CHAPTER XV.

Getting hold of an Ontario farm--How a man without a capital may succeed--Superiority of farming to a mechanical trade--A man with $10,000 can have more enjoyment in Ontario than anywhere else--Comparison with other countries--Small amount of waste land in Ontario--The help of the farmer’s wife--“Where are your peasants?”--Independence of the Ontario farmer--Complaints of emigrants unfounded--An example of success.

It was far more difficult for our early settlers in Ontario to pay for their lands by their own exertions, even at the low prices then prevailing, than it is to-day at their greatly increased values. When Ontario lands could be purchased for $4.00 or $5.00 per acre, there was no market for their produce to any extent, and money was extremely difficult to get. Not only the absence of markets was against our settlers, but though they owned a farm it was wholly unproductive and useless until cleared of timber. So it was harder to pay the $4.00 per acre then than it is to pay $80 per acre to-day. A man without capital to-day in Ontario can start on a 100-acre farm, and pay for it off the farm in a series of years, by his own and his wife’s exertions. Of course, he will need a little more to start with in the first instance than his forefathers did, for he must needs make a small payment down in order that he may mortgage the farm to get the balance of the purchase money. Since money is now being loaned on farm security at five and six per cent., he can yearly more than pay his interest and reduce his principal, so that his burdens are daily becoming lighter. His wife and himself pulling together and practising economy invariably succeed on productive farms, and pay for them. We sometimes wonder at our forefathers that they did not take up more land when it was so cheap, but forget that even its cheapness, as it seems to us to-day, was no guide to them as to its being cheap. Grain in early times did not bring money, when these prices prevailed, nor would timber. Furs and potash were the only commodities commanding cash. Hence it was almost an impossibility for an ordinary man to pay for more than 100 acres from his own exertions. To-day, even at $80 per acre on a mortgaged farm, everything he can grow will sell for money, and with his family’s help, and with the growth and increase of his stock, he is bound to succeed.

Even if he must needs practise economy it does not follow that he may not enjoy himself, as the time goes on, while he is paying for his farm. The press will, for a few dollars yearly, give him amusement and pleasure at home. If his means are particularly straitened, even $5.00 per year for weeklies will furnish him the cheapest and best contemporary readings possibly obtainable for the money. Then if he or his wife be at all musically inclined, the evening of relaxation, after the hard day’s work be done, can be pleasantly put in by a song or two, accompanied on an organ, if he has got so far along as to afford one; and he rises with the sun next morning, rested, invigorated, and ready for the next day’s work. And as every harvest comes in its turn he feels gladly thankful that the mortgage is being gradually lifted. Living as he does, and putting forth these efforts to save, he must have good habits. Good habits will invariably give him good health, and life is a pleasure to him, even under the cloud of a mortgage. Slavery some people will term this life, while under the mortgage. If one would get money one must save, and if one be well cared for, housed, clad and fed while saving, he can surely put up with the hard work, for always ahead is the goal of having a 100-acre farm paid for, which will make him independent for life. The mechanic emigrant who comes to us from Britain is not sufficiently versatile to change his mode of life to go on a farm and succeed until he has been here a few years. Having been in our midst a few years he gets his eyes opened, and learns in a measure “to be a jack-of all trades,” and then many of such former mechanics do succeed on farms and pay for them. Our native-born Canadian, who follows some mechanical trade when the mechanical labor market is over-supplied, is making a serious mistake. Very naturally many of our young men drift into this life, for their work is over at six o’clock, and they can wash, dress and walk the streets when their farmer brother at home is yet in the fields. While the mechanic goes through life with tolerable ease upon his day’s wages, as a rule he is not saving much for his declining days; but his farmer brother invariably is. His farmer brother will have soiled hands, and wear his working clothes the whole day through, and cannot go about the streets in the evenings, nor attend so many places of amusement, but he enjoys himself just as well at home, and he is saving for a rainy day. If trade be dull and shops shut down in the middle of winter, he is quite indifferent, for his cellar is well supplied, and his fields are ploughed ready for next spring’s sowing. Prices for his grain may be low, but still he has his living, and no one to call master, and is as free and independent as any king upon a throne. Writers on political economy tell us that all true wealth must be produced from the soil. Now, if this be true, then the nearer we get to the soil at first hand the better off we must be. I have already endeavored to show that those on the soil lead the most independent, free and healthy lives, and since Ontario has lots more of lands yet for the farmer, let those out of work and with no very bright or sure prospects before them, go on those lands. Many workmen could remedy the scarcity of employment in the winter, and their having not much to live upon, following strikes of trades-unions, if they would cultivate the soil. If the mechanical labor market be overstocked, the common-sense remedy would be to lessen the supply. Here with us the proper way to lessen the supply is for our smart mechanics, who know our country and its conditions, to get away from the towns upon farms; and if in the course of time such persons, succeeding in their new calling (which I have tried to prove is not a life of slavery, but of hard toil and self-denial, and wealth and independence), as succeed they must if they put forth the necessary effort, and pay for their first 100 acres, there is no law or moral obstacle to their buying 200 or 400 more if they can. Should they not be able to work so much land, surely they are at perfect liberty to rent it to others, and enjoy the rents and profits from it as the result of their labors. Very few farmers fail in Ontario; so very few, in fact, that our former bankruptcy law did not provide for the farmers’ failure at all. They invariably succeed, and the instances of old decrepit farmers, with nothing to support them in their declining years, are so very few that any reader hereof cannot call to mind very many examples. Reader, you will have to think twice before you can point to an old, infirm farmer with nothing to support him in Ontario. I only wish I could say as much for the mechanic. Even with the good wages they get, it is almost a superhuman task to save a competency for that period of life which must come to all of us surviving, when our limbs become too stiff to obey our will, and too weak to maintain the strain of toil. But I did not set out to write of the mechanical trades or kindred subjects; I am only trying to induce more mechanics to go upon farms and be independent of bosses, strikes or trades-unions.

