
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Montreal, Seaport and City
Author: Leacock, Stephen Butler (1869-1944)
Illustrator: Andrews, George Henry (1816-1898)
Date of first publication: 1942
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1948
Date first posted: 1 February 2010
Date last updated: 1 February 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #471

This ebook was produced by:
Marcia Brooks, Josephine Paolucci
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made
available by Our Roots/Nos Racines (ourroots.ca)




Montreal




SOME BOOKS BY
STEPHEN LEACOCK


My Remarkable Uncle and Other Sketches
The Greatest Pages of American Humor
The Greatest Pages of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Wet Wit and Dry Humour
Laugh with Leacock
Afternoons in Utopia
Back to Prosperity
Economic Prosperity in the British Empire
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman
Short Circuits
Winnowed Wisdom
The Garden of Folly
College Days
Over the Footlights
My Discovery of England
Winsome Winnie
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice
Frenzied Fiction
The Hohenzollerns in America
Further Foolishness
Essays and Literary Studies
Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Behind the Beyond
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Nonsense Novels
Literary Lapses
Elements of Political Science

[Illustration: A View of Montreal from St. Helen's Island. Published by
A. Bourne, Montreal, 1830.]




Montreal

SEAPORT AND CITY

By STEPHEN LEACOCK

[Illustration]

McCLELLAND & STEWART LIMITED
PUBLISHERS TORONTO


Copyright in Canada, 1948

by

McCLELLAND & STEWART LIMITED

Printed and Bound in Canada

by

The Hunter-Rose Co. Limited, Toronto




Preface


The great authorities at first hand for the earlier history of French
Canada and of Montreal are the narratives written by Jacques Cartier and
by Samuel de Champlain. With these are the collection of reports,
letters, and documents gathered by the Society of Jesus and known as the
_Jesuit Relations_; and the _History of Montreal_, written by Dollier de
Casson in 1672. Notable firsthand material about Montreal of the Old
Regime (1721) is found in the _La Nouvelle France_ of Father Charlevoix,
published in 1744, and in the celebrated _Travels (1749) in North
America_ of Peter Kalm, the Swedish naturalist. By the time the Conquest
is reached and the age of newspapers, journals, and government reports,
firsthand documents became as numerous as Maisonneuve's Iroquois.

But all writers are indebted, and none more than the present, to certain
great sources of information, secondhand in the historic sense, but
representing the labors of a lifetime and the search of libraries and
repositories inaccessible to the public at large. Here the volumes of
Francis Parkman, a marvelous blending of genius and accuracy, of
picturesque charm and reliable fact, have never been excelled. Nor are
they likely to be. Too many newer historians are afraid to be
interesting for fear of being thought shallow, afraid of any attempt at
humor and in any case unable to call it into their service, omit all
mention of scenery and wind and weather as immaterial to history, and
thus substitute for the moving, animated narrative of a Macaulay or a
Parkman a dull, indigestible record of facts that defeats its own end
and buries the past in oblivion. Conspicuous exceptions break the rule,
but the trend is all too obvious.

Nor can anyone write of Montreal without paying tribute to the
monumental work of Dr. W. P. Atherton, whose three volumes on Montreal,
its history and its institutions, are beyond competition. Talleyrand
once said of Jeremy Bentham's works, "Pillaged by everybody, he is still
rich." So let it be with Dr. Atherton. We all acknowledge our debt only
to leave it unpaid and borrow more. I have not attempted to include in
this book any general bibliography of Montreal. I have only indicated in
the notes certain firsthand authorities for corroboration of the text
where the matter is curious or contentious.

But I have to acknowledge here in the composition of this book debts of
a more intimate and personal kind. I have the honor to be a member,
since its foundation, of the University Club of Montreal, whose club
building occupies, as said in this book, the center of the site of
Hochelaga. Several of my fellow members belong to old Montreal families,
French and English, who have transmitted and treasured information,
maps, papers, pictures, relics. These they have kindly placed at my
disposal. I should wish to make honorable mention here of my friends Mr.
Stanley Coristine, Mr. Arthur Terroux, and Col. Fred Gaudet, not if this
meets their eye, but taking care that it shall meet their eye. I am also
greatly indebted to my old friends Dr. John L. Todd and Mrs. Todd, the
owners and occupants of Boisbriant, the beautiful estate at Senneville
that was the fief and Seigneurie le Ber, as mentioned in the text.

I am greatly indebted, as I have been on many previous occasions, to my
old friend Mr. Murray Gibbon of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.
Not only has he supplied me with material from his ample resources but
also with advice and suggestion from his ample brain.

I am under a very special obligation for my chapter on McGill University
to my friend and colleague of many years, Professor Thomas Matthews,
registrar of the university, without whose help and guidance I should
hardly have ventured on ground, fertile and familiar, but in its very
fertility favoring the weeds of hidden error. It is only fair to say
that if any of these errors still remain uneradicated the full credit
must be given to Mr. Matthews. I am under a similar obligation to
another old friend and former colleague of my own department, Professor
John Culliton, who has very kindly checked over the economic material of
this book, with a view to eliminating errors. Any left are his.

I have also received most valuable help in regard to the present medical
curriculum of the college from my friend Dr. E. Kenneth Smith, one of
the latest of its graduates on the roll of the faculty and certain, I am
sure, to prove worthy of it. It is proper to add that in the preparation
of this book I have from first to last been greatly aided by the
continuous and courteous assistance of the highly trained staff of the
Library of McGill University. In this connection it is proper also to
express my appreciation of the research work in the library done for me
by Mrs. H. T. Shaw.

       *       *       *       *       *

Acknowledging all these debts, I feel also that I owe a good deal of
this book to my own industry and effort.

    _McGill University_      STEPHEN LEACOCK
    _1942_




Contents


                                                 PAGE

Preface                                             v

CHAPTER

   I Hochelaga                                      1

  II Place Royale                                  22

 III Ville Marie de Montreal                       37

  IV A Half Century of Struggle                    53

   V The Old French Regime                         73

  VI The Capitulation of Montreal                  97

 VII The American Occupation                      116

VIII Lower Canada 1791-1841                       132

  IX Montreal, Capital of Canada                  159

   X The Seaport of the New Dominion              186

  XI Montreal in the Twentieth Century            215

 XII The Port of Montreal                         237

XIII French and English                           267

 XIV McGill University                            288

  XV Come Up on the Mountain                      312

 XVI L'Envoi: The Problem of a Great City         325

     Appendix                                     329

     Index                                        333




Illustrations


A View of Montreal from St. Helen's Island                _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE

The First View of Montreal. Cartier's Visit to Hochelaga in 1535      20

A Quaint Scene on the St. Lawrence                                   100

A View of the Water Front During the Intermediate Stage
  of the Port of Montreal's Development                              164

