Romantic Canada

by Victoria Hayward

The view from this old “Chapel”, up out of that stormy period, dually staging Indian warfare and Colonial pioneering, is like a pastoral benediction bestowed on those white men and red who fought so hard for Ontario and the unity of the Empire.

And somehow, as you sit in a pew of this quiet church with the spirits of the great Chief Brant and others, whose graves stand in the churchyard, hovering in the air of splendid achievement which makes up the Province’s inheritance, you cannot but feel that there is a great bond of common experience uniting into one family this church—the quaint church with the little “House of the Angels” over the altar at Indian Lorette—the Catholic church at Pierreville, whose forbear went up in flames during the French and English struggle for supremacy on the Saint Lawrence, and the old Colonial church at Grand Pré, standing amid its curtain of Lombardies, and surrounded by memorial gravestones whereon are cut names now immortally chiselled in the history of Nova Scotia and of Canada.

Recognition of the fact that this chain of old churches, to which many another throughout Canada of its own right belongs, has stood for the fundamental in an age when the very grip of the pioneer on the land was in a sense uncertain, must tend to reveal the hand of destiny, and strengthen the Canadian’s national consciousness.

That, it seems to me, is the first lesson Romance reads to the people of Canada from the doorway of these old churches, happened upon here and there from the Atlantic to the Pacific and striking northward with the great rivers running toward Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean. The very name of this old Mohawk church is national.

In the city of Brantford, in addition to the fine bronze memorial of Brant, supported by the figures of other Mohawk warriors, there is an unique monument marking an event of world-wide interest—the invention of the telephone by the late Alexander Graham Bell. The early home of Bell, where he perfected the marvellous invention which was to render such signal service to mankind, and which by virtue of that invention is more than a Provincial landmark, stands a few miles out of town on a high bluff above the Tugela. It is a quiet spot, and one of those ample old houses whose very atmosphere must have been conducive to research and experiment. Canada not only possesses the distinction of this homestead and all that it stands for, but for years Mr. Bell came back every summer to his chosen home near Baddeck on the Bras D’Or Lake to carry on further researches and experiments; and it seems in keeping with his deep love for his home here that when the Great Voice rang him up, it should find him in Canada; and that he should be buried, as he is, in Canadian soil.

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A great deal of story and romance is bound up with the canals of Ontario. The building of canals at so early a date proves the practical attitude of the early settlers of this section toward the importance of good water-highways for craft and commerce. The canals seem to ante-date the roads in some places. In all cases, they supplement the great lakes and rivers, amplifying the span of Provincial and National waterways.

The canals of Ontario are pivotal as the Province is pivotal. Without them the Great Lakes would never come to the sea or the sea to the Great Lakes.

Romance gets aboard the canal-boat of Ontario no less than aboard her sisters of the Richelieu. Nor does she stop to question whether it be a thousand-ton freighter, or a mere barge with picturesque windmill-sails to the pump and a line of family wash strung out from the caboose; or a blackened line of hulks with coal, “bound up”, or “bound down”, she steps aboard. Romance is true blue. She rides with the humblest, or on the white-and-gold pleasure boat to view the majesty of Capes Trinity and Eternity on the Saguenay, with equal ease.

What wonder then, that the canals of Canada have their individualities—individualities no less romantic than those of the lakes, the sea, or the rivers. The largest and most imposing of these is of course the Canal-town. The very presence of the canal gives one of these town the right to reach out understandingly, and with a certain degree of similarity, to any of the old river-towns of the Saint Lawrence, and to claim relation with any town of the coast whose harbour and trade-interests have given it the distinctive name of “sea-port”.