My observation of travel in continental Europe, Britain and the United States gives me the ground to fearlessly state that in Ontario a man with a capital of $10,000 can enjoy more and be more independent than he can in those countries.

Say his farm costs $8,000, or $80 per acre; but from my intimate knowledge of lands in Ontario, I would not limit myself to that price. Good land is always the cheapest, and I would not hesitate in paying $100 per acre, and more, if the productiveness of the farm will warrant it. But assuming $80 per acre to be the average for a good farm; now add to this $2,000 upon the 100-acre farm for stock, implements, etc., so that the entire $10,000 is fully invested. Upon this 100-acre farm, paid for, the farmer can enjoy as good a living as can be got in any other calling in life. It can’t be done in Britain, but it can be done here. If I would settle on such a priced farm in Germany, in the first place it would not begin to be as productive as the Ontario farm, and besides, my growing sons would have to be soldiers for three years upon reaching manhood, or leave the country. The best lands to be found in Austria are in Hungary, which is a wheat country, and not one whit better than ours, of a like fertility, and at least two and a half or three times the price. In France I have noticed that by the most rigid and grinding economy the small peasant will lay up a competency. But the economy practised by the French peasant is something our people cannot and will not use. The usual conveniences and amenities of life the French peasant knows not of; a cloth is never laid upon the table, and the bread for the mid-day meal is usually cut from the loaf in advance for each person, and laid beside the plate. A full spread, with meat and other dishes, literally filling the table, so that there is plenty left after the meal is partaken of, they know not of; still they live, and secure a competency in a small way.

Rural life in Ontario is far preferable to anything these countries can produce. We are not forced to be soldiers, and we can buy and own absolutely the land which we cultivate. But there is another point, not usually thought of in regard to Ontario farming. That is its certainty. We never get a failure of crops, for although our crops may be more plentiful some years than others, we never fail really. We never get any serious drouths nor floods, and our cattle are never diseased, as they are in several States of the Union. Our taxes are so small a matter that we do not generally give them a second thought. Nor are our winters so severe that our stock will be injured by the cold; nor will our children coming from or going to school be caught in blizzards. But the farmer who prepares his land properly, and puts forth an effort in downright earnest, is bound to succeed.

