Life in Canada

by Thomas Conant

The 100-acre farmer will ordinarily have 60 acres in crop yearly, which will average him $20 per acre. The balance of his farm is in hay, pasture, and forest.

Now, from this 60 acres of crop he nicely supports his family, and yearly puts by a nice little sum to buy lands for his growing boys when they shall need them; of course, he cannot save the whole $1,200 obtained for his crops, as his family must be maintained out of this as well as pay for repairs and improvements. However, most Canadian farmers’ wives supplement this grain product by the butter and cheese from the cows running upon the pastures.

Indeed, the wife’s help is a very great element to the farmer’s success, as regards saving money; and she deserves her place of importance beside her husband. Our Ontario farmer drives a good team upon the roads, encased in first-class harness, and a smart light spring buggy behind them. Rope traces and straw collars, which one sees in the South, would be beneath his dignity, and one must search Ontario over and over to find an example of such. And he is well clad in clothes, the product of the factory loom. Only a few years back he wore clothes made from home-grown wool spun by his good wife and woven upon some loom near at home. But latterly the factories have produced tweeds and fullcloths at so small a price that it has not paid him to work up his own wool. His table is well supplied with not only an abundance of food, but in great variety, fruit in various forms forming a feature at almost every meal. The universal meat diet of England is not acceptable to his palate nor suitable for our climate, for our systems require a laxative in this climate, which fruit gives him. His wife is more than the equal in cooking of her friends in Old England. She can compound more dishes out of the same material, make more tasteful and toothsome pastry than one can buy in a pastrycook’s shop in Europe. She does not consider it beneath her dignity assisting in milking the cows, teaching calves which are to be reared to drink milk, or possibly feeding the pigs if the men be busy.

As a transformation she can, after a wash, quickly don garments fit for the parlor, and entertain company at her board with an ease and heartiness truly surprising to European travellers who visit us. Even if not able to converse in half Frenchy English, many of them can dash off a number of tunes upon an organ or piano in a manner acceptable to most persons not musical critics. An organ is in most good farm-houses, and sometimes a piano, and the daughters are daily becoming proficient on them, practising after the evening milking is done.

Well might the European ask, “Where are your peasants?” These are our peasants, and the reason you do not recognize them is because they are on a higher plane in cultivation, taste and education than yours are; and even if they do appear as ladies and gentlemen, they are not above engaging in the arduous toil of the farm.

Ontario farms are worth so much in dollars, because, for the reason I have already given, of the little waste land, and also because of the industriousness of its people. Look across the border at our American cousins and you do not find the genuine American doing the downright hard work. The European emigrant performs that duty for him, while the American fills the offices to be filled, and does the scheming.

But the Ontario farmer will do downright hard work after the manner of his sires in the British Isles, and he has not yet learned to shirk it. It is this industry which makes our province, makes our lands sell so high, and gives his home an abundance, and puts yearly a nice sum at his credit in some savings bank. One great difference between the Canadian and the American is in this particular—the American does not lay up for his children as the Canadian tries to do. My observation leads me to think that the American does not put forth an especial effort to set his sons up in the farming or other business, but lets them commence at the foot of the ladder to work their own way up. On the contrary, the Canadian farmer, almost without exception, is yearly trying to lay aside a sum to buy, or help to buy, farms for his growing sons. Thus the Ontario farmer never gets satisfied, as it were, or never gives up work as long as he is able to perform it. Americans, on the other hand, will rest upon their laurels, and live without any exertion, on small incomes. Indeed, from my own knowledge, I know that many American farmers in Michigan have rented their small farms and moved into the villages to live on an income of $300 per year. Our farmers have the true British greed, and would not think of giving out on a $300 income. Now, I argue that our state of affairs is the best for the prosperity of our country. Never becoming satisfied, they never cease to work, and thus they have produced the most smiling and prosperous country in the world. This picture of Ontario farm life is true to-day, and I ask the reader if it is not as desirable a life as is obtainable anywhere. Our Ontario farmer owns his own soil, is well fed, housed, and clad, ever striving to do for his family, loyal to his government, and at peace with his God and with man. I have yet to find his equal, as a class, for the general well-being or common weal.

Until a few years past nearly all Ontario people did their year’s business with their town merchant on the credit basis. Goods for family use would be freely purchased on credit the whole year through, until fall came and the annual grain selling time, when large bills would be rendered by the merchant. Large enough they generally would be, for, buying goods without restraint and paying no money for them, the farmers would hardly realize that such seemingly small purchases from time to time would amount to so much in the fall. But little credit is now given, and goods and supplies are generally paid for as purchased. This very beneficial change is no doubt owing to the fact that now the farmer has a greater variety of products of the farm to sell than formerly, which come in in their turn in different seasons, and thus give him a steady supply of funds. Paying as he goes, he is not nearly so apt to buy things he does not really need, and his sum total of the cash purchases for the year will not amount to so much as his annual store bills did formerly. The merchant likewise can sell his goods closer for cash than he could if he had to wait a whole year. The fact that the credit business is being largely superseded by the cash system is one of the best arguments as to the progress of the country. All along these townships lying upon Lake Ontario the farmer delivers his barley in the early fall by waggon to the elevator at the lake. This barley money usually gives the farmer his first fall money.

Tenant farmers generally pay their fall rent with their barley money. Very many of the teams coming down with barley take coal home with them. It is an undeniable fact that the lands bordering upon the lake do not have any more wood upon them. Fifteen years ago a person who would have made the assertion that the majority of the inhabitants would be burning coal to-day would have been scouted. It shows us how much we are dependent upon our neighbors south of us for our coal supply. There undoubtedly is abundance of wood northerly from central Ontario, but for fuel purposes it is almost useless to us. Our railways won’t carry the wood to us if they can get anything else to carry, and even having carried it, when the price is considered, wood becomes almost a luxury. We may as well look the future squarely in the face and realize that in a few years a great part of Ontario along the lakes must depend for fuel wholly upon United States coal. Formerly a few farmers of push and great physical strength would attend to their farms during the summer and follow lumbering and the timber business during the winter. That class of men possessed any amount of push, and performed more manual labor than any man can be found willing to do now, even for money. Numbers of such men became wealthy, for they had double profits coming to them all the time. Rudely as they farmed, they got a profit out of the virgin soil, and the winter’s limited business paid them as much more, hence those who would endure the severe physical strain necessary to carry on this mixed business made money rapidly. Such men got along faster than the ordinary farmer. But that is all changed now. Farming is now a matter of skill, and not brute force and strength as formerly. There is no longer any lumbering or timbering to be followed in the winter, and the Ontario farmer hereabout will get no more profit from that source. Then he must rely to-day only upon his farm and what he can make it do during the summer. When he used to swing his cradle among stumpy fields, then it was a question of physical endurance and strength. But all that is changed now, for his work is nearly all done by machinery, and he must learn to manage the machinery. To make money and succeed well at farming to-day requires as much skill as it does to succeed in any other calling. When the soil was new he could draw upon it unfairly, and still with all the abuse it smiled upon him. Seventeen successive crops of wheat upon the same land has not been uncommon in the past. And yet with all this abuse the last crop was nearly as good as the foregoing ones. This will give one an idea of the extraordinary richness of our soil, and without a doubt a good deal of our soil could be so abused now and it would continue to produce and pay. But the husbandman has learned to husband his resources, and refuses to draw so heavily upon his soil, and hence to-day he practises a succession of crops, roots, manuring, and ploughing in clover, roots, etc. This he has commenced to do lest he might exhaust his lands, not particularly because he had to do so, but simply through fear of the future. The day may come, when our lands have been cultivated as long as they have been in England, that we shall have to buy outside manures and pay ten dollars per acre for them, as the British farmer has to do; but since we do not, the lot of our farmers is ten dollars per acre better than that of the English farmer.

The most independent person in Canada to-day is the person who can do most things within himself. If a man were to emigrate to Canada who knew nothing but the art of cutting diamonds, his chances of success among us would be slim indeed. For general versatility the Ontario farmer is the equal of any people in any country. He can cultivate his lands, do an odd job of carpentry, build a log-house with his axe, and some can even shoe a horse or relay a plough coulter at their rude forges at their homes. Not long since I had occasion to call on a farmer and found him repairing the family clock, which obstinately refused to run in obedience to its pendulum. It was an ordinary brass affair, and not being a practical watchmaker, the farmer had taken the works out of their case and was vigorously boiling them in a pot of water on the stove. Rude as such clock repairing was, he succeeded in freeing it from superfluous hardened oil and grease, and got it in running order once more.