CHAPTER IX
TORONTO, NIAGARA FALLS, AND A NEGRO PORTER
From Montreal to Toronto is a pleasant run through a southern part of Canada. One passes orchards and woods and Smith's Falls, where bricks are made, and Peterborough, which has the largest hydraulic lift-lock in the world. The Union railway station at Toronto, when I got there, was a seething mass of people and baggage, with an occasional railway official hidden in the vortex. I spent an hour trying to put a bag into the parcel-room, and after that gave up trying. Canadians are singularly patient in matters of this kind. Laden with heavy bags, they will collect in crowds outside the small window of a parcel-room, and burdened thus will wait there for hours without a murmur, while the youth inside lounges about at his leisure. My temper has frequently been stretched to the limit in Germany when I have had to wait perhaps ten minutes for a penny stamp while the Prussian postal official behind the glass slit curled his moustaches in imitation of the Kaiser. I think the methods at that parcel-room in Toronto were even more trying. I will admit that it was Labour Day, and that Toronto was also in the throes of the World's Fair. But in a city of that size one would expect some preparation to be made for forthcoming throes. The truth seems to be that throughout Canada important events, attracting immense crowds, are brought off without any extra provision being made. Montreal managed to contain its Congress hordes pretty well, but Toronto during the World's Fair had a general air about it of sleeping six in a bed, if it slept at all. I kept coming across the same sort of thing at other places. Calgary, I remember, looked for the few days I was there like the Old Kent Road on a Saturday night, so crowded was it with people who had come in to witness the return to its native heath of a victorious football team. Regina was overrun with the Canadian bankers who, in massive formation, were touring the North-West. In one or two small places in the Rockies enormous trainloads of Canada's leading merchants, who were inspecting British Columbia with an eye to its future, were deposited for a day in passing, and caused as much confusion as the canoe-loads of savages must have done when they descended on Robinson Crusoe's island.
Labour Day is in the New World very different from what it is with us. In Canada, if you like, you may for three hundred and sixty-four days labour and do all that you have to do, but the three hundred and sixty-fifth is Labour Day, and no manner of work—except transportation—may be done that day. Transport work is necessary, because by way of observing Labour Day it is the thing to go somewhere in great multitudes, preferably by rail, and pursue the sort of pleasure that is only to be obtained by those who seek it multitudinously.
Toronto was on this occasion a chosen spot for people to rollick in. This, added to the fact that the World's Fair was also in progress, prevented me from being able to get a room for the night, though I applied at five different hotels. At the sixth, which was full of excited commercial travellers, I was granted a bed on a top landing. I did not mind so much because I was seeing Toronto in a lively state. Ordinarily, I imagine, Toronto is the least bit too decorous, not devoid of cheerfulness, but not joyous either. There is nothing Parisian about Toronto, you would say. This stands to reason, because if there is any Parisian air in Canada at all it belongs to Montreal, and Toronto would be the last place to imitate Montreal in any manner. The extraordinary rivalry that exists between the great East Canadian cities never leads to imitation. On the plains it is different. Winnipeg is the great model for all the little towns on the plains. But while Quebec resents the idea that Montreal is a much more important city than itself, and Montreal regrets that the seat of Government should be at so small a place as Ottawa, and Toronto considers Montreal ill-balanced in spite of its wealth, each of them would only consent to expand its own real superiority along its own particular lines and in its own particular manner.
Still on Labour Night Toronto was quite gay. It did not look like the Boston of Canada at all, though it has substantial grounds, I read somewhere, for making this claim. I could realise that it was entitled to make this claim if it wanted to. If one shut one's eyes to the crowds, one could feel an air of brisk sobriety permeating it; and everything that one reads about it goes to show that a brisk sobriety is what it aims at. It keeps the Sabbath, for example, most strictly, though it hustles or almost hustles the rest of the week. I should guess Toronto places briskness next to godliness, not a very bad second either. Its industries and its opulence are too well known to be worth detailing here. What struck me as most interesting about Toronto was that it seemed to represent more than any other place in Canada what we mean in England when we talk of Canadians. We do not mean the French Canadians of Quebec Province, nor the American Canadians and English public-school boys who are to be found in such numbers in Alberta and the plains. The sort of people we are thinking of are people who have been born in Canada, who have even spent generations there, but are, nevertheless, British by descent and British in tongue. There are people of this sort in other parts of Canada. The inhabitants of the Maritime Provinces are such, in spite of the fact that Mr. Bourassa has claimed that within fifteen years they will have become French in language and Roman Catholic in faith. Mr. Bourassa has made the same claim, to be sure, with regard to the inhabitants of Ontario. In the meantime, it would be truer to describe the inhabitants of Ontario as Canadians in the English sense. And Toronto is their capital. It is, of course, the home of the United Empire Loyalists who settled here when the States broke away from our rule. The temper that made any rule but England's and any liberty that was not English liberty unendurable still remains, and I think Mr. Bourassa will have his work cut out to Gallicise them. Still even the sternest traditions of loyalty do not prevent—nay, even encourage—a certain change in the character of a people.
