The painful part of the story of this most extraordinary geography is that what I have already quoted was all there was between its two covers in any way touching upon North America.[#]
[#] Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada, Vol. I., page 106.
The great drawback to the legislative efforts to improve the system was the lack of uniformity. Each section, and later, each district, followed its own inclination, and no satisfactory results were attained until Egerton Ryerson introduced his reforms, and brought every school in Upper Canada under the same general supervision.
The old teacher of the pioneer days is gone from us forever, and, while he served his day and generation as well as he could, we cannot entertain any feelings of regret that he will never return. Brute force played an important part in his system of instruction. The equipment of no school was complete without the tawse or leather strap, and the offending pupil was frequently despatched to the neighbouring woods to cut from a beech tree the instrument of torture to be applied to his particular case.
The minor parts of speech were recognized as such, not from the functions performed by them in the sentence in which they appeared, but from the fact that they were in the list which the pupil was forced to memorize. "With" was a preposition because it was in the list of prepositions, and "forth" was an adverb because the teacher said it was, and if by chance, from nervousness or any other cause, the boy with a treacherous memory failed to place it under its proper heading, a flogging was considered a proper chastisement for the offence. It sometimes happened that a boy did not see eye to eye with his teacher upon this question of corporal punishment, and a scrimmage would ensue. If the teacher came out second best, his usefulness in that neighbourhood was gone.
To be learned, as the teacher was supposed to be, was a distinction which gave him a certain amount of prominence, and opened up for him several other fields of usefulness. He was frequently called upon as arbitrator to adjust complicated accounts, or to settle disputes in the measurement of wood or lumber, or to lay out a plot of ground with a given acreage. He was the court of last resort in matters of orthography and spelling. If he happened to be of a religious turn of mind, he might be called upon to fill the pulpit in the absence of the regular clergyman.
The Squire and the school teacher each played his part in the administration of the affairs of the neighbourhood. Each carried some weight and commanded a certain amount of respect; but both yielded first place to the clergyman. While there were several other denominations, the Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Methodists formed the great mass of the population. The Anglicans were the pampered class; they received most of the public favours and were correspondingly haughty and independent. For the first fourteen years of the settlement the clergymen of this church enjoyed a monopoly in the matter of marrying. It was a common occurrence, before there was a Protestant parson or minister duly ordained residing in the province, for a Justice of the Peace to tie the knot, and in rarer cases still for a military officer to perform the ceremony.[#]
[#] All such marriages were confirmed and made valid by "The Marriage Act" passed in 1793; and it was declared lawful for a Justice of the Peace to solemnize marriages under certain circumstances, when the parties lived eighteen miles from a parson of the Church of England.
In 1798 the privilege of performing the marriage ceremony was extended to the ministers of the Presbyterian Church, and as they did not insist upon the wedding party going to the church, the "meenester" secured many fees which otherwise would have gone to his Anglican brother of the cloth. The great democratic body of Methodists were severely handicapped, and did not come to their own until 1831, when the gate was thrown wide open, and the clergy of nearly every recognized religious denomination were placed upon the same footing in respect to marrying as the Anglicans and Presbyterians.
Some of the extreme Loyalists could not reconcile Methodism and loyalty to the Crown, and the records inform us of more than one persecution for preaching the doctrines of the Methodist Church; in fact, one duly elected member of the Legislative Assembly was refused his seat in the House, because he had upon occasions filled the pulpit in a Methodist meeting-house. It is only fair to those who supported such extreme measures to explain that these extraordinary occurrences took place at a time when the feeling in this country against the United States was very strong, and the Methodist body in Upper Canada was under the jurisdiction of a General Conference across the line.