Life in Canada

by Thomas Conant

My wood fire still burns brightly as I turn to my morning mail with its treasures of current literature. Talk about your city bustle compared with this, in my cosy seat beside the fire and all these treasures at my elbow! There are no gas bills to pay, nor water rates, and the mail comes to me daily, just as regularly as your city mail does. Then what do we want with your city?

Speaking of the post-office reminds me to say that the meanest hovel in the land can to-day put itself in almost daily communication with the best minds of the age. Such service the mail hourly and regularly performs for us, and is such a great factor to the pleasure of our lives, and yet we scarcely bestow a thought upon it. No, I do not propose to try to assume that life in the country would be very pleasant or desirable away from the mails. Given a daily mail and a comfortable country-seat, and easy access to the train, so that I may come to the city quickly and easily, if you have therein any real intellectual treat, and I yet fail to see what are the inducements to make one prefer life in the city to the free life in the country.

A rural life is a natural life, and a city life is an artificial life. Man in his first estate was an arboreal being, and in such surroundings throve as he does to-day. Our Ontario families, as a rule, who leave good properties in the country to go into the cities, make a mistake in almost every respect. Even if the parents do not feel the trouble wrought upon their families during their lives, their children almost invariably do not make the men and women they would have made had they hung on and occupied the paternal acres. In most instances these are sold, and in a few years the money scattered. Had they held on to the paternal acres, and bought more, they would have been among our staunchest and best citizens, as well as among the wealthiest.

In Europe all successful men look forward to the day when they can own and live upon a farm. Bismarck had his country home, and we know he prized it, for we often heard of him going there to get away from the cares of office. Going back to earlier times, we find that the great men of the world loved their country homes quite as much as the English country squire does at this day. I take down old Xenophon from its place on the bookshelf and see that he says he sees the ridges piling along the ælian fields, and from the way that he makes the remark, he loves the sight, and loves to be in the midst of such ridges, where some husbandmen are ploughing. Theocritus hears the lark that hovers over the straight laid furrows, and if Theocritus did not love such a scene and dwell in its midst, he would never have given it to us at this remote day. “Establish your farm near to market, or adjoining good roads,” old Cato says. So old Cato loved the country, and we all know his head was level. I am afraid some of us in Ontario have followed old Cato only too literally, and have built our houses almost overhanging the road-side, when they would have looked far better and presented a much prettier sight set back from the road and surrounded by trees and lawns. Hesiod tells us that we ought not to plough the land when it is too wet, and also how to put in a new plough beam to replace the broken one. Homer the Great says a farmer should keep two ploughs on hand for fear one should get broken, and he does hot forget to praise the wine which the country produces about his rural home, and adds some caution about its too copious use.

When Hesiod and Homer loved country life in Greece so long ago, can we be amiss in praising a country life in Ontario to-day? As my eyes run up and down the pages, I can hear the swallows twitter and the lark sing, in my fancy, as they heard them. They praise the crispness and freshness of the vegetables which their gardens yield them, and they can go on and describe feasts which they partake of at their country homes, the materials of which come almost without exception from their farms. Virgil, I infer, was not much of a farmer after all, but he tells us that he loved his country home, and seems not to have the most remote thought of removing to Imperial Rome. Mostly he praises the bees and the wine, so it is evident every one sees a beauty in country life for himself, as his peculiarities may be. Yet Virgil left us some very good hints, though he evidently made some mistakes. He tells us, for instance, that lands only need cultivating to obliterate the obnoxious weeds. Tull, however, said about one hundred years ago, that the land only needed mixing by deep ploughing to make it produce indefinitely. Now, Tull was a man of means, and only lived a rural life from the love of it, as did the old worthies whom I have instanced. Ontarians, we have a grand country, and we who are in it, let us stay therein and enjoy it. Let those persons remain in the cities who are now in them. For us nature in all its beauties is daily unfolded before our eyes, and let us daily enjoy those beauties. If we can by any means inculcate an increased love of country homes, we will continue to beautify our homes and improve our country.

Real properties in the cities and towns of Canada have been very fluctuating, often being held at prices far beyond any intrinsic value they could possibly possess, while again, the very same properties fall away, and frequently become totally unsalable. Yet during commercial depression good farm lands have held their value very well and have even, after a temporary period of dulness, steadily risen in value year by year.

To illustrate the peculiar change of town values to which I allude, I may give an instance coming under my own knowledge. One of my forbears bought, about the year 1815, a large building tract situated on King Street, Toronto, very near the market. For many years after the purchase this property was wholly unsalable. Taxes were put upon it, and yearly it became a burden. Somehow, in Canada we are not very careful, as a community, of the rights in property of the individual. Accordingly, in this instance, taxes for street improvements, with gas, water, sewers and other special levies, were put upon this land. A day finally came, about the year 1845, when to own property in Toronto meant either disaster or a very large income from without to retain it. A purchaser coming along at about that year, his offer was taken with avidity. My people were glad to get it off their hands, and thus was closed a history, so far as they were concerned, which was a fair sample of city property in Canada and its mutations for more than thirty years. Since that time the property in question rose to enormous value, but has again fallen on account of trade to some extent deserting the locality.

Another feature of city and town life we must notice, viz., the constant interchange of views among the inhabitants as to business and politics on account of their close proximity to each other. An instance occurring in one of our Canadian towns will illustrate what I mean. In this town some few moneyed men gathered nightly and exchanged views on stocks and the like. Some of them had speculated in this way to the extent of a few hundred dollars and had been moderately successful. At one of their meetings some one introduced the subject of lard.

Lard became the topic. Others came, heard and pondered. Small lots of lard were then bought in Chicago, and in a few weeks sold, and some ready profits realized.

“If a little capital will win money in lard in Chicago, a large capital will yield much more” was the reasoning, so they joined forces and got nearly every man with ready cash in that town to put money into the joint fund for lard. Again they bought in Chicago—this time largely—and the commodity began to rise in price. Moreover it kept on rising, and never seemed to recede a point. These operators began to reason that if they held all the lard, they could dictate prices and could control the article. They put more money into it and bought more lard, for they considered it to be what is called “a dead certainty.” Days and weeks passed and lard still held on. Fortunes truly seemed to be within the grasp of our group of townsmen. There could be no mistake about it, for they had, as they considered, all the lard in America cornered, so that no one could beat them.