There is no state church, but all the leading denominations, and many smaller ones, are represented. The University of Toronto (which has more than four thousand undergraduates) is non-sectarian, but there are a number of other universities and colleges connected with the several churches. The education of children is free, and their attendance at school compulsory. The school system begins with the kindergarten, and leads up through the public school and the high school to the university. There are unsectarian public schools and Roman Catholic “separate” schools.
Amongst other valuable educational agencies in the province there were in 1912 four hundred and seventeen public and two hundred and forty-two travelling libraries, which reach many a remote village and lumber camp, and three hundred and seventy-five agricultural and eighty horticultural societies. In this connection it may be mentioned that the Ontario Agricultural College and Experimental Farm at Guelph enrolled, in 1911, no less than 1,500 students, whilst the Farmers’ Institutes and Women’s Institutes number their members by thousands. There are, of course, numerous associations and societies in the cities and towns for the furtherance of objects of a religious, philanthropic, or educational character, but the comparatively recent increase of associations of farmers and farmers’ wives and daughters is especially interesting, because the enriching and development of rural social life touches a problem of national importance. These associations may prove of much advantage to the newcomer willing to profit by them.
According to the last census, considerably over half the population of Ontario is urban, but in the settled districts at least such recent innovations as rural telephones and mail deliveries are making the country life easier and more attractive. Men, accustomed to farm labour in the “Old Country,” seem to be astonished at the number of labour-saving machines employed on the farms, and, in some localities, farmers share in the advantages of the “Hydro-Electric Power,” developed from Niagara under the management of a government commission.
But, after all, it is not only material good things for which the emigrant seeks when he leaves his home-land. I have said something of the schools already, I might have said more of the churches which everywhere—in the crowded cities, in the quiet country, and in the lonely wilderness, sometimes nobly, sometimes feebly—are doing work for the growing nation which only they can do. I might tell of the vigorous, and upon the whole, successful, struggle which men and women are making in the cause of temperance—in Ontario and in other provinces—and of other efforts, needed even in this new land of opportunities, to prevent the exploiting of helpless children and young girls by greedy money-makers, to stamp out tuberculosis, to guard infant life, to cleanse the land of evils, physical and spiritual.
Ontario—and the Dominion—is, indeed, a land of endeavour as well as of opportunity, but the people are not too busy to find time to be helpful, and amongst the abiding impressions left from the years spent by the writer as an inexperienced worker on an Ontario farm, is that of the kindness and friendliness of neighbours, some of whom remembered similar experiences. And the hard work of the life was lightened by the loveliness of a beautiful country, and by no little pleasant sociability.
1. TORONTO UNIVERSITY.
2. CANADIAN NORTHERN ELEVATOR AT PORT ARTHUR.
3. SPADINA AVE. & QUEEN ST. TORONTO.