Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1

by Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

But, notwithstanding all this ultra-democracy, there is at present a sufficient counterbalance in the sense of the people, to prevent any very serious consequences; and the Irish, from having had their religion trampled upon, and themselves despised, would be very likely to run counter to native feeling.

If any country in the whole civilized world exhibits the inequality of classes more forcibly than another, it is the country which has lately annexed Texas, and which aims at annexing all the New World.

There is a more marked line drawn between wealth and pretension on the one hand, poverty and impertinent assumption on the other, than in the dominions of the Czar. Birth, place, power, are all duly honoured, and that sometimes to a degree which would astonish a British nobleman, accustomed all his life to high society. I remember once travelling in a canal boat, the most abominable of all conveyances, resembling Noah's ark in more particulars than its shape, that I was accosted, in the Northern States too, and near the borders, where equality and liberty reign paramount, by a long slab-sided fellow-passenger, who, I thought, was going to ask me to pay his passage, his appearance was so shabby, with the following questions:

"Where are you from? are you a Livingstone?" I told him, for I like to converse with characters, that I was from Canada. "What's your name?" he asked. I satisfied him. He examined me from head to foot with attention, and, as he was an elderly man, I stood the gaze most valiantly. "Well," he said, "I thought you were a Livingstone; you have got small ears, and small feet and hands, and that, all the world over, is the sign of gentle blood."

He was afterwards very civil; and, upon inquiring of the skipper of the boat who he was, I found that my friend was a man of large fortune, who lived somewhere near Utica, on an estate of his own.

This was before the sympathy troubles, and I can back it with another story or two to amuse the reader.

Some years ago, when it was the fashion in Canada for British officers always to travel in uniform, I went to Buffalo, the great city of Buffalo on lake Erie, in the Thames steamer, commanded by my good friend, Captain Van Allen, and the first British Canadian steamboat that ever entered that harbour. We went in gallantly, with the flag flying that "has braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze." I think the majority of the population must have lined the wharfs to see us come in. They rent the welkin with welcomes, and, among other demonstrations, cast up their caps, and cried with might and main—"Long live George the Third!"—Our gracious monarch had for years before bid this world good night, but that was nothing; the good folks of Buffalo had not perhaps quite forgotten that they were once, long before their city was a city, subjects of King George.

I and another officer in uniform were received with all honours, and escorted to the Eagle hotel, where we were treated sumptuously, and had to run the gauntlet of handshaking to great extent. A respectable gentleman, about forty, some seven years older than myself, stuck close to me all the while. I thought he admired the British undress uniform, but he only wanted to ask questions, and, after sundry answers, he inquired my name, which being courteously communicated, he said, "Well, I am glad, that's a fact, that I have seen you, for many is the whipping I have had for your book of Algebra." Now I never was capable of committing such an unheard-of enormity as being the cause of flagellation to any man by simple or quadratic equations; and it must have been the binomial theorem which had tickled his catastrophe, for it was my father's treatise which had penetrated into the new world of Buffalonian education.

It is a pity, is it not, gentle reader, that such feelings do not now exist?

Nevertheless, even now, the designation of a British officer is a passport in any part of the United States. The custom-house receives it with courtesy and good-will; society is gratified by attentions received from a British officer; and it is coupled with the feelings which the habits and conduct of a gentleman engender throughout Christendom.