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A HOCKEY PLAYER.
Churches, churches, everywhere. In my drive this afternoon, I counted twenty-eight in a quarter of an hour. They are of all denominations, Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, etc., etc. The Canadians must be still more religious—I mean still more church-going—than the English.
From seven in the evening on Saturday, all the taverns are closed, and remain closed throughout Sunday. In England the Bible has to compete with the gin bottle, but here the Bible has all its own way on Sundays. Neither tram-car, omnibus, cab, nor hired carriage of any description is to be seen abroad. Scotland itself is outdone completely; the land of John Knox has to take a back seat.
The walls of this city of churches and chapels are at the present moment covered with huge coarse posters announcing in loud colors the arrival of a company of performing women. Of these posters, one represents Cleopatra in a bark drawn through the water by nude female slaves. Another shows a cavalcade of women dressed in little more than a fig-leaf. Yet another represents the booking-office of the theater stormed by a crowd of blasé-looking, single eye-glassed old beaux, grinning with pleasure in anticipation of the show within. Another poster displays the charms of the proprietress of the undertaking. You must not, however, imagine any harm of the performers whose attractions are so liberally placarded. They are taken to their cars in the depot immediately after the performance and locked up; there is an announcement to that effect. These placards are merely eye-ticklers. But this mixture of churches, strict sabbatarianism, and posters of this kind, is part of the eternal history of the Anglo-Saxon race—violent contrast.
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A school inspector has kindly shown me several schools in the town.
The children of rich and poor alike are educated together in the public schools, from which they get promoted to the high schools. All these schools are free. Boys and girls sit on the same benches and receive the same education, as in the United States. This enables the women in the New World to compete with men for all the posts that we Europeans consider the monopoly of man; it also enables them to enjoy all the intellectual pleasures of life. If it does not prevent them, as it has yet to be proved that it does, from being good wives and mothers, the educational system of the New World is much superior to the European one. It is essentially democratic. Europe will have to adopt it.