Drawings of Montreal Harbour by G. H. Andrews in the
  London _Illustrated News_, 1860                                    180

The _Sarmatian_, Which Carried the Writer of This Book
  in 1876 as a Child of Six on His Way to Canada                     200

Winter Sports in Montreal in 1884, with a Picture of One
  of the Ice Palaces                                                 212

Montreal Today, the Farthest Inland Seaport of Any Importance
  in the World                                                       312




CHAPTER I

Hochelaga

     _Jacques Cartier's Discovery of the St. Lawrence. The Empty
     Continent. The Norsemen. John Cabot's Voyages. The Newfoundland
     Fisheries. Cartier's Voyage of Reconnaissance (1534). Discovery
     of the St. Lawrence (1535). Cartier at Hochelaga. The Winter at
     Stadacona._


More than a hundred years went by between the discoveries of Columbus
and Cabot and the first permanent settlements of North America in
Quebec, Virginia, and New England. Tropical America fell an easy prey to
the arms, the enterprise, and the rapacity of Europe. The feeble natives
of the Caribbean had no answer even to the clumsy firearms and the
awkward ships of the sixteenth century; the half-civilized Aztecs and
Peruvians little better. Force opened the way; gain and the lure of
adventure furnished the motive, religious zeal the cloak of
justification. None who went to America meant to stay there.

With North America it was different. For centuries after the discovery
of the North American coast nature jealously guarded the access to the
vast resources of the interior. On the north a great barrier of ice
blocked all approach. The Elizabethan explorers, interested not in
America but in what might lie behind it, strove against this barrier in
vain. On the south, along the Gulf of Mexico, the tropical heat, the
fevers of coastal swamps, the tangled delta, and the shifting channels
of the Mississippi long held all intruders at bay. The western side of
North America remained thus utterly unknown and beyond reach. The
passage around the bottom of South America, achieved by Magellan and by
Drake, was impossibly far and impossibly dangerous. Even after Nez
Balboa had seen the unlimited Pacific, during his famous silence on his
peak of Darien,[1] the route over the jungles and mountains of Panama
was barely more than a war trail for buccaneers and plunderers, too
arduous for the path of peace.

Only on one side was the coast of the continent of easy access. The
incomparable series of inlets, bays, and river mouths which indent the
Atlantic coast from the Bay of Fundy to the sands of Carolina offer
everywhere easy landings and ample shelter. But it was only the coastal
margin which was thus accessible. The mountain rock and forest of the
Adirondacks and the Appalachians still blocked the interior. In a few
places access might be effected by the valleys of the rivers. But only
in one place was there a wide-open break in this barred coast. Right in
its center the sheltered waters round what is now New York led into the
broad placid stream of the Hudson that carried ships under sail 150
miles inland and showed them, when ship navigation ended, the open
valley of the Mohawk, an easy pathway into inland America. For over a
century the coastal voyages of explorers (Corte-Real, Verrazano, Gmez)
passed this opening by. They too were looking for something else. The
"stern and rockbound coast," the forest torn by the wind, the lurking
savages meant nothing to men whose eyes expected at each new cape and
corner to see the crowded seaports and the sunlit cities of the Orient,
and whose ears ever listened for the bells in the pagodas of Cathay.[2]

It is a humiliating thought for us to realize that these early
discoverers saw North America and didn't want it. A few attempts on it
were made. Ponce de Len, searching, as old men ever do, for the
Fountain of Youth, looked for it, as old men still do, in Florida. De
Soto and others, looking for gold and the "Seven Cities of Cibola,"
struggled as far as the Mississippi. Raleigh even attempted a real
settlement. Henry Hudson, after sailing his ship against the ice of
Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya, with the same pagoda bells in his ears,
turned right about westward and left his name forever on the great
fresh-water river and the great salt sea which he discovered. Of the two
the great sea seemed at the time vastly the more important. Then came
the Pilgrims looking for the wilderness and finding it.

Thus slept North America. It was indeed an empty continent; empty and
silent. Except perhaps on the British Columbian coast its aborigines
were so few that all was solitude. Here and there a few thousand Indians
might cluster, as in the wigwam lodges of the Hurons below the Georgian
Bay, or the Onondagas beside Oneida Lake, or the group which Jacques
Cartier was to find at Hochelaga. But such open spots were rare in the
unbroken forest which then covered all eastern Canada, New England, and
the shores of the Great Lakes. A voyager making his way along the rivers
that pierced the forest or along the streams where the forest trees met
over his head, might pass days and days--indeed expected to do
so--without sight or sound or evidence of human life. Our Canadian west
was one vast solitude over which passed at intervals great droves of
buffalo, attacked by nomad savages, without as yet the European horses
that later gave them mastery. Nearly four hundred years after Columbus
the famous English soldier and writer, Captain Butler,[3] could still
speak of the inconceivable solitude of the West. "You may travel," he
wrote, "five hundred miles in a straight line without meeting a human
being." Thus slept America; thus waited the best of it for man's
use--the riches of the Ohio valley, the alluvial soil of the prairies,
the garden valleys of British Columbia; its very uses slept with it,
still unusable. What were rock oil and hard coal to people who traded
in little shipfuls of spices, sandalwood, and nutmeg, thinking pepper
priceless? Today the kitchen holds unheeded all their little treasures.
Even gold: all the gold and silver of Mexico and South America was as
nothing beside what was hidden in the fastnesses of the silent
continent. All that came to Europe in a hundred years of the days of
Cortez and Pizarro was nowhere beside what later came from California in
twenty years and out of Canada in the last ten.

It is necessary to lay stress on this unused aspect of our continent,
and especially of Canada. It has served to turn the course of our
history aside, false values blocking the true direction. We cannot
understand the history of Montreal without it. This failure to
appreciate the latent wealth of the North is not a mere curious relation
of the romance of the past, of the irony of history. It counts now. It
explains the common failure to understand that Canada is today still
relatively empty--12,000,000 people instead of ten times as many. The
material changes of machine civilization (we dare no longer call it
progress) have shifted all physical values. What now is a little pot of
pepper, or even a rajah's emerald, as beside water power, minerals,
coal, rock oil? Man now can live sheltered from the cold, serving iced
drinks where Indians froze. Civilization moves north, steadily as a star
drifts across the sky. Unless we take full account of these broad
features, this shifting frame of human history, we cannot estimate the
oncoming future of North America.