He is eligible to any office within the gift of the people, if he be that way inclined, and he does not take off his hat to any lord or duke in the land. Literally he is master of his own situation; an honest, fearless, loyal, independent yeoman, with himself and his family absolutely provided for, and above all want. Pulling up and moving away he never thinks of. He has his home, and knows what a home is and should be. The temptation to go upon some cheap lands out west, where grasshoppers are possible to destroy his year’s crop, he does not even think of. The western American’s ease and little regret in pulling up and leaving for a little farther west he cannot understand.

He sticks to his home, and yearly improves it and adds to its value, and is ready to fight for it if need be. Ontario runs away south into the best States--agriculturally--of the Union. Even some American writers honestly assert that it is better situated (north of the lakes) than their own lands in the same latitude, south of the lakes. For a fact, we know Ontario gets less snow than northern New York or Ohio does, and the seasons are not nearly so trying in Toronto as they are in Buffalo. Granted, first, that the reader knows of the richness of Ontario’s lands and its little waste places, and also of the downright hard work of its people and their love of home, if you will then take up the map and note how Ontario is situated--surrounded by water and having a summer nearly as long as that of the north half of France--you can come to no other conclusion but that, with a capital of $10,000 in a farm and appurtenances, in Ontario one can enjoy most and be the surest of success.

One great fact which distinguishes Ontario is its little waste land. Draw a line from Lake Simcoe to Belleville, and all that portion of old Ontario west of that line possesses less waste land than any tract of country of equal size known in the world. There are no mountain wastes nor extensive marshes within this space, but nicely undulating lands with frequent streams, and almost naturally drained. Farms in Ontario are 100 acres each, ordinarily, and the 100-acre farmer is a man generally to be respected. He brings his family up respectably, and educates them at the common school so that they are capable of filling almost any position in after life in which they may be placed. Such farmers are intelligent and more or less travelled. Last summer I recollect being the guest of a Yorkshire farmer who farmed 560 acres of Yorkshire lands. He was a man of sixty-five, wealthy, and had been on the farm all his lifetime. During this time he had been to London only twice, at some horse shows. The River Tweed, dividing England from Scotland, was only two hours distant from him by rail, and yet he had never crossed it. As to going over to Ireland, he had never even thought of it. Our Ontario farmer comes to our provincial shows, and jostles among city people now and again in our different cities, and thus gets his rough corners rubbed off. And he is far more than the equal in intelligence of any yeoman in the Old World of anything like his means.

The 100-acre farmer will ordinarily have 60 acres in crop yearly, which will average him $20 per acre. The balance of his farm is in hay, pasture, and forest.

Now, from this 60 acres of crop he nicely supports his family, and yearly puts by a nice little sum to buy lands for his growing boys when they shall need them; of course, he cannot save the whole $1,200 obtained for his crops, as his family must be maintained out of this as well as pay for repairs and improvements. However, most Canadian farmers’ wives supplement this grain product by the butter and cheese from the cows running upon the pastures.

Indeed, the wife’s help is a very great element to the farmer’s success, as regards saving money; and she deserves her place of importance beside her husband. Our Ontario farmer drives a good team upon the roads, encased in first-class harness, and a smart light spring buggy behind them. Rope traces and straw collars, which one sees in the South, would be beneath his dignity, and one must search Ontario over and over to find an example of such. And he is well clad in clothes, the product of the factory loom. Only a few years back he wore clothes made from home-grown wool spun by his good wife and woven upon some loom near at home. But latterly the factories have produced tweeds and fullcloths at so small a price that it has not paid him to work up his own wool. His table is well supplied with not only an abundance of food, but in great variety, fruit in various forms forming a feature at almost every meal. The universal meat diet of England is not acceptable to his palate nor suitable for our climate, for our systems require a laxative in this climate, which fruit gives him. His wife is more than the equal in cooking of her friends in Old England. She can compound more dishes out of the same material, make more tasteful and toothsome pastry than one can buy in a pastrycook’s shop in Europe. She does not consider it beneath her dignity assisting in milking the cows, teaching calves which are to be reared to drink milk, or possibly feeding the pigs if the men be busy.

