CHAPTER XIX.
City and country life compared--No aristocracy in Canada--Long winter evenings--Social evenings--The bashful swain--Popular literature of the day--A comfortable winter day at home--Young farmers who have inherited property--Difficulty of obtaining female help--Farmers trying town life--Universality of the love of country life--Bismarck--Theocritus--Cato--Hesiod--Homer--Changes in town values--A speculation in lard.
Your city dweller turns away from a life in the country on account of society. Granted that we in the country cannot make calls and pay fashionable visits as easily as you can. But most good country families have a few genuine friends and acquaintances whom they visit periodically, and such visits are really appreciated by the persons entertaining. There is not much duplicity about our friendships, for we are not so much thrown together as city people; and when we do meet at the different family boards, genial right good fellowship is the rule. The cant and half-friendly reception of your city fashionables we know not of.
There is no aristocracy in Canada, and all attempts to found any such class in America have signally failed. It is contrary to the genius and spirit of the democracy of America, for are we not quite as democratic as our neighbors to the south of us? Of all the prominent families who were on the boards at the time of the American Revolution, in the last century, only five are in existence this day. What a comment on the mutability of human affairs! Your titles and riches don’t stick in America, and there is many a boy in rural Ontario who now follows the plough who will yet rise to eminence as his years increase. To create and maintain a titled class in Canada, in the face and eyes of the great Republic adjoining us, would be an anomaly, and it never can be done. There seems to be a growing disposition to exclusiveness among the city families, and to discriminate to too great a nicety as to whom their sons and daughters shall marry. Their alliances in the matrimonial way are ever to be with those of the presumably rich, in contradistinction to others possessing push and merit, but not quite as many dollars in immediate view. So far as I can judge, I do not know of the son of a business man to-day in any of the country towns hereabout who inherits the wealth his father once possessed, and who pursues his father’s calling. John Adams, when ambassador of the United States to Paris, wrote home to his daughter who asked his views about her approaching marriage: “Marry an honest man and keep him honest.” In Adams’s advice there is no mention of the _dot_, as the continental Europeans use the term, and it is earnestly to be hoped that this word will never find any currency among us.
The long winter evenings, when our inhabitants must perforce remain by the lamplight, are the most trying period for our young people. Some sort of excitement seems to be the great _desideratum_. In most country parts the local church will have evening anniversaries and teas, to which the near inhabitants invariably flock. Ministers on other circuits usually come to such gatherings, to assist the local minister, and much genial talk usually flows. The half-grown farmer’s son at these meetings usually essays his first attempt to wait upon the fair sex, and brings some neighboring farmer’s young daughter to the entertainment. Paying the required admission fee for both, he considers her usually his partner for the evening, and pertinaciously sits by her side. His half-bashful, scared look, and the twitch of his downy moustache, even if they do show some awkwardness on his part, betoken a thoroughly honest fellow, whose intentions are above suspicion.
The influence which the clergy exert upon the community cannot for a moment be gainsaid. Ontario to-day listens to her ministers, and in a great measure they form a standard for the opinions and actions of its inhabitants. It must necessarily be so, for Ontario people are a church-going people, and in many country parts the ministers are the best read and most cultivated persons in their midst. All honor to our clergy, for they have done and are daily doing a good work. Even sceptics tell us that we must build gaols or churches. We prefer the churches, hence we have them, and our people attend them and listen to our ministers, and crime is rare, and our people are law-abiding, no mobs, and industrious. Protoplasm, evolution, or modern agnosticism have not reached our rural population to disturb their simple faith.
Comparisons of travel lead me to think that our country churches might be made more attractive. Who has not seen in the Old World gems of little country churches, moss-grown, ivy-wreathed, and surrounded by trees, shrubs and hedges? Among the graves at the church’s side are invariably rare shrubs and grasses, let alone flowers, but the whole embowery of green giving an air of quiet repose. And with the steeple or tower pointing to heaven, no place seems better calculated for reverential feelings than do the rural churches of the British Isles.
