Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

It was a city of people given over to the meditative, if sympathetic, silence. It was an artificial city sprung from the sterile seeds of legislature, and thriving on the arid food of Bills. It was a mere habitation of governments. It was a freak city created coldly by an act of Solomonic wisdom. Before 1858 it was a drowsy French portage village, sitting inertly at the fork of the Ottawa and Rideau rivers, concerning itself only with the lumber trade, almost inattentive to the battle which Montreal and Quebec, Toronto and Kingston were fighting for the political supremacy of the Dominion. Appealed to, to settle this dispute, Queen Victoria decided all feuds by selecting what had been the old Bytown, but which was now Ottawa, as the official capital of the Dominion.

Ottawa men pointed all this out to us, and declared that a town of such artificial beginnings, and whose present population was made up of civil servants and mixed Parliamentarians, could not be expected to show real, red-blood enthusiasm.

A day later those Ottawa men met us in the high and handsome walls of the Château Laurier, and they were entirely unrepentant. They were even proud of their false prophecy, and asked us to join them in a grape-juice and soda—the limit of the emotion of good fellowship in Canada (anyhow publicly) is grape-juice and soda—in order that they might explain to us how they never for a moment doubted that Ottawa would show the enthusiasm it had shown.

"This is the Capital of Canada, sir. The home of our Parliament and the Governor-General. It is the hub of loyalty and law. Of course it would beat the band."

II

I don't know that I want to quarrel with Ottawa's joke, for I am awed by the way it brought it off. Perhaps it brought it off on the Prince also. If so he must have had a shock, and a delightful one. For the taciturnity of Ottawa is a myth. When the Prince entered it on the morning of Thursday, August 28th, it was as silent as a whirlwind bombardment, and as reticent as a cyclone.

There were crowds, inevitably vast and cheering, with the invincible good-humour of Canada. They captured him with a rush after he was through with the formalities of being greeted by the Governor-General and other notabilities, and had mounted a carriage behind the scarlet outriders of Royalty. That carriage may have been more decorative but it was no more purposeful than an automobile would be under the circumstance. Even as the automobile, it went at a walking pace, with the crowd pressing close around it.

It passed up from the swinging, open triangle that fronts the Château Laurier Hotel and the station, over the bridge that spans the Rideau Canal, and along the broad road lined with administration buildings and clubs, to the spacious grass quadrangle about which the massive Parliament buildings group themselves.

This quadrangle is a fit place to stage a pageant. It crowns a slow hill that is actually a sharp bluff clothed in shrubs that hangs over the startling blue waters of the Ottawa river. From the river the mass of buildings poised dramatically on that individual bluff is a sharp note of beauty. On the quadrangle, that is the city side, this note is lost, and the rough stone buildings, though dignified, have a tough, square-bodied look. Yet the massiveness of the whole grouping about the great space of grass and gravel terraces certainly gives a large air. They form the adequate wings and backcloth for pageants.

And what happened that morning in the quadrangle was certainly a pageant of democracy.