Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

Boys' schools had the inmates gathered at the road-edge in jolly mobs, though some of these had a semi-military dignity, because of the quaint and kepi-ed uniform of the school, that made the boys look like cadets out of a picture by Detaille.

The seminaries had their flocks of black fledglings drawn up under the professor-priests, and the sober black of these embryo priests had not the slightest restriction on their enthusiasm.

There were crowds everywhere on that extraordinary ride, but it was in Montreal itself that the throngs reached immense proportions. From the first moment of arrival, when the Prince in mufti rode out from under the clangour of "God Bless the Prince of Wales" played on the bells of St. George's Church, that hob-nobs with the station, crowds were thick about the route. As he swung from Dominion Square (in which the station stands) into the Regent Street of Montreal, St. Catherine Street, crowds of employés crowded the windows of the big and fine stores, and added their welcome to the mass on the sidewalks.

Short notice had curtailed decoration, but the enthusiastic employés (mainly feminine) of one tall store strove to rectify the lack by arming themselves with flags and stationing themselves at every window. Balancing perilously, they waited until the Prince came level, and then set the whole face of the tall building fluttering with Union Jacks.

From these streets, impressive in their sense of vigour and industry, the procession of cars mounted through the residential quarter to Mount Royal Park. Here in the presence of a big crowd that surrounded him and got to close quarters at once, the Prince alighted and stayed a few minutes at the statue of Georges Etienne Cartier, the father of Canadian unity, whose centenary was then being celebrated, since the war forbade rejoicing on the real anniversary in 1914.

Cartier's daughter, Hortense Cartier, was present at this little ceremony, and she was, as it were, a personal link between her father and the Prince, who is himself helping to inaugurate a new phase of unity, that of the Empire.

From this point the Prince's route struck out into the country districts that I have described, but the crowds had accumulated rather than diminished when he returned to the streets of the city, about one o'clock, and he drove through lanes of people so dense that at times the pace of his car was retarded to a walk.

The crowd was a suggestive one. All ranks and conditions were in it—and conditions rather than ranks were apparent in the dock-side area, which is a dingy one for Canada. But in all the crowds the thing that struck me most was their proportion of children. Montreal seemed a veritable hive of children. There were thousands and thousands of them.

The streets were bursting with kiddies. And not merely were there multitudes of girls and boys of that thoroughly vociferous age of somewhere under twelve, but there were ranked battalions of boys and maids, all of an age obviously under twenty.

Quebec is the province of large families. Ten children to a marriage is a commonplace, and twenty is not a rarity. A man is not thought to be worth his salt unless he has his quiver full. And the result of this as I saw it in the streets gives food for thought.