In Ontario we build bare, glaring walls, and our churches are right, from a modern architectural point of view. Even if we cannot grow ivy, we can greatly beautify our churches and grounds by planting shrubs and evergreens, and thus relieve the stiffness of our newly constructed churches and grounds.
Henry Ward Beecher says that he never knew a bad family to come from a home where there was an abundance of books and papers. Our Ontario farmers do not provide enough and sufficiently varied reading matter for their families. Most of them take a weekly paper, an agricultural paper, and generally some religious paper, the organ of the denomination to which they belong. These are all well enough so far as they go, but pictures are perhaps the quickest, best, and most agreeable way of imparting instruction. All our farmers could easily spare annually the cost of enough journals to make home daily attractive, so that the new papers to come each day forward would be looked for and something sought. The London _Graphic_ or London _Illustrated News_ would keep us posted pleasantly on matters at home, and, in fact, they would follow England all over the world, and improve the family taste at the same time. From New York a paper should certainly be taken, for we must, of course, follow our cousins just south of us, with their seventy-five millions of people. The New York semi-weekly _Tribune_ would keep us thoroughly up with the times, and there will be nothing in it that one need be ashamed to read before his daughters, which is a great recommendation in this day of trashy literature. By all means add _Harper’s Weekly Illustrated_, and _Frank Leslie’s_ as well, for they do not require much time to read--the pictures show for themselves; and then there is the _Century Magazine_, which is perhaps the most popular to-day. As to merit, I only wish we in Canada could afford to produce anything nearly as good. Its illustrations will shame any English magazine, and I would certainly add _Harper’s Magazine_ as well. For the little folks, by all means the _St. Nicholas Magazine_, beautifully illustrated, and with stories down to the mental calibre of the little ones. Of course, I would not forget our own productions, and would take a few of them in addition to those now taken.
Now, I know a good many will look upon this as too much to read, will say it costs too much, etc. They can all be taken for less than $50 per year, and if once they begin to come to the family, the boys will soon stay at home nights rather than go prowling around the country or seeking society in the towns and villages.
Excitement people must have, and your city people get their excitement by conversing with one another, the theatre, lectures, etc. But if our country people would take the periodicals I have outlined, in conjunction with their social gatherings at churches and in neighbors’ houses, they would have a constant fund of excitement and pleasure at home. Each mail would be looked forward to with eagerness, and the quiet evenings at home would be most pleasurably and profitably spent.
Even if they read upon subjects quite foreign to their own occupations, some knowledge would be gained. Knowledge from whatever source is valuable, and some day will, without a doubt, come into play. In this fast century many people who are able financially eschew a country life, and flock bag and baggage to the cities. There are some instances wherein a city life is more desirable than life in the country. Admitted that the city dweller can hear the best lectures of the day, and now and again witness a play of genuine merit upon the stage, yet there are pleasures in a country life which will outbalance those privileges, and of which I cannot help speaking now and again when my pen flows freely and I am in the humor. When writing of life in the country I do not mean twelve miles from a lemon, as Gail Hamilton writes in her New England bower, but rather within easy reach of the daily mail. Around me are no signs of want. The examples of wretchedness the city dweller has brought to his notice so very often we know not of. It is truly said, “that one-half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” So far as our pleasures and feelings are concerned we do not want to know, _i.e._, while we are willing to relieve the distressed we are glad that such examples do not come before us to harrow our feelings.
My hardwood fire burns brightly in the open fireplace as I sit behind double windows defying the 7° below zero without to penetrate, and my books and papers rest upon my writing-desk within easy reach of my hand. The children come in from their slides upon the ice with cheeks aglow and faces on fire, induced from the sudden change from the cold outside to the genial warmth within. You city dweller would think half-grown boys and girls too big to enjoy their hilarious, life-giving fun, and would want them to be nicely dressed and walk your city streets in the prim of propriety.