All this we have said of the Hudson River access to the continent. But
above the Bay of Fundy a greater and easier one, the entry of the St.
Lawrence, lay concealed, to be revealed for one brief moment by Jacques
Cartier in 1535, lost then for sixty-eight years till Samuel de
Champlain rediscovered it forever. If it were not for the northern ice,
this entry indeed to the very heart of the continent would surpass all
others to an incomparable degree. It leads by water, so to speak, to
everywhere. But the "if" is large enough to blot out all the rest of the
clause. Indeed in past history, in sailing-ship days, this factor
governed all. We do not realize how few people ever came that way before
the steamship revolutionized it after 1809. A hundred years after
Cartier there were only sixty-five French people in Quebec and none
(over the winter) in Montreal. At the close of the seventeenth century
New France had only about 12,000 French inhabitants. The population of
the British Atlantic seaboard was nearly a quarter of a million. The
chief glory of the St. Lawrence was as yet in what it was going to be
rather than what it was. It still is.

Cartier's discovery came about thus. The northeastern coast of North
America had long been dimly known to Europe--known and disregarded. The
Norsemen had been established in Greenland for over four hundred years.
As a result their ships were at times driven by bad weather, or tempted
by good weather, along the shores of the mainland of America. Here they
found a coast of rock and slate that they called Hulluland and a seaside
forest land that they named Markland. They even went south to the warm
temperature of a fertile district called Vinland, all of which places
are now a puzzle to the historian. But the Norsemen had enough of them.
As soon as random voyages led to an attempt at real settlement in
Vinland (Thorfinn Karlsefni, A.D. 1007), the Norsemen came in contact
with the American savages, the treacherous ambush, the war by night and
cruelty by day that were to be the curse of North America.] These
tangled woods, these stealthy, whispering waters became, in old
classical sense, a "horror" to the Norsemen. They drove their ships back
again, back to the bright emptiness of Greenland, its green meadows and
its glistening ice, all adrip in the sunshine--God's country, brave and
open, where men were men. They never came to Vinland again, except in
short voyages to snatch away timber. They knew quite enough about North
America. They too didn't want it.

Neither did John Cabot, who did not live to know that he had been there.
He came back to his parsimonious patron, Henry VII, with brave talk of
the "new Isle" that he had discovered. He reported that he had reached
the country of the Great Khan; that it was seven hundred leagues beyond
Ireland. He offered to go again and sail farther south to reach Cipango,
which was nearer the equator, and to bring back spices. This first
voyage of Cabot and his sons had been, like the later journeys of the
Pickwick Club, conducted "upon their own proper costs and charges." But
the King now, evidently deeply moved, gave Cabot 10 for having "found
the new Isle." He commissioned him at once to make a new voyage by this
happy route to Cipango for spices, with a promise of 20 a year for life
and of a fleet of ten ships and three hundred sailors for 1498.

There was great excitement in Cabot's home town of Bristol from which he
had sailed over this new route. We read how the sailors followed him
around. Sailors and merchants foresaw a great trade in spices between
Bristol and Cipango. But we know now, thanks to painstaking scholarship,
where Cabot had been on his famous first voyage. Sailing from Bristol
May 2, 1497, he had landed, fifty-two days out, on Cape Breton Island,
claimed it and named it Cape Discovery, sailed north, saw and named Cape
Ray on Newfoundland, the near-by islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon
(rediscovered by the world in 1942), passed the bold headland of Cape
Race (he called it England's Cape), and thence home to drop anchor in
Bristol on August 6, 1497, with Asia in his pocket.

Such was Cabot's first voyage. Like so many American voyages of
discovery, from Columbus' first error onward, it was utterly futile in
its intended purpose, immeasurable in its unplanned results. For Cipango
take the Grand Banks; from their codfish trace Cartier, and from Cartier
the St. Lawrence, Montreal, and the vision of the future. Meantime
preparations went forward for the second Cipango voyage. The King was as
good as his word, or as nearly good as kings then were. Cabot got two
ships and three hundred men with letters patent (February 3, 1498) wide
enough to reach Asia. A few small trading vessels joined fortunes with
him. He set out in May 1498 on a voyage in defiance of geography, dreary
with cold and hardship, broken with mutiny, and utterly fruitless. Cabot
pushed up the east coast of Greenland till the sheer futility of it led
him to the west coast, thence across the Straits to Baffin land
(latitude 66 north), then south past Newfoundland, and then along the
everlasting coast of forest and rock and empty sand, looking for what
was not there. Somewhere off the coast of Maryland (latitude 38), with
stores low and hope dead, Cabot turned for England. He reached Bristol
late that autumn to die--why not?--soon afterward. His son Sebastian had
a later career, but as far as North America was concerned, the Cabots
ended with 1498.

Not so the "new Isle." Cabot's sailors brought home to Bristol and from
there to all western Europe the news of the marvelous codfisheries off
the "new Isle." Till then the English codfishing fleets went out, mostly
from London and the east ports, but also from Bristol, to fish off the
coast of Iceland. But the fishing was limited and restricted by the
regulations of Danish sovereignty. These new fisheries, free and open,
literally "beat all." There is a famous letter in which an Italian
diplomat wrote home: "Cabot's sailors, practically all English and from
Bristol . . . affirm that the sea is swarming with fish which can be
taken with baskets let down with a stone."[5]

For once sailors' tales of wonder held true. The North Atlantic Ocean,
at the full depth of its sunken bed between America and Europe, is five
miles deep. But all around the northeastern coast of North America from
Cape Cod to Labrador there projects an outlying "continental shelf,"
only "recently" submerged. Here are great "banks," like Georges Bank
east of Nantucket and the Grand Bank southeast of Newfoundland. The line
that marks a depth of only six hundred feet runs all round this
continental shelf. The area of the whole submarine plateau is computed
at 500,000 square miles. There are great stretches on the Banks where
the depth is only from 180 to 420 feet. Here, as a French writer has
said, "the land is infinitely silent, but the sea harbors every form of
life." The temperature, the ocean bed with an infinity of small fish,
and salt cold water combine to make an ideal environment (for a
codfish). Here close to the surface, upheld by the salt of the icy
water, float the infinite quantities of "plankton," the microscopic life
of ponds and seas. On this feed the larvae of the codfish. Later the fry
descend to live on shell stuff, then come again up to live, voraciously,
on everything afloat. A codfish is mature at three years, lives easily
beyond five, weighs from three to four pounds inshore and about
twenty-five to thirty-five on the Banks. They vary greatly. The record
reaches over two hundred pounds, a six-foot length. Small varieties are
mature at three years, large ones at five. A sizable cod when it spawns
leaves 3,000,000 eggs a year floating among the plankton. Each egg only
asks a chance to leave 3,000,000 more. Malthusian despondency is
staggered at the prospect. But at least it makes our history easier to
understand, our future easier to secure.

That is what Cabot's sailors saw when they lifted in the cod in
basketfuls. That was the news that sent all Brittany and Normandy to the
Banks. Bretons, Normans, and Basques, even the Portuguese, came before
the English themselves; the latter still clung with insular conservatism
to their Iceland fishing. Later, after Cartier's time, they came in a
flock.