It is probable that Ontarians are less English now than they were, just as Quebeckers are less French. Which have the right to be held more essentially Canadian may be questioned, but I repeat that when we in England talk of Canadians we have in mind a type of men to which the Ontarians correspond more than any others. It would be absurd, no doubt, to look for the English type in a metropolis like London, and perhaps it is absurd to look for the Ontarian type in a metropolis like Toronto. But it is less absurd, I think, and anyhow I did look for it there. What did I find? Well, I hope elsewhere to go cautiously and delicately into this matter of what a typical Canadian is like. Here I will only say that if you can imagine a Lowland Scot, cautious and self-possessed, outwardly resisting American exuberance and extravagance, but inwardly by slow degrees absorbing—and thereby moderating—that hustling spirit of which these things are manifestations, you have something not unlike the Canadian of Toronto. Remember that Toronto is the southern gateway of Canada. It fronts on the States. It deals with the States. Between it and the States there is constant intercourse. It pursues the same industries, following in many cases the same methods. Many American managers of men are to be found in Toronto. It is not unnatural that some of the American spirit should dwell there also, and even tend to breed there.
Now for the Fair. Fairing is a pretty old thing, and I have done a good deal of it, but fairing at Toronto struck me as being somehow new. I do not mean in the way of the exhibits one saw. They were nothing out of the way to any one who has seen the more famous exhibitions of the Old World, and the arrangements struck me as poor. The grounds by the lake are fairly extensive, but the buildings are second-rate. I thought when I saw the fruit exhibit in one of them that the whole display was little better than at a little English village flower show. But the keenness of the crowd visiting the ground! There was the novelty. They did not glimpse at things in our blasé European way, and then sink into seats to listen to the band. They did listen to the band, but that was because the band was part of the show; and they wanted to do the show, every inch of it. Whole families camped for the day on the grounds. They brought meals with them in paper bags and boxes to fortify themselves lest they should drop before they had seen everything. Not that there was any lack of smartness either. The ladies had on their best hats and frocks, and the Canadian best in these respects is very fine. But one did not suspect them, as one would have suspected ladies at the White City or the Brussels Exhibition, of being there merely to show themselves off. Their frocks were in honour of the Fair. The Fair was the thing. It was a scene of the greatest enthusiasm under a tolerably hot sun. I had been asked to note if any English firms had taken the trouble to exhibit, and I am bound to say that I saw very few. It seems a pity when one considers the sort of people who visit the Fair—not merely a crowd amusing itself for an hour or two with glancing at the exhibits, but a crowd trying to find out what there was to buy—a crowd with dollars in its pockets and plenty of dollars in its banks. I dare say there are difficulties in the way. There was not, for example, indefinite room for more exhibits, nor are Canadian manufacturers, with rumours of reduced tariffs going about, to be presumed eager to encourage competitors. Still, it seemed a pity.
I clove my way to bed that night on the top landing through a horde of keen commercial travellers joyfully discussing all the business the exhibition would bring them. Next day I went to Niagara, by steamer, across the great lake. Toronto owes at least half its greatness to the Falls, and there should be, but I do not think there is, a really big monument to their discoverer, Father Louis Hennepin. Very likely, though, the discovery of Niagara was its own reward, especially for so inquisitive a man as that friar. He has himself confessed how, in the old days, when he was only a begging friar, sent by the Superior of his Order to beg for alms at the seaport of Calais, he used, in his curiosity, to hide himself behind tavern doors and listen to the sailors within telling of their voyages, while their tobacco smoke was wafted out and made him 'very sick at the stomach.' In the end he was the first white man to see the Falls, in the winter of 1687....
They were framed in a most gorgeous sunset when I saw them on an August day. The green and white foam swooped from a mountain of clouds all grey and gold—clouds piled fantastically into the furthest sky. No one seeing them in such a light could be disappointed with them, but I would forbid any more writers to write about them. Every man should be his own poet where the greater sights of the world are concerned. On second thoughts it is permissible to read Mr. Howells on the subject, and even Dickens, provided one is never likely to see them with one's own eyes. I saw the Falls at sunset, by starlight, and in the sunrise, and I can commend them at all these times. The river that drowned Captain Webb and was crossed by Blondin on the tight-rope, though extraordinary in its way, seemed to me comparatively unbeautiful and uninteresting. Any big sea on the Atlantic or Pacific is a finer sight and grips a man harder. I like a river quiet myself. Moreover, the villas above Niagara River give the landscape a domestic air in which its mad swirl seems only like an attempt to show off malignantly.