The examples of all great men and women prove distinctly that in order to be such you must first have good constitutions to support big brains, and our children by this are laying the foundations of such sound constitutions. Soon enough they will be men and women, and let them have their fun as long as they can.
In this locality most of our lands are held by inheritance. The sons of the pioneers who cleared the forests are the owners of the soil as a rule to-day. The rising generation, the immediate sons of the pioneers, are not as a rule equal to the old stock. The reason is, so far as I can judge, that they have seen the hard toil and steady, unchangeable life of their future, and having received a little education, which their fathers did not possess, they judge themselves too smart to follow their fathers’ footsteps. A good many of these sons, as I have before remarked, flock to the cities to live as half gentlemen, and very many others lease their farms to tenants, and reside in the towns hereabout.
There come before my mind as I write dozens of instances of young men who inherited a hundred or a hundred and fifty acres of land, worth probably from $80 to $125 per acre, or, say, they are worth individually $8,000 to $12,000, and these young men think to be gentlemen on these means. There are so many of such instances that I must needs make a note of it. Seemingly they get on for the present tolerably well. But the fences and buildings which their fathers built are yearly rotting away, and there is no timber here to replace them; and having yearly lived up to their full rental it becomes a serious question to know what this class of persons will do in the end. Englishmen with small means are gradually buying up such farms. Given the entering payment, and your sturdy English emigrant, who has spent a few years in this country, will pay for the property from the money which he makes off it.
Many of the pioneers and their sons in this locality have been as nomadic as the Indian. Having cleared or partly cleared up their lands, which they obtained for a merely nominal sum, or by Government grant, and spent many years in hard toil, in fact the very hardest kind of toil, they pull up and sell out, and move to the promised West.
So far as I have yet been able to learn, I cannot now recall a single instance in which an Ontario farmer, from this locality, who left a 100 or 150 acre farm, is to-day worth more money in the West than the same lands he left are worth here to-day. It would appear that these persons obtained their properties too easily to learn their real value, and hence are supplanted by the emigrant, whose previous lot in his old home has been a hard one.
Upon the other side of the picture, there are some of the sons of those pioneers who early learned wisdom, and commenced just where their forefathers left off. Such young men or middle-aged men are buying out very many of the small properties around them, are keeping good blooded and grade stock, and are a credit and a benefit to the country. They ever dispense a generous hospitality when called upon, and ordinarily will give the visitor as much of their time as he desires. Their sons and daughters are invariably healthy and well on in a common school education, and are the hope and interest for the future of our glorious Province of Ontario.
And yet there is a dark side to their lives, or rather that of their wives. Female help in the house is so difficult to obtain that the wife of many and many a man, who is worth easily from $30,000 to $50,000, has perforce to perform more hard manual labor than has the wife of the ordinary mechanic, the owner, perhaps, of a very humble home, and who earns his $1.25 or $1.50 per day. Pardon me, reader, for drawing this unpleasant picture, but it is indeed too true, and there is something very wrong in the “eternal fitness of things,” when men of such ample means are able and willing to pay for servants to ease their wives’ lots, and they cannot be obtained. The only hope on this score seems to be in emigration. When our country becomes more thickly populated, and a living in the country is not quite so easily obtained, then the daughters of households having therein a number of girls will go out to work rather than be pinched at home. Formerly the daughters of the farmers would go out to work among the neighboring farmers, and usually married the sons of those farmers, and became in their turn mistresses themselves. All this is now past, and our farmers’ families, with increasing wealth, do not go out to work but feel perfectly able, as no doubt they are, to live at home.