All through the fifteen hundreds the fishermen came in increasing
numbers to the Newfoundland Banks. But they came and went like a flock
of sea birds in unrecorded voyages in the summer season of the spawning
of the codfish. They drove home with the strong west winds of the
equinox in a voyage of about a month. Later sailing ships have run
across in two weeks. History took but little count of the fishing fleet,
though we read that Henry VIII once sent out ships of the new Royal Navy
to shepherd them safely into the Channel. History was too busy with the
new splendors of the monarchies of the Renaissance and with the Italian
wars. Only today patient scholarship traces out the record from seaport
entries.

The cartographers of the day gathered up the rough charts of the fishing
pilots and made out of them the maps and globes that have been
preserved. These show the coast and islands recognizable from the Bay of
Fundy to Labrador. But the Gulf of St. Lawrence is marked as a huge
inlet closed in on the west, beyond the Strait of Belle Isle, and marked
the Great Bay. The fishing boats did not push far into the gulf since
the fishing is less good as the water gets less salty.

There must have been much information handed round in the seaports
about the strong currents that came down and much suspicion that the
Great Bay led somewhere. After all, the ground was as familiar to them
as Saint-Malo itself. Lescarbot, the later companion of Champlain, tells
of knowing one old man who had made forty-two round trips (eighty-four
voyages). We still retain some of the place names given by the fishermen
before history began--the Cape of the Bretons, the Harbour of St. John.

       *       *       *       *       *

This was the situation that led Francis I of France into North American
exploration. Francis was one of the glittering kings of the new
monarchy, as who should say, the "opposite number" of our Henry VIII and
the Spanish Charles V. He threw himself eagerly into the glory of war
and the invasion of Italy till his defeat at Pavia left him a prisoner
with "all lost but honor." Set free with his honor--by trading off
Burgundy--he threw himself into the current of the Renaissance, a patron
of the glory of Paris in art and letters. Then for a brief moment--a
break in the clouds--into North American adventure, and then finally
into the crowning glory of the persecution of the peasant heretics of
Vaudois (the Waldenses). The brief American episodes of his reign were
found in the voyage of Giovanni Verrazano, commissioned by King Francis
before his Italian disaster, and by Jacques Cartier's discovery of
Canada.

Verrazano's voyage and his later fate have left only a twilight record.
He sailed across the Atlantic until he struck land, skirted northward,
looking always for something better, landed here and there but nowhere
north of the present New Hampshire, then up along the fishing coast to
the frozen seas, then out and home. The voyage was fruitless, leaving
nothing but the name New France, lost and found again, and needless as a
French claim when Cartier's voyages superseded it.

These voyages were another matter. Cartier was a pilot of Saint-Malo, a
man in middle life, courageous and devout and of a vision that looked
beyond sea fishery to the apostles' higher calling. He had already made
a voyage to South America, perhaps had been to the Banks. We do not know
whether the King's admiral, Chabot, heard of Cartier and summoned him or
whether Cartier made proposals to the admiral. At all events he was
given a royal commission for a voyage of discovery.

Cartier seemed to know well enough where he was going--straight through
the Belle Isle Strait and on. The fact that after he passed the Strait
he met, without surprise, "a tall ship out of Rochelle" shows how
familiar already was the outer coast.[6] He passed along the stern and
forbidding north shore of the Gulf. He decided that this must be the
land that God gave Cain. This was not a joke. It was, after the fashion
of the day, a pious confirmation of the truth of Scripture. But
Cartier's attempt to get past Anticosti Island by the north channel,
against wind and current, proved hopeless.

The art of "tacking," sailing in zigzags against the wind, was unknown,
or perhaps previously known and lost, in the Middle Ages. One recalls
the contrary winds which held Richard II in Ireland and lost a throne.
Tacking, even when introduced, for centuries made little progress. The
clumsy, tubby ships, all superstructure and square-backed to the wind,
were ill fitted for it. Even Lord Nelson's ships of war could do little
by way of beating up. The beautiful clipper ship, streamlined as we
should say, the fore-and-aft rig of the deep-draught yacht, making
almost four points into the wind, these triumphs of sail came only as
the swan's song of a vanishing epoch. Sail only came into its own when
its own was over.

But Cartier at least knew, from the very obstacles encountered, that he
had found a great river, a waterway to the interior. He sailed all round
the Gulf, which he named with its river in honor of St. Lawrence. He
noted the appealing misery of the harmless savages he saw, left them a
great cross set up on Gasp to hold them till he should come again. He
noted in passing the fertility, the sanded shores, and the beautiful
forests of our Prince Edward Island. Cartier mistook it for the
mainland, but he knew at least that this was not part of the land given
to Cain and would do for the King of France. The voyage was only a
reconnaissance, but it promised much. As living witness Cartier carried
back two Indians with him to France.

Cartier's second voyage (1535-36) was the famous voyage from which dates
the true discovery of the St. Lawrence, of the indefinite region called
Canada, and the discovery of the Indian settlement of Hochelaga. From
the commanding elevation of Mount Royal, Cartier was able to divine the
course of the inland waters and to speculate on the wealth and wonder of
the "Kingdom of Saguenay" which was supposed to lie beyond. All that
Vasco da Gama found at Calicut Cartier thought he had found in this vast
emptiness.

This great voyage of 1535-36, the discovery of Hochelaga, and the tragic
winter at Stadacona that followed it have been so often narrated in full
detail that it is needless here to attempt more than a summary.

King Francis gave to Cartier three ships--the _Grand Ermine_ of one
hundred and twenty tons, the _Petite Ermine_ of sixty, and the
_Emrillon_, called also in the English books the _Merlin_, or the
_Sparrow Hawk_. The ship's company were men of heart and courage as the
sequel proved. It has been stated, and denied, that there were criminals
among them. The practice of the time would have sanctioned this. For
Cartier's later and fruitless voyage his commission gave him the right
to take sixty criminals from jail, and the commission to his associate
and superior, Sieur de Roberval, allowed him to open the jails and help
himself. But if the men who stood by Cartier in the tragic winter that
was to come at Stadacona were criminals, then we need more of them in
Canada. It is disputed also--scholars will be scholars--whether Cartier
carried priests with him. Probably not; that roll of honor begins later.