As a transformation she can, after a wash, quickly don garments fit for the parlor, and entertain company at her board with an ease and heartiness truly surprising to European travellers who visit us. Even if not able to converse in half Frenchy English, many of them can dash off a number of tunes upon an organ or piano in a manner acceptable to most persons not musical critics. An organ is in most good farm-houses, and sometimes a piano, and the daughters are daily becoming proficient on them, practising after the evening milking is done.

Well might the European ask, “Where are your peasants?” These are our peasants, and the reason you do not recognize them is because they are on a higher plane in cultivation, taste and education than yours are; and even if they do appear as ladies and gentlemen, they are not above engaging in the arduous toil of the farm.

Ontario farms are worth so much in dollars, because, for the reason I have already given, of the little waste land, and also because of the industriousness of its people. Look across the border at our American cousins and you do not find the genuine American doing the downright hard work. The European emigrant performs that duty for him, while the American fills the offices to be filled, and does the scheming.

But the Ontario farmer will do downright hard work after the manner of his sires in the British Isles, and he has not yet learned to shirk it. It is this industry which makes our province, makes our lands sell so high, and gives his home an abundance, and puts yearly a nice sum at his credit in some savings bank. One great difference between the Canadian and the American is in this particular--the American does not lay up for his children as the Canadian tries to do. My observation leads me to think that the American does not put forth an especial effort to set his sons up in the farming or other business, but lets them commence at the foot of the ladder to work their own way up. On the contrary, the Canadian farmer, almost without exception, is yearly trying to lay aside a sum to buy, or help to buy, farms for his growing sons. Thus the Ontario farmer never gets satisfied, as it were, or never gives up work as long as he is able to perform it. Americans, on the other hand, will rest upon their laurels, and live without any exertion, on small incomes. Indeed, from my own knowledge, I know that many American farmers in Michigan have rented their small farms and moved into the villages to live on an income of $300 per year. Our farmers have the true British greed, and would not think of giving out on a $300 income. Now, I argue that our state of affairs is the best for the prosperity of our country. Never becoming satisfied, they never cease to work, and thus they have produced the most smiling and prosperous country in the world. This picture of Ontario farm life is true to-day, and I ask the reader if it is not as desirable a life as is obtainable anywhere. Our Ontario farmer owns his own soil, is well fed, housed, and clad, ever striving to do for his family, loyal to his government, and at peace with his God and with man. I have yet to find his equal, as a class, for the general well-being or common weal.

Until a few years past nearly all Ontario people did their year’s business with their town merchant on the credit basis. Goods for family use would be freely purchased on credit the whole year through, until fall came and the annual grain selling time, when large bills would be rendered by the merchant. Large enough they generally would be, for, buying goods without restraint and paying no money for them, the farmers would hardly realize that such seemingly small purchases from time to time would amount to so much in the fall. But little credit is now given, and goods and supplies are generally paid for as purchased. This very beneficial change is no doubt owing to the fact that now the farmer has a greater variety of products of the farm to sell than formerly, which come in in their turn in different seasons, and thus give him a steady supply of funds. Paying as he goes, he is not nearly so apt to buy things he does not really need, and his sum total of the cash purchases for the year will not amount to so much as his annual store bills did formerly. The merchant likewise can sell his goods closer for cash than he could if he had to wait a whole year. The fact that the credit business is being largely superseded by the cash system is one of the best arguments as to the progress of the country. All along these townships lying upon Lake Ontario the farmer delivers his barley in the early fall by waggon to the elevator at the lake. This barley money usually gives the farmer his first fall money.