Not a few of our farmers, feeling that they were not big enough upon their own farms, became storekeepers or manufacturers in the towns. No doubt, in the abstract this may be well for the general progress of those towns in building them up and laying the nucleus of new industries. They do not, however, as a rule, succeed in the new fields of business they have chosen, or if they do not become the principals of businesses in the towns, they sometimes lend their names as endorsers to assist those who are principals of such businesses. Endorsations were sometimes very easily obtained by the glib-tongued business man, and for a time all went on well, until some financial crisis overtaking the business man, consequent ruin came to the farmer. These instances have been so many that I speak of them as exemplifying another phase of life in the country. Latterly, however, the landowners are becoming more conservative of their means and credit, and are disposed to “paddle their own canoe.”
Since the law of primogeniture was abolished in Canada, the hold upon land has become very slight, and the examples of large landed estates being retained in the same families for over two generations are so very rare that they need scarcely be mentioned. In some cases our rich men make a terrible mistake in bringing up their families. They are not taught to labor, but live a life of ease, with the idea that the family property will be sufficient to support each individual member. But with the nomadic habits of our Canadians, and the light stress usually heretofore laid upon the paternal acres, each individual share soon vanishes, leaving them to learn to fight the battle of life at a terrible disadvantage, because frequently they are then past their first youth at least.
My wood fire still burns brightly as I turn to my morning mail with its treasures of current literature. Talk about your city bustle compared with this, in my cosy seat beside the fire and all these treasures at my elbow! There are no gas bills to pay, nor water rates, and the mail comes to me daily, just as regularly as your city mail does. Then what do we want with your city?
Speaking of the post-office reminds me to say that the meanest hovel in the land can to-day put itself in almost daily communication with the best minds of the age. Such service the mail hourly and regularly performs for us, and is such a great factor to the pleasure of our lives, and yet we scarcely bestow a thought upon it. No, I do not propose to try to assume that life in the country would be very pleasant or desirable away from the mails. Given a daily mail and a comfortable country-seat, and easy access to the train, so that I may come to the city quickly and easily, if you have therein any real intellectual treat, and I yet fail to see what are the inducements to make one prefer life in the city to the free life in the country.
A rural life is a natural life, and a city life is an artificial life. Man in his first estate was an arboreal being, and in such surroundings throve as he does to-day. Our Ontario families, as a rule, who leave good properties in the country to go into the cities, make a mistake in almost every respect. Even if the parents do not feel the trouble wrought upon their families during their lives, their children almost invariably do not make the men and women they would have made had they hung on and occupied the paternal acres. In most instances these are sold, and in a few years the money scattered. Had they held on to the paternal acres, and bought more, they would have been among our staunchest and best citizens, as well as among the wealthiest.
In Europe all successful men look forward to the day when they can own and live upon a farm. Bismarck had his country home, and we know he prized it, for we often heard of him going there to get away from the cares of office. Going back to earlier times, we find that the great men of the world loved their country homes quite as much as the English country squire does at this day. I take down old Xenophon from its place on the bookshelf and see that he says he sees the ridges piling along the ælian fields, and from the way that he makes the remark, he loves the sight, and loves to be in the midst of such ridges, where some husbandmen are ploughing. Theocritus hears the lark that hovers over the straight laid furrows, and if Theocritus did not love such a scene and dwell in its midst, he would never have given it to us at this remote day. “Establish your farm near to market, or adjoining good roads,” old Cato says. So old Cato loved the country, and we all know his head was level. I am afraid some of us in Ontario have followed old Cato only too literally, and have built our houses almost overhanging the road-side, when they would have looked far better and presented a much prettier sight set back from the road and surrounded by trees and lawns. Hesiod tells us that we ought not to plough the land when it is too wet, and also how to put in a new plough beam to replace the broken one. Homer the Great says a farmer should keep two ploughs on hand for fear one should get broken, and he does hot forget to praise the wine which the country produces about his rural home, and adds some caution about its too copious use.