Till its close in the tragic winter just mentioned this same voyage of
Cartier that discovered Hochelaga was like the voyage of a dream--easy
and successful beyond belief. It is true that the passage out (May 19,
1535, Saint-Malo--Belle Isle, July 26) was prolonged and tempestuous and
that much time was wasted in fruitless detours around Anticosti. But the
ships sailed up the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Saguenay on
September 1, and from then on all was wonder. Here was the Saguenay
itself, a river of profound depth issuing from between tall mountains
of almost bare rock. There were great fish about its mouth, "which no
man," said Cartier, "had ever seen before or heard of." Indian canoes
danced in the foam. The Indians came aboard; they spoke in their own
tongue to Cartier's Indians brought back with him from France. The
Indians explained to Cartier where he was--namely, that this river of
Saguenay led to the "Kingdom of Saguenay," a fabulous land of wealth and
wonder of which Cartier was to hear more and more. Straight up the main
river was the "land and province of Canada," and beyond that, some
distance inland, was Hochelaga.

Here enters into the world's record the word Canada, ever since
unexplained. In the Huron-Iroquois language Canada means a settlement of
lodges. Later on Cartier, or one of his associates, made out a
vocabulary which said, "They call a town (_une ville_) Canada." But
somehow the word seemed to mean either a town or the whole region; just
like the double usage in England by which a man living in a town takes
an occasional run up to town (London). Such fanciful derivations as
Aca-nada, "nothing there," are merely history's earliest jokes on our
unappreciated country, like Cartier's "land of Cain" and Voltaire's
"acres of snow."

       *       *       *       *       *

With a fair wind Cartier's ships moved up the river west, in an
enchanted autumn scene of forests hung with grapevines, of islands all
cluttered with hazelnuts (Isle aux Coudres), and one so heavy with its
grapes that they named it after Bacchus. Later royal geographers made it
the Island of Orleans.

Cartier anchored in the north channel off this pleasant island. And here
there came to them the Indian Chief Donnacona, the "Lord of Canada,"
with twelve canoes of his people, with every demonstration of welcome
and of friendship. The welcome doubled when it turned out that this was
the very home of Cartier's two Indian guides and when they told of the
wonder of France and the kindness there received. Astonishment and
delight knew no bounds.

Cartier moved his ships up from the island to what was later called the
Basin of Quebec, where the St. Lawrence narrows to the smallest width
of its course. Here was the high promontory of Cape Diamond, the
incoming stream of the St. Charles, in the background the blue
Laurentian hills, and all around the colors of the Canadian autumn. Here
Cartier laid up his two larger ships to winter in what he called the
Ste. Croix River, now the St. Charles. There followed Indian receptions,
dances, and, above all, the long harangues that followed the feasts,
tedious, says a Canadian historian, "in the Huron-Iroquois language,"
and adds as an afterthought, "or in any other." We realize with
something like awe that we see here the origins of the lunch-club talks
of the United States and Canada, now spreading around the world, the
Indian's vengeance on his conquerors.

The Indians tried to dissuade Cartier from going farther up the river.
There were spirits, angry gods, they said, at Hochelaga. But on these
Cartier took his chance. Taking his _Emrillon_ and two ships' boats, he
embarked on another wonderland journey of thirteen days from Stadacona
to Hochelaga in the full glory of autumn. Here, in his mid-journey, the
St. Lawrence expands into Lake St. Peter, a stretch of twenty miles.
Above it the water was low. Cartier left his _Emrillon_ and went
forward with his boats only. At last in the dusk of an October evening
the boats were halted by the swift St. Marys current where an island
(St. Helens) partly closes the river. Here he came to land. He had
arrived. He was now, though he didn't know it, inside the present limits
of the city of Montreal. But he knew that he was somewhere, for a great
concourse of Indians, more than a thousand, he said, came flocking
joyously to the shore.

The scenes that followed, Cartier's reception by the Indians, the night
of bonfires and singing, the presents given and received, the visit next
day to the great stockaded fort of Hochelaga, the bringing of the sick
and the infirm for Cartier's touch, the reading of the Gospel of St.
John to the Indians, reverent as in God's presence, the ascent of the
mountain and the vision from its summit as of a kingdom to come--these
are embalmed pages of Canadian history. They are almost sacred in the
atmosphere they breathe of piety and mutual faith. No picture in all
North American history is more inspiring. At least Montreal began well.

The pages of Cartier's narrative have here been so often quoted that
they are part of our history. But no account of the discovery of
Hochelaga is complete without at least a citation of certain passages in
regard to the great stockade itself and the scene enacted within its
precincts.

     _There are some fifty houses in this village, each about fifty
     or more paces in length and twelve or fifteen in width, built
     completely of wood and covered in and boarded up with large
     pieces of the bark and rind of trees, as broad as a table,
     which are well and cunningly lashed after their manner. And
     inside these houses are many rooms and chambers, and in the
     middle is a large space without a floor, where they light their
     fire and live together in common. Afterward the men retire to
     the above-mentioned quarters with their wives and children. And
     furthermore there are lofts in the upper part of their houses,
     where they store the corn of which they make their bread._

     _Our captain, seeing the misery and devotion of this poor
     people, recited the Gospel of St. John, that is to say, In the
     beginning was the word, touching everyone that was diseased,
     praying to God that it would please Him to open the hearts of
     the poor people and to make them know His Holy Word and that
     they might receive baptism and Christendom. That done, he took
     a service book in his hand and with a loud voice read all the
     passion of Christ, word by word, that all the standers-by might
     hear him. All which while this poor people kept silence and
     were marvelously attentive, looking up to heaven and imitating
     us in gestures._

Early on the morning after their arrival, on a bright October day,
Cartier and his companions were led by the Indians up the slope from the
river to Hochelaga at the foot of the mountain. The distance through the
woods--from the foot of the new Harbour Bridge to the University Club on
Mansfield Street, which was (and perhaps is) the central hearth of
Hochelaga--was about two miles. But the way was lengthened and enlivened
by a pause to light a fire and make speeches.

They came thus to the famous stockade itself, described with a
perplexity of detail that is the despair of the historian in histories
and school books.

Yet there is a certain mystery about Carrier's Hochelaga which history
has all too little investigated. There is no doubt that such a place as
Hochelaga existed. The various remains that have been excavated from
under the soil indicate that its site was somewhere near the Hochelaga
Memorial Stone set up in 1925 at the foot of the grounds of McGill
University. The writer of this book had the honor of making over this
stone the speech of dedication. He spoke in glowing terms of the
vanished Hochelaga. He pictured its fifty great wooden lodges, each a
hundred and fifty feet long, the vast stockade thirty feet high that
enclosed it, its galleries, its ladders, and the huge open square among
its lodges in which uncounted thousands of Indians listened to Jacques
Cartier read from the Gospel of St. John.

But he had at the time grave doubts, such as many others must have
entertained, whether Hochelaga could have really been a place of the
huge dimensions indicated and yet have left so little trace; whether
Jacques Cartier could have enacted a scene of such intense devotion and
interest and yet, on his subsequent journey past Montreal inland to the
Grand Sault, have gone past Hochelaga without a visit, without a word,
without a thought, apparently, as to how his Indians were making out
with St. John.

