We find it necessary now to add that the socio-economic constitutes a no less important factor. But the effects may not stop with mere recuperation. Suppose a city becomes in a trice more prosperous and progressive than ever. Suppose she begins to grow populous with uncommon rapidity; her bank clearings do not fail but rather increase; her industries rebuild and grow in numbers; new companies come looking for sites as if dimly conscious that expansion is at hand! Suppose a city rises Phoenix-like from the flames, a new and better city, her people more kind, more charitable, more compassionate to little children, more considerate of age! Suppose there come social changes which alter the conservatism and civic habits of many years—changes which foster a spirit of public service, and stimulate civic pride! Then there is clearly some further influence associated with the day of disaster. Perhaps we shall find progress innate in catastrophe itself.
[CHAPTER VIII]
Catastrophe and Social Change
The unchanging Halifax of the years—The causes of social immobility—The new birthday—The indications of change: appearance, expansion of business, population, political action, city-planning, housing, health, education, recreation, community spirit—Carsten's prophecy.
Halifax has had her fair proportion of tribute in her time. Kipling has called her “the Warden of the Honor of the North.” Pauline Johnston sings of her pride of situation. As Edinburgh, “it is a city of many charms; beautiful for situation, beyond most of the cities of the world; vocal with history beyond most, for at every turn of its streets some voice from the past ‘comes sounding through the toon.’” Her public gardens are the envy of all. Her vistas of the sea are without compare. Her Northwest Arm is a veritable joy. Birds sing in her homes. Cheery wood-fires burn brightly in her open grates. No city of her size is more hospitable than she.
But she has always been a city which has never quite entered into her heritage commercially. Situated where by nature she might well be great, she has always been small. Unambitious, wealthy[152] and little jealous of the more rapidly-growing cities, she has prided herself on being a lover of better things. Commerce and industry were things alien[153] and secular. She devoted herself to standards of art, music, learning, religion and the philanthropies. Charitable and philanthropic institutions abounded. She has had her own conservative English ways. She affected homage to “old families,” and to that illusory element “social prestige.” She welcomed each new knight which the favor of the king conferred, and grew careless of civic prosperity and growth. She had leaned “too long upon the army and the navy” and her citizens had become “anaemic,” “lethargic” and standstill; their “indifference” and “inertia” were a commonplace. Halifax had been complacent and academic rather than practical in her outlook upon the world and her general attitude toward life.
Geographically she suffered by her situation on the rim of the continent. She experienced not a little neglect and isolation because she was an undeveloped terminal, and not a junction point. Travellers and commercial men could not visit her en route but only by special trip.
Again “the government has had altogether too many interests in Halifax for the good of the place.” “Government-kept towns” are not as a rule “those which have achieved the greatest prosperity.” Halifax as a civil-service headquarters and a government military depot was perhaps open to the charge of being at least “self-satisfied.” Valuable acres of non-taxable land have been far from stimulating to civic enterprise.
An historic city too, Halifax fell under the blight of overmuch looking backward, and sociologically the back look has been always recognized as the foe of progress. But she has had a past to be proud of—one which throbs with incident and interest. Born as a military settlement, she has been a garrison city and naval station for more than a hundred and fifty years. She has been called “the stormy petrel among the cities—always to the front in troublous times.” She has served and suffered in four hard wars. She has gloried in this wealth of years and storied past. Her traditions have been traditions of royalty, blue blood, dashing officers, church parades, parliamentary ceremonies, fêtes, levées and all the splendor and spirit of old colonial times. A newspaper has published daily items of a generation before, and weekly featured a reverie in the past.[154] Old in her years she remained old in her appearance, old in her ways, and in her loves. She boasted old firms which have kept their jubilees, old churches wherein was cradled the religious life of Canada, an old university with a century of service. Each noon a cannon boomed the mid-day hour, and like a curfew sounded in the night.
Search where one will, it would be difficult to find another city which has more completely exhibited the causes of social immobility as set forth by sociology. For there are, it must be remembered, causes of immobility as well as factors of social change. They may be geographical difficulties, or elements more distinctively social—an over-emphasis of government, discouraging innovation, too great a “volume of suggestion,” the drag of “collective customs and beliefs,” a “traditionalist educational system,” the “inheritance of places and functions” tending to arrest development, “government, law, religion and ceremony, hallowed by age.”[155] All these reënforce the conservative tendencies in society and preserve the status quo.[156]
Diagnosis in detail is not essential here. Up to the time of the disaster Halifax had certainly preserved the status quo. We need not labor the how and why. Tourists had returned year after year and found her unaltered. “Dear, dirty old Halifax” they had called her. They had found business as usual,—old unpainted wooden houses on every side, unswept chimneys, an antiquated garbage system and offensive gutters; the best water and the poorest water system an inspector ever examined; the purest air but the most dust-laden in a storm; an obsolete tramway,[157] a “green market,” ox-carts on the main streets, crossings ankle-deep with mud, a citizenship given over to late rising. Instead of making the city they had been “letting it happen.” The “transient, the good-enough, the cheapest possible” had been the rule of action.