And just as Toronto once did her part in depopulating the north of Ireland, so today is the Province of Ontario and the country to the west of it draining old England. It is related that one little English village—Dove Holes is its name and it is situate in Derbyshire—has been sadly depleted in just this fashion. Eight years ago and it boasted a population of 1250 persons. Today 500 of that number are in America—a new village of their own right in the city of Toronto, if you please—and Dove Holes awaits another Goldsmith to sing of its saddened charms. One resident came, the others followed in his trail to a land that spelled both opportunity and elbow-room. Your real Englishman of so-called middle class, even gentlemen of the profession or service in His Majesty's arms, seem to have one consuming passion. It is to cross Canada and live and die in the little West Coast city of Victoria. Victoria stands on Vancouver island and they have begun to call Vancouver island, "Little England." In its warm, moist climate, almost in its very conformation, it is a replica of the motherland of an Englishman's ideal; a motherland with everything annoying, from hooliganism to suffragettes, removed.
But Victoria is across a broad continent as well as a broad sea, and so your thrifty emigrant from an English town picks Toronto as the city of his adoption. Winnipeg he deems too American; Montreal, with her damnable French blood showing even in the street-signs and the car-placards, quite out of the question. But Toronto does appeal to him and so he comes straight to her. There are whole sections of the town that are beginning to look as if they might have been stolen from Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool—even London itself. The little red-brick houses with their neat, small windows are as distinctively British as the capped and aproned house-maids upon the street. In the States it takes a mighty battle to make a maid wear uniform upon the street. In Toronto it is not even a question for argument. The negro servant, so common to all of us, is unknown. The service of the better grade of Toronto houses is today carefully fashioned upon the British model—even to meal hours and the time-honored English dishes upon the table. And in less aristocratic streets of the town one may see a distinctively British institution, taken root and apparently come to stay. It is known as a "fish and chip shop" and it retails fried fish and potato chips, already cooked and greasy enough to be endearing to the cockney heart.
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Remember also that the city upon the north shore of Lake Ontario is an industrial center of great importance. You cannot measure the tonnage of Toronto harbor as you measured the harbor of Cleveland—alongside of the greatest ports of the world—for Ontario is the lonely sister of the five Lakes. No busy commercial fleet treks up and down her lanes. But Toronto is a railroad center of increasing importance; they are still multiplying the lines out from her terminals and, as we have just intimated, she is a great and growing manufacturing community. Her industrial enterprises have been hungry for skilled and intelligent men. They have gradually drafted their ranks from the less-paid trades of the town. Into these places have come the men from the English towns. The street cars are manned by men of delightful cockney accent, they drive the broad flat "lourries," as an Englishman likes to call a dray, they fit well into every work that requires brawn and endurance rather than a high degree of intellectual effort.
Just how this invasion will affect the Toronto of tomorrow no one seems willing to prophesy. The men from Glasgow and from Manchester are used to municipal street railroads and such schemes and the New England town-meeting ideas, which were the products of Anglo-Saxon spirit, come home to rest in English hearts. The street railroad system of Toronto may groan under its burden—it is paying over a million dollars this year to the city and is constantly threatened with extinction as a private corporation. But the Englishman of that city merely grunts at the bargains it offers—six tickets for a quarter; eight in rush-hours, ten for school children and seven for Sabbath riding, all at the same price—and wonders "why the nawsty trams canna' do better by a codger that's workin' like a navvie all the day?"
Toronto will see that they do better—that is her vision into the future. But just how the new blood is to infuse into some of the Puritan ideas of the town—there is another question. Here is a single one of the new puzzling points—the temperance problem. It was not so very long ago that Canada's chief claim for fame rested in the excellence of her whiskey—and that despite the fact that the Canadian climate is ill-adapted to whiskey drinking. The twelfth of July—which you will probably recall as the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne—used to be marked by famous fights, which invariably had marine foundations in Canadian rye. However, during the past quarter of a century, the temperance movement has waxed strong throughout Ontario. Many cities have become "dry" and it is possible that Toronto herself might have been without saloons today—if it had not been for the English invasion. For your Englishman regards his beer as food—"skittles and beer" is something more than merely proverbial—and he must have it. He looks complacently upon the stern Sabbath in Toronto—Sunday in an English city is rarely a hilarious occasion—but he must have his beer. Up to the present time he has had it.
But these problems are slight compared with the problem of assimilation of alien tongues and races, such as has come to New York within the past two decades. The Englishman is but a cousin to the Canadian after all, and he shows that by the enthusiasm with which he enters into her politics. He entered into Mr. Taft's pet reciprocity plan with an enthusiasm of a distinct sort. With all of his anti-American and pro-British ideas he leaped upon it. And when he had accomplished his own part in throttling that idea he exulted. Whether he will exult as much a dozen years hence over the defeat of reciprocity is an open question. But the part that the transplanted Englishman in Canada played in that defeat is unquestioned, just as the part he is playing in providing her with useless Dreadnoughts for the defense of other lands is undisputed.[H] The Englishman is no small factor in Canadian politics; he is a very great factor in the political situation in the city of Toronto.
[H] This plan is temporarily blocked in Canada, whose enthusiasm for Dreadnoughts seems to be waning. E. H.
Lest you should be bored by the politics of another land, turn your attention to the way the Toronto people live. They have formal entertainments a-plenty—dinners, balls, receptions—a great new castle is being built on the edge of Rosedale for a gubernatorial residence and presumably for the formal housing of royalty which often comes down from Ottawa. There are theaters and good restaurants, and no matter what you may say about her winters, the Canadian summers are delightful. For those who must go, there are the Muskoka Lakes within easy reach, Georgian bay and the untrod wildernesses beyond. But if we lived in Toronto, we think we should stay at home and enjoy that wonderful lake. There are yacht-clubs a-plenty alongside it, bathing beaches, sailing, canoeing—the opportunity for variety of sport is wide. In the milder seasons of the year there is golf and baseball, football, or even cricket, and in the wintertime tobogganing and snowshoeing and iceboating. No wonder that the cheeks of the Toronto girls are pink with good health.
In the autumn there is the big fair—officially the Canadian National Exhibition—which has grown from a very modest beginning into a real institution. Last year nearly a million persons entered its gates, there were more than a hundred thousand admissions upon a single very big day. Delegations of folk came from as far distant as Australia—there were special excursion rates from all but three of the United States. It is not only a big fair but a great fair, still growing larger with each annual exhibition. Toronto folk are immensely proud of it and give to it loyalty and support. And the Canadian government is not above gaining a political opportunity from it. We remember one autumn at Toronto three or four years ago seeing a great electric sign poised upon one of the main buildings. It was a moving sign and the genius of the electrician had made the semblance of a waving British banner. Underneath in fixed and glowing letters you might read: