CHAPTER VIII

GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL

Just as a man who knows mountains can in a little time describe the character of a mountain that is new to him, so a man who knows the country in general will soon find himself becoming acquainted with new country. It is not so with cities. Only a long residence in it will reveal the character of a city. I suppose that is because man is more subtle than nature. A clay land is always a clay land; it produces the same crops, the same weeds, the same men. But who will undertake to say what a city on a clay land produces? Only the man who has long been familiar with the particular city, and he probably will not even be aware that it stands on clay.

This is preparatory to saying that being a stranger to Montreal, I did not find out much about it in the few days I was there, and I will not pretend that I did. It is, I suppose, architecturally, far the most beautiful city in {67} the Dominion, and indeed in the Western Hemisphere, and for that very reason appears less strange to European eyes than most other Canadian towns. I would not suggest that all European towns are architecturally beautiful, or that Montreal is anything but Canadian inwardly. Superficially it looks like some fine French town. It also smells French.

'But them thereon didst only breathe And sentst it back to me, Since when it blows and smells, I swear, Not of itself but thee.'

Thus England might address France on the subject of Montreal, though indeed France did more than breathe on Montreal. I would not be taken to suggest that the smell is a malodorous one--merely French. You get just that smell in summer in any French town from Rouen to Marseilles, and it is probably due to nothing but the sun being at the right temperature to bring out the mingled scent of omelettes and road grit, cigarettes, _apéritifs_, and washing in sufficient strength to attract the sensitive British nose. As for Montreal's French appearance--the city is by all accounts strictly divided into a French East-end and an English West-end, St. Laurent being the dividing line. But when I passed west of {68} St. Laurent, and hundreds of French men and French women and French children continued to file past me, and I asked my way many times in English and was not understood, I began to doubt the reality of that dividing line. It seems a pity that there should be one, but there is of course, and it runs through Canada as well as Montreal. Race and religion and language combine to keep that line marked out, and it only becomes faint in business quarters.

The time has gone by for great commercial undertakings to be conducted by means of gesticulations or by the aid of an interpreter. Master and man must speak the same language, at any rate outwardly. Therefore all clerks learn English, which is also American; and I take it that statistics, if they were kept, would show many more French Canadians speaking English every year--whatever they may be thinking.

So commerce, long the butt of moralists, takes its part among the moral influences of the world. Already writers like Mr. Angell have begun to assure us that it alone--by reason of its enormous and far-reaching interests--can keep international war at a distance: here is an example of how it {69} increases peace within a nation. In the end, perhaps, Mammon himself may appear, purged of his grossness upon the canonical list--St. Mammon!

Montreal has, so I am told, sixty-four millionaires--real, not dollar millionaires; self-made, not descended millionaires; strenuous, not idle millionaires. Most of them live in Sherbrooke Street, or near it, on the way up to the Mountain. It is a fine wide road with an extraordinary variety of houses in it. You cannot point to any one house and say this is the sort of house a millionaire builds, for the next one is quite different, and so is the next and the next. It is natural that Canadians should be more original in their house-building than our millionaires. They are more original men altogether. They have made their money in a more original way, and when they have made it, they have to think out original methods of spending it--unlike ours, who find the etiquette of it all ready made for them, and a practised set of people who want nothing more than to be able to help millionaires scatter their money in the only correct and fashionable way. You have to think everything out for yourself in Canada, even to the spending of your money. That is, if you have the money in large quantities. {70} For the ordinary person the inherent slipperiness of the dollar suffices, and he will find that it will circulate itself without his worrying. The diversity of house-building, such as may be found in Sherbrooke Street, should give encouragement to Canadian architects, but does, as a matter of fact, let in the American architects as well. I could not feel that they had altogether succeeded in this street--certainly not half so well as they have succeeded in some of the business buildings, especially the interior of the Bank of Montreal--but that is not surprising. Architects must have their motives, and the reasons that went to the building of some of the stately private houses of Europe have ceased to exist now. The most that a man can demand from his house--certainly in Canada--is that it shall be luxurious. Nobody is going to keep retainers there. The three hundred servants even that went to make up the household of an Elizabethan nobleman could not be had in Canada either for love or money. Those three hundred serve in the bank or the shops--not in the houses--and it is there that the big man works also. Slowly we come to the right proportions of things; nor am I suggesting that the private houses of the Canadian millionaires are in the {71} least lacking in size. They are as large as they need be, if not larger; and where they did not altogether succeed was, I thought, in the attempt made with some of them to achieve importance by rococo effects. The road itself, curiously enough, was rather bad and rutty; I began to think, seeing it, that there is some strange influence at work in French Canada which prevents a road from ever being first-rate. It may be that since roads there are only needed in summer, for a half year instead of a whole one, the care and affection we lavish upon them is not necessary. The good snow comes and turns Sherbrooke Street into a sleigh-bearing thoroughfare only comparable with those of St. Petersburg. The ruts are drifted up and vanish--why bother about them? It is a good enough explanation. If another is needed, it may be that there is money to be made--by those in charge of the keeping up of the roads--by the simple method of not keeping them up.

