Life in Canada

by Thomas Conant

Your city dweller turns away from a life in the country on account of society. Granted that we in the country cannot make calls and pay fashionable visits as easily as you can. But most good country families have a few genuine friends and acquaintances whom they visit periodically, and such visits are really appreciated by the persons entertaining. There is not much duplicity about our friendships, for we are not so much thrown together as city people; and when we do meet at the different family boards, genial right good fellowship is the rule. The cant and half-friendly reception of your city fashionables we know not of.

There is no aristocracy in Canada, and all attempts to found any such class in America have signally failed. It is contrary to the genius and spirit of the democracy of America, for are we not quite as democratic as our neighbors to the south of us? Of all the prominent families who were on the boards at the time of the American Revolution, in the last century, only five are in existence this day. What a comment on the mutability of human affairs! Your titles and riches don’t stick in America, and there is many a boy in rural Ontario who now follows the plough who will yet rise to eminence as his years increase. To create and maintain a titled class in Canada, in the face and eyes of the great Republic adjoining us, would be an anomaly, and it never can be done. There seems to be a growing disposition to exclusiveness among the city families, and to discriminate to too great a nicety as to whom their sons and daughters shall marry. Their alliances in the matrimonial way are ever to be with those of the presumably rich, in contradistinction to others possessing push and merit, but not quite as many dollars in immediate view. So far as I can judge, I do not know of the son of a business man to-day in any of the country towns hereabout who inherits the wealth his father once possessed, and who pursues his father’s calling. John Adams, when ambassador of the United States to Paris, wrote home to his daughter who asked his views about her approaching marriage: “Marry an honest man and keep him honest.” In Adams’s advice there is no mention of the dot, as the continental Europeans use the term, and it is earnestly to be hoped that this word will never find any currency among us.

The long winter evenings, when our inhabitants must perforce remain by the lamplight, are the most trying period for our young people. Some sort of excitement seems to be the great desideratum. In most country parts the local church will have evening anniversaries and teas, to which the near inhabitants invariably flock. Ministers on other circuits usually come to such gatherings, to assist the local minister, and much genial talk usually flows. The half-grown farmer’s son at these meetings usually essays his first attempt to wait upon the fair sex, and brings some neighboring farmer’s young daughter to the entertainment. Paying the required admission fee for both, he considers her usually his partner for the evening, and pertinaciously sits by her side. His half-bashful, scared look, and the twitch of his downy moustache, even if they do show some awkwardness on his part, betoken a thoroughly honest fellow, whose intentions are above suspicion.

The influence which the clergy exert upon the community cannot for a moment be gainsaid. Ontario to-day listens to her ministers, and in a great measure they form a standard for the opinions and actions of its inhabitants. It must necessarily be so, for Ontario people are a church-going people, and in many country parts the ministers are the best read and most cultivated persons in their midst. All honor to our clergy, for they have done and are daily doing a good work. Even sceptics tell us that we must build gaols or churches. We prefer the churches, hence we have them, and our people attend them and listen to our ministers, and crime is rare, and our people are law-abiding, no mobs, and industrious. Protoplasm, evolution, or modern agnosticism have not reached our rural population to disturb their simple faith.

Comparisons of travel lead me to think that our country churches might be made more attractive. Who has not seen in the Old World gems of little country churches, moss-grown, ivy-wreathed, and surrounded by trees, shrubs and hedges? Among the graves at the church’s side are invariably rare shrubs and grasses, let alone flowers, but the whole embowery of green giving an air of quiet repose. And with the steeple or tower pointing to heaven, no place seems better calculated for reverential feelings than do the rural churches of the British Isles.

In Ontario we build bare, glaring walls, and our churches are right, from a modern architectural point of view. Even if we cannot grow ivy, we can greatly beautify our churches and grounds by planting shrubs and evergreens, and thus relieve the stiffness of our newly constructed churches and grounds.

Henry Ward Beecher says that he never knew a bad family to come from a home where there was an abundance of books and papers. Our Ontario farmers do not provide enough and sufficiently varied reading matter for their families. Most of them take a weekly paper, an agricultural paper, and generally some religious paper, the organ of the denomination to which they belong. These are all well enough so far as they go, but pictures are perhaps the quickest, best, and most agreeable way of imparting instruction. All our farmers could easily spare annually the cost of enough journals to make home daily attractive, so that the new papers to come each day forward would be looked for and something sought. The London Graphic or London Illustrated News would keep us posted pleasantly on matters at home, and, in fact, they would follow England all over the world, and improve the family taste at the same time. From New York a paper should certainly be taken, for we must, of course, follow our cousins just south of us, with their seventy-five millions of people. The New York semi-weekly Tribune would keep us thoroughly up with the times, and there will be nothing in it that one need be ashamed to read before his daughters, which is a great recommendation in this day of trashy literature. By all means add Harper’s Weekly Illustrated, and Frank Leslie’s as well, for they do not require much time to read—the pictures show for themselves; and then there is the Century Magazine, which is perhaps the most popular to-day. As to merit, I only wish we in Canada could afford to produce anything nearly as good. Its illustrations will shame any English magazine, and I would certainly add Harper’s Magazine as well. For the little folks, by all means the St. Nicholas Magazine, beautifully illustrated, and with stories down to the mental calibre of the little ones. Of course, I would not forget our own productions, and would take a few of them in addition to those now taken.

Now, I know a good many will look upon this as too much to read, will say it costs too much, etc. They can all be taken for less than $50 per year, and if once they begin to come to the family, the boys will soon stay at home nights rather than go prowling around the country or seeking society in the towns and villages.

Excitement people must have, and your city people get their excitement by conversing with one another, the theatre, lectures, etc. But if our country people would take the periodicals I have outlined, in conjunction with their social gatherings at churches and in neighbors’ houses, they would have a constant fund of excitement and pleasure at home. Each mail would be looked forward to with eagerness, and the quiet evenings at home would be most pleasurably and profitably spent.

Even if they read upon subjects quite foreign to their own occupations, some knowledge would be gained. Knowledge from whatever source is valuable, and some day will, without a doubt, come into play. In this fast century many people who are able financially eschew a country life, and flock bag and baggage to the cities. There are some instances wherein a city life is more desirable than life in the country. Admitted that the city dweller can hear the best lectures of the day, and now and again witness a play of genuine merit upon the stage, yet there are pleasures in a country life which will outbalance those privileges, and of which I cannot help speaking now and again when my pen flows freely and I am in the humor. When writing of life in the country I do not mean twelve miles from a lemon, as Gail Hamilton writes in her New England bower, but rather within easy reach of the daily mail. Around me are no signs of want. The examples of wretchedness the city dweller has brought to his notice so very often we know not of. It is truly said, “that one-half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” So far as our pleasures and feelings are concerned we do not want to know, i.e., while we are willing to relieve the distressed we are glad that such examples do not come before us to harrow our feelings.