In this long and wonderful drive there was but one stop. This was at the City Hall, a big, rough stone building with a soaring campanile. On the broad steps of the hall a host of wounded men in blue were grouped, as though in a grand-stand. The string of cars swerved aside so that the Prince could stop for a few minutes and chat with the men.
His reception here was of overwhelming warmth; men with all manner of hurts, men on crutches and in chairs stood up, or tried to stand up, to cheer him. It was in the truest sense a meeting of comrades, and when a one-legged soldier asked the Prince to pose for a photograph, he did it not merely willingly, but with a jolly and personal friendliness.
The long road to the Exhibition passed through the busy manufacturing centre that has made Toronto famous and rich as a trading city, particularly as a trading city from which agricultural machinery is produced. The Exhibition itself is part of its great commercial enterprise. It is the focus for the whole of Ontario, and perhaps for the whole of Eastern Canada, of all that is up-to-date in the science of production. In the beautiful grounds that lie along the fringe of the inland sea that men have, for convenience' sake, called Lake Ontario, and in fine buildings in those grounds are gathered together exhibits of machinery, textiles, timber, seeds, cattle, and in fact everything concerned with the work of men in cities or on prairies, in offices or factories, farms or orchards.
The Exhibition was breaking records for its visitors already, and the presence of the Prince enabled it to break more. The vastness of the crowd in the grounds was aweing. The gathering of people simply obliterated the grass of the lawns and clogged the roads.
When His Royal Highness had lunched with the administrators of the Exhibition, he came out to a bandstand and publicly declared the grounds opened. The crowd was not merely thick about the stand, but its more venturesome members climbed up among the committee and the camera-men, the latter working so strenuously and in such numbers that they gave the impression that they not only photographed every movement, but also every word the Prince uttered.
The density of the crowd made retreat a problem. Police and Staff had to resolve themselves into human Tanks, and press a way by inches through the enthusiastic throng to the car. The car itself was surrounded, and could only move at a crawl along the roads, and so slow was the going and so lively was the friendliness of the people, that His Royal Highness once and for all threw saluting overboard as a gesture entirely inadequate, and gave his response with a waving hand. The infection of goodwill, too, had caught hold of him, and not satisfied with his attitude, he sprang up in the car and waved standing. In this manner, and with one of his Staff holding him by the belt, he drove through and out of the grounds.
It was a day so packed with extraordinary crowds, that we correspondents grew hopeless before them. We despaired of being able to convey adequately a sense of what was happening; "enthusiasm" was a hard-driven word that day and during the next two, and we would have given the world to find another for a change.
Since I returned I have heard sceptical people say that the stories of these "great receptions" were vamped-up affairs, mere newspaper manufacture. I would like to have had some of those sceptics in Toronto with us on August 25th, 26th and 27th. It would have taught them a very convincing and stirring lesson.
The crowds of the Exhibition ground were followed by crowds at the Public Reception, an "extra" which the Prince himself had added to his program. This was held at the City Hall. It had all the characteristics of these democratic and popular receptions, only it was bigger. Policemen had been drawn about the City Hall, but when the people decided to go in, the police mattered very little. They were submerged by a sea of men and women that swept over them, swept up the big flight of steps and engulfed the Prince in a torrent, every individual particle of which was bent on shaking hands. It was a splendidly-tempered crowd, but it was determined upon that handshake. And it had it. It was at Toronto that, as the Prince phrased it, "My right hand was 'done in.'" This was how Toronto did it in.