Equally amazing seems the silence of Champlain in 1603. The history
books all tell us that when Champlain came Hochelaga had vanished. But
Champlain doesn't tell us this. He never mentions the place.

The extraordinary prestige of Cartier's discovery of the river and of
the wonderful site of the island with the Royal Mountain, the peculiar
reverence that attaches to his having thus first brought Christianity to
the savages throw a sort of veil of sanctity over the whole episode.
Doubt seems to savor of irreverence. Yet it is worth while, perhaps, to
look into the facts indicated by the meager and uncertain record and to
try to distinguish what is undoubted truth from what is error, or even,
to some extent, deception.

We may accept the general conclusion that Hochelaga was
somewhere near the spot indicated by the stone. Other localities have
been assigned to it. Half a century ago the late Dr. S. Dawson, an
eminent scholar and a high authority, placed Hochelaga beside the
Windsor Hotel, at that time Montreal's latest pride and more interested,
perhaps, in the sheltering Hochelaga than since the royal visit of 1939.
A French-Canadian scholar, also, once gave grounds for placing Hochelaga
out near Ahuntsic on the other side of the mountain. But the strongest
evidence indicates it as beside, indeed as in the curve of, the little
Burnside Brook that once ran down from the sunken hollow in the McGill
grounds. The University Club on Mansfield Street represents, as it were,
the central hearth of Hochelaga.

But when we turn from the question of the site to the question of size
that is quite another matter. The existence of Hochelaga, as a huge
fortified stockade with vast wooden houses, rests on one document, the
narrative of Cartier's voyage of 1535 (_Relation Originale_). Cartier's
narrative was not printed in French for a long time; nor was his own
handwritten copy ever found. But various manuscript copies were made of
Cartier's manuscript and of his similar story of his first voyage in
1534, in which he found and named the river St. Lawrence but couldn't
get up it (_Bref Recit_). An Italian collector of travels (Gian Battista
Ramusio) had a translation of the narratives made into Italian and
published in a collection (_Naviazioni e Viaggi_) in 1556. McGill
University has in its library one of the few extant copies of this book.
In it appears the famous picture of Hochelaga as a huge round wooden
erection that has been in every schoolbook ever since and remains one of
the crossword puzzles of history. It was evidently the product of an
Italian illustrator utterly ignorant of the reality and working in a
frenzy of either imagination or despair. He has his busy Indians working
away with saws on board lumber. His Hochelaga is big enough to reach
from the mountain to the river.

But this translated account of Cartier was all that the world had. The
famous Elizabethan collector, Richard Hakluyt, had the voyages
retranslated from the Italian into English and took over the picture
along with them. Hakluyt also got somewhere, not from Ramusio,
a part of the narrative of Cartier's next voyage, that of 1541, in which
he gives Hochelaga the go-by. Later on a French edition of the two
voyages was printed from another manuscript (1598) and, much later,
manuscripts, but not in Cartier's hand, were found in the French
National Library for both the _Bref Recit_ and the _Relation Originale_.

The reader must reconstruct for himself the nature of the stockade that
is thus described. No two authorities agree about it, and Ramusio's
picture, as Dr. W. D. Lighthall has abundantly shown in his Hochelaga
monograph of 1932, is not so much a help as a hindrance. If we accept it
on its face value it must have taken a powerful quantity of logs and a
terrific amount of cutting. The trees available would have been elm and
oak, hardwood, with perhaps soft maple, though soft maple doesn't run
enough to length. There was no spruce, pine, or tamarack. But even at
that the stone tomahawk of the Indians was an instrument of argument,
not of carpentering.

Champlain saw later a few Indian axes beaten flat out of bits of Lake
Superior copper. But Indians couldn't cut down trees on any real scale.
Their canoes were sometimes made from birch-bark: but they only prized
off the bark; they didn't cut the tree. Most of the St. Lawrence canoes
were dugouts, burned-out logs with the ends pointed by alternate
charring and cutting. You could have done that with a hoe. But, as a
matter of fact, even a hoe would have been far above anything an Indian
had. He would have used it to shave with.

Take the number of logs in the Hochelaga lodges, each 150 feet by 30;
allowing 15 feet per log, it takes 24 logs to go round once--one course:
it takes 20 courses (15 feet) as a minimum of height; that means 480
logs to each house and a total of 24,000 logs. There are still the
partitions and the roofs to provide for, and the big stockade itself.
Give it a perimeter--or no, don't even give it a perimeter. It's too
silly; Hochelaga is like the farmer's giraffe. No such animal.

Now we must admit that Champlain found a pretty big stockade fort among
the Onondagas. Everyone recalls how he had a platform made, higher than
this Onondaga fence, and had himself (and his musket) carried on the
platform for a sort of aerial attack on the Onondagas. But you can pack
all this into a very small compass. Even Champlain's own Onondaga
drawing does not compare with Hochelaga. One admits, of course, that the
Huron mission Indians, massacred in 1649, had hundreds of lodges and
that the military expeditions of La Barre and the Marquis de Tracy
(1666) destroyed hundreds of Mohawk lodges. But if instead of lodge we
read "wigwam," instead of stockade read "fence," instead of "palisade"
read "pole," then Hochelaga shrinks back to very different dimensions.

It was evidently there, or thereabouts. Certain relics of it exist. If
it had really consisted of 24,000 big logs, no fires, no rot would have
wiped it out so utterly. Burned-out cities like pre-Roman London or Troy
leave old charred logs for centuries. But call it all poles and sticks,
a sort of bird's nest, and you can burn it all up like yesterday's camp.
The relics that exist, pipes, stone axes, and so on, are the kinds of
things that would have been found, and are found, round any annual
squatting place of savages. In this case their location, as said above,
points to the University Club as the center of Hochelaga. The little
river, the Burnside Brook, that now gurgles itself to death in the
sewers ran around the lower side. It is strange to think that it was in
the lounge room of the University Club that Jacques Cartier read the
Gospel of St. John to the savages. It is a thing that would stand doing
again.

But why, then, did such an account come into being? It has been argued
that possibly it was what we now call "propaganda." It was made to
"sell" Canada to King Francis I of France. Hence the same narrative
tells of the "Kingdom of Saguenay," full of rubies and gold and men as
white as Frenchmen. But the Gospel was needed also. The ladies of the
French court were all set on saving the souls of the Indians. As Francis
Parkman said, it was an easy way to save their own. Hence the two
motives, wealth and the kingdom of heaven, appear in the words of an old
nursery rhyme, "as a pretty dish to set before the King."

