The Ontario farmer’s success is not anomalous when we come to consider him physically, capable as he is of performing an almost unlimited quantity of manual labor, and of so many kinds.
An American friend happened to be visiting me while a gathering was taking place not long ago here, and on viewing the farmers and their sons, made the significant remark, “What material for an army!”
Dean Stanley, who paid us a visit a few years before his death, said that “the people who could conquer this climate could achieve anything sought.” As to conquering the climate this we have done, and to-day there is no more law-abiding, peaceful, intelligent, and industrious class in any country than among the rural sections of Ontario.
The emigrant who comes to us complains that our farmers work him too hard, or, in other words, that he becomes a slave. During the pressing season of seeding and harvesting there are no people anywhere who work harder than our Ontario farmers do, and with our short seasons it must necessarily be so. As yet very few farmers ask their hired help to perform more work than they do themselves. The farmer generally works side by side with his hired man, and what the farmer can stand it would appear his hired man can. No farmer asks his hired man to plough in the drizzle and rain, which he had to do in England, and come in at night wet to the skin. He does not get his beer as he did in England, it is true, because in our climate of extremes of heat and cold we do not need the beer, and were the hired man to partake of it as freely as he used to in England he could not perform his necessary work for a long time. He sits at the same table with his master generally, and gets just the same fare, and has a bed and room to himself, same as if quartered in an hotel. Meat three times a day he can usually have if he wants it, which he certainly did not get in his Old Country home. And he is paid for eight months’ work, with his board and washing included, $160, or for a year with the same perquisites, $200. Now, the emigrant who comes over here and expects us to feed and lodge him for nothing must certainly think this country a second garden of Eden. As to farm hands flocking into the cities during the winter, I have only to say that I do not see what possible business they can have there. If a man refuses to engage for a whole year he gets his $160 for eight months, and very many remain with some farmer during the winter, doing chores at a low pittance, or perhaps even for their board. Well, he has got his $160 for the eight months of the year, and during the winter he need not spend it, and by the winter’s rest he is recuperating his physical powers even if the farmer did work him very hard during the summer. Those who grumble at the life I have pictured of a farmer’s hired man had better go back to England; but, for a fact, we do not see them ever going back. But the thrifty emigrant, who works away and saves, soon gets enough money together to become a tenant farmer, and becomes himself boss in turn. Usually such men are far harder on their hired help than those whom they themselves worked for. As a tenant farmer he pays about $5.00 per acre per year rent for his farm and the taxes, and if he has a growing family and a saving helpmate, in a few years he has saved money enough to quite or nearly pay for a farm of his own. Could he have accomplished that in the Old World? And still they grumble at our country, call it rural slavery, and write home to Old Country journals letters calculated to do us harm. So many young men leaving their fathers’ farms and flocking to the cities and towns might lead some to infer that the farmers’ sons were sick of life upon the farm. I do not so interpret it. Take, for instance, a farmer owning 150 acres of land and having four sons. Now, to divide his land equally among his sons would give each thirty-seven and a half acres, which is too small for a farm to be profitable as a farm. Then the farmer educates a couple of his sons, who leave the family farm and pursue other callings. With the industrious habits they learned at home, and with good sound physical bodies, they are quite able to succeed in their new callings. One instance of signal success in Ontario farm lands comes to my mind, and I will mention it. A Canadian, the oldest son, whose father died, leaving the mother without means, went to work among the farmers at twelve years of age. For the first three years he only got $40 per year. Notwithstanding this low wage he saved a little out of it. As he grew older he began to get a little more wages, and thus worked seven years to save his first $400. At this time in his life he turned sharp around and went to school, and soon became a school-teacher. With his first year’s salary as teacher, and a few dollars he already possessed from his former earnings, he bought his fifty acres of land and paid about half down for it. Then he hired a man and started to cultivate the fifty acres, by the help of a yoke of oxen. Night and morning he worked faithfully upon his land, chopping and logging, and attending to his school duties during the day. Soon he had his first fifty acres paid for, and then bought another farm of the same size, adjoining it, which he paid for in the same manner that he paid for the first fifty acres, only sooner, for he had the proceeds of the first farm to help him. At this turn in his life he studied for one of the learned professions, and attained a degree, and also educated his other brothers and sisters as well. To-day this gentleman owns 500 acres of land, very nearly all paid for, and farms it himself. His land cannot be worth less than $50,000, and yet he is not over fifty years of age at this time. Another very important feature in this gentleman’s career is that his family have all been taught to labor, and have been brought up to industrious habits, and the individual members cannot fail to make their mark in our midst. Ye city dwellers, do not for a moment suppose that this is only a solitary instance of signal success of country life. Many more might be mentioned, but this is sufficient to show what push, determination and brains will accomplish in rural Ontario. What he has done others can do, and are doing this day. Your examples of city dwellers’ success do not very much surpass this for the years during which the fortune was made. To “blow” about our own country is right and laudable, I maintain, especially when our country in its merits fully bears one out in the “blowing.”
CHAPTER XVI.
Unfinished character of many things on this continent—Old Country roads—Differing aspects of farms—Moving from the old log-house to the palatial residence—Landlord and tenant should make their own bargains—Depletion of timber reserves.
In America everything is begun, and but few things finished. Persons from the Old World tell us this, and there is a great deal of truth in it. Driving on Ontario roads one sees a good farm-house, surrounded by trees and fences, all nicely kept, when perhaps the very next field adjoining this well-cultivated farm is considerably given up to stumps and a few boulders, although of stones the best parts of Ontario are happily almost free. There may be a little brook crossing the highway; to get over this brook a bridge or culvert of cedar sticks has been put down, which does well enough in itself, and is quite safe, but it manifestly will not last any great length of time. Now, in Europe, such little streams would be spanned by a stone arch bridge. The little stream as it passes along the fields in many parts, notably in Germany, would be straightened and walled in with stones to keep it from wearing away its banks. Of course, we cannot afford to do all this in our new country, but I think from this time forth what work we do at all should be of a more permanent character than it has been, for the first outlay would be the cheapest in the end. Again, beside a farm well kept, on the next lot will be often found old fences barely sufficient to turn cattle. If it is a board fence half the boards will be off, and one end of them lying on the ground, while the other end still adheres by a solitary nail to the proper post. Or a few posts will have got out of the perpendicular, and point their several ways heavenward, but unfortunately each post points a way and on an incline of its own.
Besides the country roads are, sometimes, even in our best settlements, remains of old logs, nearly rotted away, an old stump or so, and on the sides of the road, upon either side of the waggon track, stumps and convolutions, just as it came from primeval forest, and never smoothed down by the hand of man. The waggon track, passing between these stumps, decaying logs and hillocks, will generally be a good one, but it is this unfinished appearance which causes the European to tell us, with a shade of truth, that things are begun in America but not yet finished. Driving in Europe all seems finished. There is nothing left in the roads, and even if they be narrow, the hedges or walls upon either side are perfect, and there is nothing to mar the scene. It is literally finished. Man has done all there is to do. We must, of course, recollect that ours is a young country, and I am only presenting this disagreeable side of our country that we may begin to right these features. For utility and resource the people of Europe cannot begin to compare with us. The very nature of things here, commencing as we did a few years ago in the native woods, compelled us to seek the quickest and easiest ways of getting on. But all that is past now, and we ought to commence to finish our country.
Those who remain constantly at home do not feel the deficiency so particularly, but to those who go abroad these defects are so glaring that one notices them at every turn. The more we beautify our country the better it will please ourselves, and likewise will be the means of inducing capitalists from abroad to invest among us. We may often see, in driving along our roads, first-class capacious barns and sheds, and every fence on a farm neat and tidy, gates all right, nicely painted, and the whole get-up of the farm neat and thrifty. At the same time this farmer may be living in an ordinary farm-house, or perhaps the original log-house which he built when he commenced to subdue the forest. The farmer is among our best citizens, and presents a striking contrast to our American cousin, who builds a showy house first, and perhaps a very small barn afterwards. This farmer has carved his fortune from his forest and farm, and appreciates that his stock makes money for him, hence he prepares first-class stabling for them, while his own family lives in meagre quarters within square log walls. No doubt his family are quite comfortable in their log-house, but do not essay to cut so great a figure in the world as many of his neighbors of much smaller means and fewer acres. Many times this person will own his 200 or 300 acres, and all paid for. He drives great fat horses on the road, and pulls his cap squarely down on his head, and goes on as if he meant business, which he really does. It is a matter of indifference to him if his wife and daughters be dressed in the latest fashions or not. If they have good, strong, serviceable clothing, he considers it sufficient, and the gimps and gew-gaws of modern times have not yet entered upon his calculations; but he can show a whole row of stalls in his cow-barn containing twenty head of good fat cattle and a lot of growing young calves. Such citizens are desirable, and we are proud of their industry and success. Now and again such farmers get around to the house business, and when they do build, they build well—usually brick, or it may be he has for years been gathering the stones in piles from his fields; if so, his house will be of solid stone walls two feet thick. Many such persons put $3,000 or $4,000 in their houses, and the abrupt transfer from the old log-house to the palatial residence is almost startling to the inmates. Some little time has to elapse before they sit their new house well. But, gradually, furniture comes in furtively in the great farm waggon, returning home from the market, and in a year or so their new homestead is complete in its appointments and in detail, and there is a house any man in America or in Europe might be proud of. The old log-house, likely as not, is left standing behind the new one. As an excuse for leaving the old log-house standing, he says it is handy to put implements in and a good place—up-stairs—for seed corn. But in many instances I suspect he leaves it that he may look upon it and upon the new one likewise in the same glance, and call a justifiable pride to his mind, that the new palace, comparatively speaking, grew from the old log-house, now holding his seed corn and implements. You call on him, and he passes by the old log-house without a remark, but you speak of it, and with just a tinge of pride he tells you, as he pulls down his cap and thrusts his hands in his trousers’ pockets, that on that site where the old log-house now stands, forty-five years or so ago, he cut down four maple trees to make room for it, for there was then no room elsewhere for it on his lot.
In former days, as has already been remarked, the great fertility of the soil caused people to farm rather carelessly and without any consideration of the desirableness of a rotation of crops. Time has changed that to a great extent. I have a number of farm tenants, and would not allow them to crop continually without seeding, etc.—not because my soils are exhausted, but because I do not want them exhausted. While we sympathize with Ireland and would like to see her condition bettered, still to-day I, as a landlord, would not accept her land law and abide by it. If I had to send my leases in to a land commissioner to tell me what I must charge for my lands, I would not any longer own lands, but would sell them out at once and put the proceeds in Government bonds. It is obvious that here in Ontario each landlord and tenant ought to make his own bargain, just the same as regarding interest for money. Until our country is as thickly populated as Ireland is, we need not raise this question of adjudicating upon rents but if that time were to come I would not any longer consider my position as a landlord in Ontario desirable. By this means I would let Ireland have a home parliament, and I was in favor of the Gladstonian programme, but I should think it extremely hard for any government to dictate to me what I must receive as income for my estate, Henry George to the contrary notwithstanding. Should our fair Ontario ever get to entertaining communistic notions, the tenure of property and estates would be not worth the effort to retain, and, as far as I am concerned (and there are many like me), I would rather go over to Old England and take up my abode.