinage exists, but it can hardly be said to be used; indeed, in the west, shopkeepers refuse to accept it. The only thing you can buy for two cents, so far as my experience goes, is a postage stamp of that value. But note the happy significance of this disdain of coppers. Money is a utility constantly accessible to all classes in Canada, every form of manual and mental labour yielding in that country an easy margin beyond the living wage: wherein lies the difference between Great Britain on one side of the Atlantic and Greater Britain on the other—between the small country at the zenith of its development and the large country that offers ever-widening opportunities to industrious humanity.
Of what the Dominion is, and of what it will become, I have attempted to afford some glimpses in this book, which haply may assist in stimulating young Britons to cross the sea and enter into their inheritance. And with Canada’s expansion we may dream of the day when our Empire, grown strongest on the North-American continent, shall join with the sister democracy of the United States in leading the world to universal peace.
INDEX
A
Acadia, settlement in, [12]
Agricultural pests, [261]
—— possibilities in the North West, [134]
—— produce of Saskatchewan, [195]