It might be objected that Cartier would not have stooped to write this.
Quite so: he couldn't and didn't, because he didn't write it. In any
sustained writing there is always evidence not exactly as to who wrote
it but as to who didn't. No one but an actual sailor could have written
the sea stories of Fenimore Cooper; no one but a person with all the
phrases of the law on his finger tips could have written the plays of
Shakespeare. Yet here is Cartier, if it is Cartier, muddling up the sea
terms that a Breton pilot would use; here is Cartier writing a windy,
fulsome dedication and urging King Francis to kill the heretics. This
piece of savagery would be just right to say to Francis, who afterward
killed them with great cruelty (the Vaudois), but it sounds all wrong
for the humane Cartier to say it. Cartier was dead before the book was
ever printed in French.

Oddly enough this lying propaganda, if it was such, like so much that is
sinful, succeeded. In fact, we owe Montreal to it. One of the few things
we know from the mixed account of Cartier's third voyage (1541) is that
King Francis was enthusiastic about Saguenay and determined to open it
up. He authorized the Sieur de Roberval to open all the jails in France
and help himself to Canadian settlers. The "wars of religion" intervened
(piety always comes first), but the story of the Royal Mountain, or its
flock of meek Indians, their rapt faces turned to the sky, waiting only
for the Gospel, became a legend. "Montreal," long before it was founded,
came to mean vaguely a distant place in North America where the savages
needed Christ.

From the Hochelaga stockade Cartier and his gentlemen and twenty sailors
made the ascent of the mountain which he named Mount Royal. In the
French of the day, "royal" was still writable as _ral_. Montreal
carries its name unchallenged. Here upon the summit--not from any one
spot, for the trees forbade and still forbid it, but from various points
of vantage--Cartier viewed the imposing panorama "of thirty leagues in
all," as he expressed it. The Indians explained it to him--the islands,
the enfolding lakes, the great rivers that here came together. One of
them, pointing to the Ottawa, then touched Cartier's silver whistle and
the gilt handle of a sailor's dagger. Cartier thought they meant that
where they pointed silver and gold were found. And they _did_ mean that.
But later history, still ignorant, explained away Cartier's error; the
Indians, it said, only referred to the silver color of the Ottawa, a
flight of fancy quite beyond a Huron. Since the opening of the northern
mining district, richer in gold and silver than all Peru, we know
better. Perhaps luckily, history remained in the dark.

Cartier came down, impressed with the idea that here was the path to
Saguenay. But the season was too late to reach it now. He hastened back,
picked up his _Emrillon_, and so came safely to Stadacona in
mid-October. Here all the previous good fortune was to change to the
record of the terrible winter that followed. It is no part of the
present work to follow it in detail. Cartier's men had built a solid log
fort and mounted on it the cannon from the ships. It was to stand them
in good stead. The winter set in early and intense with the utmost rigor
of the Canadian cold. The ships froze in solid in mid-November. Indian
friendship changed to Indian treachery. A terrible plague, recognizable
as scurvy, struck down the French. In February only ten out of the one
hundred and ten were fit for service. Twenty-five men were dead, lying
under the snow, unburied. Cartier concealed his losses. His men made a
brave show of manning the ramparts against the Indians now gathering for
the slaughter. Then came what seemed a miracle, or at least a miraculous
remedy, made from a native balsam, which cured the pestilence. The
Indians waited, hesitating, as Indians always did, before an open
attack. Then came the spring, the melting ice, the open river, Canada's
annual deliverance.

Cartier hastened his departure. The ships were rapidly prepared.
Donnacona kept up his false friendship to the last, kept up his wonder
tales of the gold and silver of Saguenay, heightening the wonder with
stories of men as white as the French, of men with one leg and no
stomach, and "other marvels too long to tell." In reward for which, as a
sort of poetic justice, Cartier carried him, by strategy, off to France,
as too good to leave behind. With him were taken ten others--a source of
later woe. Sailing on May 6, the ships reached Saint-Malo on July 16,
1536.

[Illustration: The First View of Montreal. Cartier's Visit to Hochelaga
in 1535. From an Old Print.

_Courtesy of the New York Public Library_]

And with that Jacques Cartier's career, as far as it affected Canada,
practically ended. There was a third voyage, as mentioned above, of
which the record is confused and uncertain. In this, if we can believe
the broken fragment left of the narrative, Cartier came up the river
again and rowed past his Hochelaga without troubling to look at it.
There may have been a fourth voyage. But in any case nothing came of it
all. The energies of France were being absorbed for half a century in
what the irony of history calls the "wars of religion." North American
discovery fell asleep again. When it awoke Hochelaga had vanished.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Keats of Cortez in error.

[2] S. E. Dawson, _The St. Lawrence_, 1905.

[3] (Sir) William Butler, _The Great Lone Land_, 1872.

[4] F. Nansen, _In Northern Mists_, 1911.

[5] H. A. Innis, _The Cod Fisheries_, 1940.

[6] _Cartier's Voyages_ (Champlain Society. H. P. Biggar).




CHAPTER II

Place Royale

     _The Inland Waterways. Geographical Situation of Montreal. The
     St. Lawrence Basin. Champlain's Voyages of Exploration. At
     Montreal Island, 1603. Establishes Place Royale, 1611. Later
     Journeys._


Here it may be proper, for the later purposes of this book, to pause a
while, as it were, with Cartier on the summit of Mount Royal and view
with the aid of modern survey and topography the scene around us. The
unusual physical features of this exceptional and happy environment make
it one of the chief geographical centers of North America.

Its meaning lies in the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa
rivers, which here come together with such a great gathering of the
waters that no single channel carries it. It forces its way through the
higher ground, dividing it into a complex of islands and intervening
channels. Down the steeper slopes it gathers into rapids. In the wide
hollows that it has itself helped to deepen, the St. Lawrence spreads
out into the expansion of Lake St. Louis above the Lachine Rapids and
the La Prairie Basin below. On the other side the Ottawa expands into
the Lake of the Two Mountains. Of the larger islands formed by these
dividing channels there lies farthest south and west, farthest
upstream, Isle Perrot, a rough oblong of a length of about seven miles
with a maximum breadth of about three. Immediately below it is the main
island, the beautiful island of Montreal, thirty miles long from point
to point, shaped in a long oval. Side by side with it and so beautifully
wooded that in places the eye does not see the dividing Rivire des
Prairies is Isle Jsus. On the other side of Isle Jsus runs the similar
Rivire des Milles Isles in a wide concave bow from the foot of the Lake
of the Two Mountains down to its junction with the Rivire des Prairies
at the north end of Montreal Island.