Montreal has slums as well as Sherbrooke Street, which seems to show that sixty-four millionaires are no real guarantee of a city's perfectness. I heard about those slums from the editor of one of Montreal's leading newspapers. The subject arose out of a question {72} I put him as to whether he could tell me the difference between Conservatives and Liberals in Canada. Some people maintain that the difference even in England is so slight as to be unreal. To a Canadian who is not much of a politician (but is, of course, either a Liberal or a Conservative), the question amounts to being a catch question. He has to think for a long time before he answers. This editor, who was a Liberal, took it quite coolly.

'Oh,' he said, 'Liberals here are very much like Liberals in the old country; we stand for Social Reform and the interests of the People.'

Then he told me about the slums in Montreal. But for these I should have felt doubtful about the parallel, even though it was drawn by so eminent an authority as the editor of a newspaper. For, naturally, at present in most parts of Canada there is no People (with our own English capital P) to stand for, just as there are no peers and no Constitution. Where there are slums, there may be a People to be represented. The more is the pity that there should be slums. Why does Montreal possess them? Largely, I suppose, for the reason that any very great city possesses them. There are landlords who can make money out of them, there are people so poor that they will live in them; {73} and their poverty is accounted for by the fact that cities draw the destitute as the moon the tides. It seems against reason that Canada, capable of absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants, calling for them to be absorbed, so long as they are able men, should have any destitute to be drawn to the cities; but it has to be remembered that no immigration laws can really prevent a percentage of incapables arriving. They may not be incapables as such, but they are incapables on the land, which is indeed in Canada endlessly absorbent, but absorbent only of those who have in them in some way the land-spirit. To expect the land to take on hordes of the city-bred without ever failing is to dream. It would be easier for the sea to swallow men clothed in cork jackets. Some are bound to be rejected, and they turn to the cities. But the cities of a New World cannot absorb indefinite numbers of men; London or Glasgow cannot. The work is not there for them--not for all of them.

The Canadian winter also has to be remembered as a factor driving men to cities like Montreal. Even good men on the land cannot always during the winter obtain work on the farms; or think that the little they can make there is not worth while. So they, too, make {74} for the cities, not always to their own improving. This problem of the Canadian winter is one that has still to be reckoned with, and no doubt the Canadians will solve it in due course--perhaps by some extension of the Russian methods whereby the peasant of the summer becomes the handicraftsman of the winter. It is not the winter itself that is at fault in Canada, as used to be thought; it is the method of dealing with it. The Canadian may not mind the hard, cold months--may even boast of them, but he cannot ignore them. And the solution of the winter problem seems to be that though Canada is marked out as an agricultural country, it must also equally become a manufacturing one, so that men--who cannot hibernate like dormice--may be able to work the year through. The whitest nation is that nation whose leisure is got by choice not by compulsion.

There must be local reasons, too, for Montreal slums, but these a visitor is not happy in describing. Municipal mismanagement is unfortunately not exclusive to Europe; and my editor gave me examples of it in Montreal which were impressive without being novel.

He also pointed out that there were forty thousand Jews in Montreal, as though that {75} might have something to do with her slums. Others point out that the Catholic Church, which believes that the poor must be always with us, is supreme in Montreal; poverty and the faith, they say, go always together. I think it is truest to argue that, while all these things are in their degree contributory, it is not fair to fix on any one of them as the chief cause of the ill. One thing is certain. Montreal's slums are not typical of Canada, but of a great city. No great city has as yet found itself completely, and the greater it is, the less soluble are its problems of poverty. It may be that they can be resolved only by the great cities ceasing to exist in the form we know them.