When Hesiod and Homer loved country life in Greece so long ago, can we be amiss in praising a country life in Ontario to-day? As my eyes run up and down the pages, I can hear the swallows twitter and the lark sing, in my fancy, as they heard them. They praise the crispness and freshness of the vegetables which their gardens yield them, and they can go on and describe feasts which they partake of at their country homes, the materials of which come almost without exception from their farms. Virgil, I infer, was not much of a farmer after all, but he tells us that he loved his country home, and seems not to have the most remote thought of removing to Imperial Rome. Mostly he praises the bees and the wine, so it is evident every one sees a beauty in country life for himself, as his peculiarities may be. Yet Virgil left us some very good hints, though he evidently made some mistakes. He tells us, for instance, that lands only need cultivating to obliterate the obnoxious weeds. Tull, however, said about one hundred years ago, that the land only needed mixing by deep ploughing to make it produce indefinitely. Now, Tull was a man of means, and only lived a rural life from the love of it, as did the old worthies whom I have instanced. Ontarians, we have a grand country, and we who are in it, let us stay therein and enjoy it. Let those persons remain in the cities who are now in them. For us nature in all its beauties is daily unfolded before our eyes, and let us daily enjoy those beauties. If we can by any means inculcate an increased love of country homes, we will continue to beautify our homes and improve our country.
Real properties in the cities and towns of Canada have been very fluctuating, often being held at prices far beyond any intrinsic value they could possibly possess, while again, the very same properties fall away, and frequently become totally unsalable. Yet during commercial depression good farm lands have held their value very well and have even, after a temporary period of dulness, steadily risen in value year by year.
To illustrate the peculiar change of town values to which I allude, I may give an instance coming under my own knowledge. One of my forbears bought, about the year 1815, a large building tract situated on King Street, Toronto, very near the market. For many years after the purchase this property was wholly unsalable. Taxes were put upon it, and yearly it became a burden. Somehow, in Canada we are not very careful, as a community, of the rights in property of the individual. Accordingly, in this instance, taxes for street improvements, with gas, water, sewers and other special levies, were put upon this land. A day finally came, about the year 1845, when to own property in Toronto meant either disaster or a very large income from without to retain it. A purchaser coming along at about that year, his offer was taken with avidity. My people were glad to get it off their hands, and thus was closed a history, so far as they were concerned, which was a fair sample of city property in Canada and its mutations for more than thirty years. Since that time the property in question rose to enormous value, but has again fallen on account of trade to some extent deserting the locality.
Another feature of city and town life we must notice, viz., the constant interchange of views among the inhabitants as to business and politics on account of their close proximity to each other. An instance occurring in one of our Canadian towns will illustrate what I mean. In this town some few moneyed men gathered nightly and exchanged views on stocks and the like. Some of them had speculated in this way to the extent of a few hundred dollars and had been moderately successful. At one of their meetings some one introduced the subject of lard.
Lard became the topic. Others came, heard and pondered. Small lots of lard were then bought in Chicago, and in a few weeks sold, and some ready profits realized.
“If a little capital will win money in lard in Chicago, a large capital will yield much more” was the reasoning, so they joined forces and got nearly every man with ready cash in that town to put money into the joint fund for lard. Again they bought in Chicago--this time largely--and the commodity began to rise in price. Moreover it kept on rising, and never seemed to recede a point. These operators began to reason that if they held all the lard, they could dictate prices and could control the article. They put more money into it and bought more lard, for they considered it to be what is called “a dead certainty.” Days and weeks passed and lard still held on. Fortunes truly seemed to be within the grasp of our group of townsmen. There could be no mistake about it, for they had, as they considered, all the lard in America cornered, so that no one could beat them.
One day, however, some persons in Chicago offered an immense quantity of lard from some unknown source. So great was the amount that our townsmen could not tackle it.
Down came the price. Still down it came, and down every day, until in a few days these lard cornerers in the Canadian town were entirely “cleaned out” and a loss of $2,000,000 actually sustained. From that loss for ten years afterwards that town was as quiet as a country place, and its magnates felt and acted with the timorousness of poor men.