Life in Canada

by Thomas Conant

My hardwood fire burns brightly in the open fireplace as I sit behind double windows defying the 7° below zero without to penetrate, and my books and papers rest upon my writing-desk within easy reach of my hand. The children come in from their slides upon the ice with cheeks aglow and faces on fire, induced from the sudden change from the cold outside to the genial warmth within. You city dweller would think half-grown boys and girls too big to enjoy their hilarious, life-giving fun, and would want them to be nicely dressed and walk your city streets in the prim of propriety.

The examples of all great men and women prove distinctly that in order to be such you must first have good constitutions to support big brains, and our children by this are laying the foundations of such sound constitutions. Soon enough they will be men and women, and let them have their fun as long as they can.

In this locality most of our lands are held by inheritance. The sons of the pioneers who cleared the forests are the owners of the soil as a rule to-day. The rising generation, the immediate sons of the pioneers, are not as a rule equal to the old stock. The reason is, so far as I can judge, that they have seen the hard toil and steady, unchangeable life of their future, and having received a little education, which their fathers did not possess, they judge themselves too smart to follow their fathers’ footsteps. A good many of these sons, as I have before remarked, flock to the cities to live as half gentlemen, and very many others lease their farms to tenants, and reside in the towns hereabout.

There come before my mind as I write dozens of instances of young men who inherited a hundred or a hundred and fifty acres of land, worth probably from $80 to $125 per acre, or, say, they are worth individually $8,000 to $12,000, and these young men think to be gentlemen on these means. There are so many of such instances that I must needs make a note of it. Seemingly they get on for the present tolerably well. But the fences and buildings which their fathers built are yearly rotting away, and there is no timber here to replace them; and having yearly lived up to their full rental it becomes a serious question to know what this class of persons will do in the end. Englishmen with small means are gradually buying up such farms. Given the entering payment, and your sturdy English emigrant, who has spent a few years in this country, will pay for the property from the money which he makes off it.

Many of the pioneers and their sons in this locality have been as nomadic as the Indian. Having cleared or partly cleared up their lands, which they obtained for a merely nominal sum, or by Government grant, and spent many years in hard toil, in fact the very hardest kind of toil, they pull up and sell out, and move to the promised West.

So far as I have yet been able to learn, I cannot now recall a single instance in which an Ontario farmer, from this locality, who left a 100 or 150 acre farm, is to-day worth more money in the West than the same lands he left are worth here to-day. It would appear that these persons obtained their properties too easily to learn their real value, and hence are supplanted by the emigrant, whose previous lot in his old home has been a hard one.

Upon the other side of the picture, there are some of the sons of those pioneers who early learned wisdom, and commenced just where their forefathers left off. Such young men or middle-aged men are buying out very many of the small properties around them, are keeping good blooded and grade stock, and are a credit and a benefit to the country. They ever dispense a generous hospitality when called upon, and ordinarily will give the visitor as much of their time as he desires. Their sons and daughters are invariably healthy and well on in a common school education, and are the hope and interest for the future of our glorious Province of Ontario.

And yet there is a dark side to their lives, or rather that of their wives. Female help in the house is so difficult to obtain that the wife of many and many a man, who is worth easily from $30,000 to $50,000, has perforce to perform more hard manual labor than has the wife of the ordinary mechanic, the owner, perhaps, of a very humble home, and who earns his $1.25 or $1.50 per day. Pardon me, reader, for drawing this unpleasant picture, but it is indeed too true, and there is something very wrong in the “eternal fitness of things,” when men of such ample means are able and willing to pay for servants to ease their wives’ lots, and they cannot be obtained. The only hope on this score seems to be in emigration. When our country becomes more thickly populated, and a living in the country is not quite so easily obtained, then the daughters of households having therein a number of girls will go out to work rather than be pinched at home. Formerly the daughters of the farmers would go out to work among the neighboring farmers, and usually married the sons of those farmers, and became in their turn mistresses themselves. All this is now past, and our farmers’ families, with increasing wealth, do not go out to work but feel perfectly able, as no doubt they are, to live at home.

Not a few of our farmers, feeling that they were not big enough upon their own farms, became storekeepers or manufacturers in the towns. No doubt, in the abstract this may be well for the general progress of those towns in building them up and laying the nucleus of new industries. They do not, however, as a rule, succeed in the new fields of business they have chosen, or if they do not become the principals of businesses in the towns, they sometimes lend their names as endorsers to assist those who are principals of such businesses. Endorsations were sometimes very easily obtained by the glib-tongued business man, and for a time all went on well, until some financial crisis overtaking the business man, consequent ruin came to the farmer. These instances have been so many that I speak of them as exemplifying another phase of life in the country. Latterly, however, the landowners are becoming more conservative of their means and credit, and are disposed to “paddle their own canoe.”

Since the law of primogeniture was abolished in Canada, the hold upon land has become very slight, and the examples of large landed estates being retained in the same families for over two generations are so very rare that they need scarcely be mentioned. In some cases our rich men make a terrible mistake in bringing up their families. They are not taught to labor, but live a life of ease, with the idea that the family property will be sufficient to support each individual member. But with the nomadic habits of our Canadians, and the light stress usually heretofore laid upon the paternal acres, each individual share soon vanishes, leaving them to learn to fight the battle of life at a terrible disadvantage, because frequently they are then past their first youth at least.