Meanwhile it looks as though the welfare of employees is not being neglected by the leading directors of industry. Take, for example, the Angus Shops, which are larger than any other engineering shops in the world. Here are built these huge houses of cranks and pistons, the railway engines of the Canadian Pacific, that hustle one from end to end of the Dominion; here also are turned out all else that appertains to the biggest railway company in existence. In these shops a system has been introduced which might be called a Bourneville system, only Canadianised. The management {76} refers to it as Welfare Work, and it consists mainly in certain methods whereby the men can obtain good food--while they are working--at low prices, apprentices are helped to an education, the cost of 'holiday homes' is defrayed, and so on. Very sensibly the management admits the system to be a part of a business plan, which it finds remunerative. The idea that beneficence plays a leading part in it is almost scouted; indeed it would not be easy to persuade Canadian working-men that their bosses were doing things from charity. I went over the shops, and found them built on a vast and airy scale. Not being an engineering sort of person, I usually feel, when I invade a machinery place, like some unfortunate beetle that has strayed into a beehive, and may at any moment be attacked by the busy and alarming creatures that are buzzing about there. As I watched the huge engines, swung like bags of feathers from the roof, some black demon would heave showers of sparks at me, and when I started back, another would come raiding out with red-hot tongs. I admired respectfully. But I am one of those who can enjoy my honey just as much without knowing just how it was made. Still, here was a big bit of Montreal, and what miles of French houses {77} with green shutters one drove past to get to it!

It would be absurd to suggest that poverty or slums are conspicuous things in Montreal. The average tourist will see none of them, but only many beautiful things--from the Bank of Montreal to the Cathedral, from the Lachine Rapids to the Mountain. I will not describe shooting the Rapids, it has been so often done. I wish I could describe the view from the Mountain. It is the most beautiful view of a city that can be seen. Marseilles from her hill is beautiful, so is Paris from Champigny. From neither of these, nor from any hill that I know of, is there so complete a view of so fair a city. The Mountain is wooded, and through the arches of the trees you gain a score of changing outlooks; but from the edge you see all Montreal--houses and streets and spires, each roof and gate, each chimney and window--so it seems. And beyond, the great river, and beyond, and on every side--Canada. If there were a mountain above Oxford, something like this might be seen.

It was up this wooded steep to Fletcher's field, where an altar had been set up, that the great Eucharistic procession of 1910 wound its way. I was in Montreal just before this event, {78} for which the Montrealers had spent months preparing, and I realised a little why Montreal hopes some day to be the New Rome. The whole city was in a fervour of enthusiasm. A society had been formed for the special purpose of growing flowers to line the way along which the Cardinal-legate would walk, and gifts of money for the same purpose had been received from every part of Canada. The papers, of course, were full of every detail about Church dignitaries arriving or about to arrive. Nor were the shops behindhand. 'Eucharistic Congress! House decoration at moderate prices' was everywhere placarded; and papal flags and papal arms were to be had cheap. There were Congress sales, too, and you could buy Congress 'creations' from the dressmakers, Congress hats from the milliners, Congress boots from the bootmakers.

On the day that Cardinal Vannutelli arrived, in a dismal and violent downpour of rain, all Montreal in macintoshes was to be seen dashing for the Bonsecours wharf to offer its respectful greetings to the papal legate.

Will the Montrealers' dream of providing the New Rome ever be achieved? Who can say? Rome, though Italians may become subversive of the faith, will perhaps stand for ever. If it {79} ceased, as the centre of the Catholic faith, Montreal might certainly claim to take its place. It is already the centre of French-Canadian Catholicism; it might become the religious centre of Canada. There is no certainty that Catholicism will persist in Canada only among the French Canadians. It seems equally possible that Rome will prevail among non-French Canadians. Both in Canada and the States her strides forward have been enormous--comparable perhaps only to the steps taken in other directions by Free Thought in Europe. Is it that Catholicism makes peculiar appeal in a new country, or that in these new countries the propagation of the faith has been great and unceasing? These are debatable questions (though undebatable, I think, is the statement that in the New World Rome has a marvellous history of things attempted splendidly and achieved without reproach). I will not debate, then, but rather return to the Mountain and ask you to picture the great Eucharistic procession moving slowly up to it--up to the altar built there in the open, under the high and clear Canadian skies--all the inhabitants of a mighty city moving with it, till the city itself is left behind and all that is low and earthly left for the moment {80} with it. Then you will have in your mind one picture of Montreal at least not unworthy of it. It will be a picture of Montreal at its best and highest--a city of the faithful--near to their Mountain.

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