Tenant farmers generally pay their fall rent with their barley money. Very many of the teams coming down with barley take coal home with them. It is an undeniable fact that the lands bordering upon the lake do not have any more wood upon them. Fifteen years ago a person who would have made the assertion that the majority of the inhabitants would be burning coal to-day would have been scouted. It shows us how much we are dependent upon our neighbors south of us for our coal supply. There undoubtedly is abundance of wood northerly from central Ontario, but for fuel purposes it is almost useless to us. Our railways won’t carry the wood to us if they can get anything else to carry, and even having carried it, when the price is considered, wood becomes almost a luxury. We may as well look the future squarely in the face and realize that in a few years a great part of Ontario along the lakes must depend for fuel wholly upon United States coal. Formerly a few farmers of push and great physical strength would attend to their farms during the summer and follow lumbering and the timber business during the winter. That class of men possessed any amount of push, and performed more manual labor than any man can be found willing to do now, even for money. Numbers of such men became wealthy, for they had double profits coming to them all the time. Rudely as they farmed, they got a profit out of the virgin soil, and the winter’s limited business paid them as much more, hence those who would endure the severe physical strain necessary to carry on this mixed business made money rapidly. Such men got along faster than the ordinary farmer. But that is all changed now. Farming is now a matter of skill, and not brute force and strength as formerly. There is no longer any lumbering or timbering to be followed in the winter, and the Ontario farmer hereabout will get no more profit from that source. Then he must rely to-day only upon his farm and what he can make it do during the summer. When he used to swing his cradle among stumpy fields, then it was a question of physical endurance and strength. But all that is changed now, for his work is nearly all done by machinery, and he must learn to manage the machinery. To make money and succeed well at farming to-day requires as much skill as it does to succeed in any other calling. When the soil was new he could draw upon it unfairly, and still with all the abuse it smiled upon him. Seventeen successive crops of wheat upon the same land has not been uncommon in the past. And yet with all this abuse the last crop was nearly as good as the foregoing ones. This will give one an idea of the extraordinary richness of our soil, and without a doubt a good deal of our soil could be so abused now and it would continue to produce and pay. But the husbandman has learned to husband his resources, and refuses to draw so heavily upon his soil, and hence to-day he practises a succession of crops, roots, manuring, and ploughing in clover, roots, etc. This he has commenced to do lest he might exhaust his lands, not particularly because he had to do so, but simply through fear of the future. The day may come, when our lands have been cultivated as long as they have been in England, that we shall have to buy outside manures and pay ten dollars per acre for them, as the British farmer has to do; but since we do not, the lot of our farmers is ten dollars per acre better than that of the English farmer.

The most independent person in Canada to-day is the person who can do most things within himself. If a man were to emigrate to Canada who knew nothing but the art of cutting diamonds, his chances of success among us would be slim indeed. For general versatility the Ontario farmer is the equal of any people in any country. He can cultivate his lands, do an odd job of carpentry, build a log-house with his axe, and some can even shoe a horse or relay a plough coulter at their rude forges at their homes. Not long since I had occasion to call on a farmer and found him repairing the family clock, which obstinately refused to run in obedience to its pendulum. It was an ordinary brass affair, and not being a practical watchmaker, the farmer had taken the works out of their case and was vigorously boiling them in a pot of water on the stove. Rude as such clock repairing was, he succeeded in freeing it from superfluous hardened oil and grease, and got it in running order once more.

The Ontario farmer’s success is not anomalous when we come to consider him physically, capable as he is of performing an almost unlimited quantity of manual labor, and of so many kinds.

An American friend happened to be visiting me while a gathering was taking place not long ago here, and on viewing the farmers and their sons, made the significant remark, “What material for an army!”

Dean Stanley, who paid us a visit a few years before his death, said that “the people who could conquer this climate could achieve anything sought.” As to conquering the climate this we have done, and to-day there is no more law-abiding, peaceful, intelligent, and industrious class in any country than among the rural sections of Ontario.

