The Fair Dominion: A Record of Canadian Impressions

by R. E. Vernède

Now you see the point of my aphorism. I do not propose to hold the balance between these distinguished cities. Both have their peculiar merits; and if Vancouver is likely in years to come to leave Victoria far behind in the race for industrial supremacy, Victoria is none the less likely to remain ahead of Vancouver in culture and the arts. At present I should judge that Victoria is distinctly the steadier city of the two. Speculation in land is the exception rather than the rule; prices go up steadily, and the land is bought by intending residents. At which point I will abandon comparisons, which are the more absurd because the destinies of the two towns are so widely different. Vancouver is a great port on the mainland of Canada, connecting it with Asia, the western States, South America, and whatever countries will henceforth export merchandise via the Panama Canal. Victoria is the political capital of British Columbia, with all the prestige that attaches to such a position and the finest climate in the Dominion. Not that it is only that. Some of its inhabitants consider that its prospects are immeasurably superior to those of Seattle, 'since the riches of Vancouver Island' (I quote from a local pamphlet), 'in their entirety incomparably more valuable than the gold-mines of Alaska, are directly tributary to the British Columbia capital.'

There is a great deal in this, though one has to remember that those riches will take many years to develop. The drawback to the immediate development of Vancouver Island is that it is covered with enormous timber. Reciprocity with the States is likely to give a fillip to the lumber industry, and the clearing of the land will then go on far quicker than hitherto. True, lumbermen do not actually clear the land; they leave the stumps behind them, and all the poorer trees. But they undoubtedly open the land up. Moreover, the revival of Esquimalt as a naval base will revive the prestige of Victoria, and create more work, besides inducing railwaymen to press on into the island.

I stopped there on my way back, partly to see the town itself, partly because I wished to see Mr. Richard M'Bride. The town disappointed me just a little. It commands a magnificent view of the mountains on the mainland, and the country all round is beautiful. But the villas and gardens, which one hears so much praised, struck me as a little commonplace. Perhaps it is that I like a town to be a town and a garden to be a garden; whereas Victoria is a sort of garden city, grateful no doubt to those eyes that are accustomed to the utilitarian towns of the West, but altogether lacking in architectural fineness. The Parliament Buildings are good, and would be very good if those responsible for their maintenance would remove the inscription 'Canada' from across the front of them. In its coloured lettering it looks like the icing-sugar mottoes you see inscribed on birthday cakes.

But let a more enthusiastic pen than mine (again I fall back on that local pamphlet) describe Victoria as it appears to Victorians.

'If there are sights more beautiful than the Olympian Mountains from Beacon Hill, or the windings of the Gorge as the waters come in from the sea between waving battlements of plumy firs, then eyes have not seen them. If there is a sweeter song than the skylark's matin melodies high up from Cadboro Bay, then ears have not heard it. If there be more bewildering loveliness than clusters about the shaded and flower-gemmed gardens of Victorian homes looking seaward, then poets have not written it in imperishable numbers, nor minstrels celebrated it in well-remembered song. If there be a city of dreams, even the fabled Atlantis of antiquity, or vision of Babylonian towers set in hanging gardens, and redolent of strange odours of musk and myrrh, or fairy casements opening out to perilous seas forlorn, then never one approached in splendour this jewel of all time, ringed by the azure seas and sentinelled by everlasting hills.... A bird's song drops like the sudden peal of a bell. Outside are broad boulevards, grey with powdery macadam, stretching towards the bustling city; highways of progress and modernity, now scrolled by the flight of a whizzing automobile, now echoing with the staccato sound of hurrying hoof-beats. Inside are flowers and brooding hedges, the sheen of close-cropped grasses and sun-lacquered tree-trunks—rest, peace, and sweet seclusion.'

After this it comes almost as a relief to know from the same pamphlet that 'the climate of Victoria is best expressed in figures.' There is a great deal to be said for figures.

There is a very good, small, natural-history museum in a wing attached to the Parliament Buildings, but it is absurdly small. The collection of Indian curios is remarkably inadequate, and merely tempts the visitor to ask when Canadians are going to devote some of the money they are undoubtedly making to a genuine study and collection of the remains of their predecessors in the land. Indians are not dying out as fast as some people suppose; but their crafts are, and so are their creeds and all that appertains to them. It would be easy even now to create a magnificent Indian museum, but it will become less and less easy as the years go by. Relics of Indian times are constantly being picked up by men travelling in out-of-the-way parts, or unearthed during railroad and other excavations, and if it were known that the authorities would be glad to receive them and would perhaps pay the cost of their carriage to some centre, there is no doubt that many valuable finds would be forwarded to them. The making of museums, just like the building of ships, is a branch of empire work which should not be neglected; and Victorians are eminently the people to recognise this.

It was in his rooms in Parliament Buildings that Mr. M'Bride conversed with me on the subject of British Columbia. You hear people say in Canada, that if ever that astutest of party leaders, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, goes out of office with his Liberals, Mr. M'Bride will shortly after become Prime Minister of the Dominion—as Conservative leader, be it understood. He is not a great orator, and he has no scheme even for a party millennium. That, however, in Canada is a strength rather than a weakness. Politicians are not expected in Canada to bring about the millennium: indeed, so far as I could make out, the average Canadian is of opinion that when the millennium comes, it will be noticeable for an absence of politicians. They have not our reverence for these great men. But on the other hand, they require from them evidence of qualities which may or may not be present in our ministers. One is a readiness to seize opportunity as it comes. Another is, to have a practical understanding of the ways of finance. Yet a third is, to be in touch with men and things—the sort of quality we mean, however vaguely, when we raise the cry of a Cabinet of Business Men. All these qualities Mr. M'Bride possesses, together with that readiness to seem agreeable which is almost a necessity to a public man.

Mr. M'Bride confined his conversation with me to British Columbia—a big enough subject for a short interview. I wished to know if the survey of the province was being carried out as quickly as possible. In a vast country like British Columbia, it seems one of the most important things. The right to acquire land must be made simple and certain. Mr. M'Bride declared that surveying was going on as fast as men and money could do it, and referred me to the surveyor-general for details. I wish I could go further into the subject, but there is no space for it here. Then we got on to education, and Mr. M'Bride asked me to assure the working men of England that the education facilities of British Columbia were as fine as any to be got anywhere. Perhaps this is so, though I heard some criticism of the public schools from another eminent Victorian. It is easier, perhaps, to be enthusiastic than to be unanimous about any given system of education. To take but one small point, the co-education of boys and girls is a thing upon which people are not agreed even in British Columbia.