The emigrant who comes to us complains that our farmers work him too hard, or, in other words, that he becomes a slave. During the pressing season of seeding and harvesting there are no people anywhere who work harder than our Ontario farmers do, and with our short seasons it must necessarily be so. As yet very few farmers ask their hired help to perform more work than they do themselves. The farmer generally works side by side with his hired man, and what the farmer can stand it would appear his hired man can. No farmer asks his hired man to plough in the drizzle and rain, which he had to do in England, and come in at night wet to the skin. He does not get his beer as he did in England, it is true, because in our climate of extremes of heat and cold we do not need the beer, and were the hired man to partake of it as freely as he used to in England he could not perform his necessary work for a long time. He sits at the same table with his master generally, and gets just the same fare, and has a bed and room to himself, same as if quartered in an hotel. Meat three times a day he can usually have if he wants it, which he certainly did not get in his Old Country home. And he is paid for eight months’ work, with his board and washing included, $160, or for a year with the same perquisites, $200. Now, the emigrant who comes over here and expects us to feed and lodge him for nothing must certainly think this country a second garden of Eden. As to farm hands flocking into the cities during the winter, I have only to say that I do not see what possible business they can have there. If a man refuses to engage for a whole year he gets his $160 for eight months, and very many remain with some farmer during the winter, doing chores at a low pittance, or perhaps even for their board. Well, he has got his $160 for the eight months of the year, and during the winter he need not spend it, and by the winter’s rest he is recuperating his physical powers even if the farmer did work him very hard during the summer. Those who grumble at the life I have pictured of a farmer’s hired man had better go back to England; but, for a fact, we do not see them ever going back. But the thrifty emigrant, who works away and saves, soon gets enough money together to become a tenant farmer, and becomes himself boss in turn. Usually such men are far harder on their hired help than those whom they themselves worked for. As a tenant farmer he pays about $5.00 per acre per year rent for his farm and the taxes, and if he has a growing family and a saving helpmate, in a few years he has saved money enough to quite or nearly pay for a farm of his own. Could he have accomplished that in the Old World? And still they grumble at our country, call it rural slavery, and write home to Old Country journals letters calculated to do us harm. So many young men leaving their fathers’ farms and flocking to the cities and towns might lead some to infer that the farmers’ sons were sick of life upon the farm. I do not so interpret it. Take, for instance, a farmer owning 150 acres of land and having four sons. Now, to divide his land equally among his sons would give each thirty-seven and a half acres, which is too small for a farm to be profitable as a farm. Then the farmer educates a couple of his sons, who leave the family farm and pursue other callings. With the industrious habits they learned at home, and with good sound physical bodies, they are quite able to succeed in their new callings. One instance of signal success in Ontario farm lands comes to my mind, and I will mention it. A Canadian, the oldest son, whose father died, leaving the mother without means, went to work among the farmers at twelve years of age. For the first three years he only got $40 per year. Notwithstanding this low wage he saved a little out of it. As he grew older he began to get a little more wages, and thus worked seven years to save his first $400. At this time in his life he turned sharp around and went to school, and soon became a school-teacher. With his first year’s salary as teacher, and a few dollars he already possessed from his former earnings, he bought his fifty acres of land and paid about half down for it. Then he hired a man and started to cultivate the fifty acres, by the help of a yoke of oxen. Night and morning he worked faithfully upon his land, chopping and logging, and attending to his school duties during the day. Soon he had his first fifty acres paid for, and then bought another farm of the same size, adjoining it, which he paid for in the same manner that he paid for the first fifty acres, only sooner, for he had the proceeds of the first farm to help him. At this turn in his life he studied for one of the learned professions, and attained a degree, and also educated his other brothers and sisters as well. To-day this gentleman owns 500 acres of land, very nearly all paid for, and farms it himself. His land cannot be worth less than $50,000, and yet he is not over fifty years of age at this time. Another very important feature in this gentleman’s career is that his family have all been taught to labor, and have been brought up to industrious habits, and the individual members cannot fail to make their mark in our midst. Ye city dwellers, do not for a moment suppose that this is only a solitary instance of signal success of country life. Many more might be mentioned, but this is sufficient to show what push, determination and brains will accomplish in rural Ontario. What he has done others can do, and are doing this day. Your examples of city dwellers’ success do not very much surpass this for the years during which the fortune was made. To “blow” about our own country is right and laudable, I maintain, especially when our country in its merits fully bears one out in the “blowing.”