In all this area it is difficult to indicate the direction of the rivers
and the lie of the islands by simple reference to the cardinal points of
the compass. The compass lies awkwardly across them. The St. Lawrence
River in its passage from Lake Ontario to Lachine is moving virtually
eastward. But the great rapids give it a throw to the left, and from La
Prairie Basin, past the city of Montreal, the river is moving almost due
north. Between Montreal and Quebec it flows about northeast, and below
Quebec the river and the trend of the Gulf to which it enlarges is more
and more directed toward the east. Readers will find that the north and
south of Montreal are now called east and west in the perplexing
nomenclature of our streets. Visitors to the city must remember that St.
Catherine Street East and Sherbrooke Street East run fairly close to
north, and that the south shore of the river lies east of the north
shore; this is because the north shore got its name away back in
Cartier's days from the geography of its mouth at the Gulf, where it
really lies north. All such references as the recurrent historical
statement that "the harbor of Montreal lies on the north side of the
river," must be taken in this sense. As a matter of fact, the Victoria
Bridge in crossing the river from the city to St. Lambert on the south
shore runs almost northeast and the new Harbour Bridge due east.

The Ottawa where it joins the St. Lawrence has indeed run a strange
course. Its sources lie in the wilderness about 160 miles north of the
city of Ottawa. It starts off as if it meant to run westward to lake
Superior but keeps swinging around until by the time it has reached
Ottawa it has completed a vast semi-circle. Inside this enclosed sweep
lie its great tributaries, the Coulanges, the Gatineau, the Rivire du
Livre. At Ottawa it passes without deflection of its course over the
roaring "caldron" of the Chaudire Falls, an imposing, almost terrifying
sight as seen by Champlain and the early explorers, but now almost
buried under the dams, power sites, and bridges of the capital city.

On its exit from the Lake of the Two Mountains the part of the Ottawa
that does not join the St. Lawrence above Montreal Island is turned to
an easterly course down the Mille Isles and Rivire des Prairies, and
beyond Bout de L'Ile joins the main northeast current of the St.
Lawrence.

Now the whole area thus described around the confluence of the two great
rivers and the enfolded islands is blocked and guarded by rapids by
which nature prevented all further navigation from the sea and gave the
site its meaning and its history. Explorers coming up the St. Lawrence
and reaching the bottom end of the island system (Bout de L'Ile) would
naturally, and as a matter of course if guided by Indians, prefer the
main channel, the one on their left hand. But some twelve miles up from
Bout de L'Ile their course would be impeded--not absolutely blocked--by
the broken water of St. Marys current. This is where the island named by
Champlain St. Helens Island lies midway in the stream with shallow,
rapid water on one side and on the other this fierce St. Marys current,
varying with the season, but at times moving at six miles an hour. Boats
and canoes could pass it by vigorous rowing, poling, or trekking. But it
was obvious and natural to land at the foot of it, as Cartier did on his
first discovery of Hochelaga.

But to pass St. Marys current had, in any case, no further meaning than
to attain the sheltered water of the natural harbor under the projecting
bank and a little island beside it, the original harbor of Montreal. The
passage up the St. Lawrence beyond Montreal Island was barred by the
vast rapids variously called the Great Sault, the Sault St. Louis, and
finally the Lachine Rapids. In spite of the terrifying aspects and the
awful roar of the waters of the Great Sault, of which even Champlain was
not ashamed to record his fears, canoes and boats under proper guidance
could come down in safety. Champlain himself is the first white man on
record to have "shot the rapids." Presently it was found that even large
steamers could shoot Lachine in safety. The terror of the explorer
became the mock terror of the tourist.

Canoes and boats could come down. But nothing could go up except with
laborious portaging and trekking. This was the end of real navigation
till the nine-mile canal of 1825 left Lachine on one side.

The upward voyage past Montreal, behind the island by the Rivire des
Prairies and the Rivire des Milles Isles, is similarly blocked. There
are heavy rapids near the bottom end of the Rivire des Prairies, and
halfway up its course is the famous and tumultuous Sault au Recollet. It
is so called in memory of the tragic drowning of a Recollet friar in
1625, drowned in sight of his Indian flock, with or without their
assistance. The Rivire des Milles Isles is blocked by great rapids
beside the Isle St. Jean and Terrebonne.

At the upper end of the island system, where the Ottawa and the St.
Lawrence connect, are the famous Rapids of St. Anne. Montreal is thus a
full stop.

But it is a full stop, then as now, only for a new start. Even the
liveliest imagination cannot readily realize what a concourse of waters,
what a multitude of inland waterways are represented by these colossal
converging streams. Here was to the acute eye of a Champlain the key to
the continent. Nor is it a bygone key to a rusted lock. For the course
of North American history has turned a full cycle, and the whole
question of the St. Lawrence is up again with the discussion of the
continental seaway. This magnificent project, to turn a dream to a
reality, is already a matter of international agreement, postponed only
by the present war. In the hope of many of us it will stand as one of
the huge enterprises of constructive peace that will help to obliterate
the ravages of war. Hence the facts behind it are as much front-page
matter to us as they were to Cartier, Champlain, and La Salle.

The St. Lawrence River when it reaches Montreal has already drained all
the Great Lakes. One of the strangest physical features of our
continent is that the Great Lakes, an area of nearly 100,000 square
miles, are fed almost entirely by rainfall and snow. The rivers that
come into them are so short, the watersheds so relatively narrow, that
only six miles from Lake Erie there are streams that start to flow to
the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Ohio. The Des Plaines River, bound the
same way via the Mississippi, rises only four miles west of Lake
Michigan. Even on the north side, where Lake Nipigon drains to Lake
Superior, it is only ten miles from Lake Nipigon to where the rivers
start for James Bay. Apart from the minor tribute of rivers in western
Ontario, the Great Lakes, as said, are fed only by precipitation. Yet
their depth is so great, all but Lake Erie reaching far below the bottom
of the sea, that this vast unaided reservoir keeps Niagara falling.
Strangely enough, modern engineering now sets its hand to correct this
unfair competition of the watersheds and to turn the waters from the
wasted tumult of the empty North to the broad bosom of the Great Lakes,
mother of man's industry. That is a far cry from the Montreal of
Champlain but a vital concern to the seaport of today.

Nor does the glory of the volume of the St. Lawrence end with the island
of Montreal. Passing down, it receives at Sorel, forty-three miles
below, the flood of the Richelieu, the Rivire des Algonquins, which has
drained Lake Champlain and all the country south to where the headwaters
of the Hudson and the Mohawk dispute to carry it down the Hudson to the
Atlantic. All these rivers and lakes, trails and portages connect in the
retrospect of history with over two centuries of the dark shadows of
conflict and war and with one in the bright daylight of peace and good
will.

On the south side below the Richelieu are the lesser rivers, the St.
Francis, Yamaska, Nicolet, and Ste. Croix.

The north side pays an even fuller tribute. The St. Maurice, whose
sources rise beside the sources of the Ottawa but avoid its western
aberration, comes into the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers, thus making
with the course of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence a sort of huge
circle, and with it an inner chain of communication, known and used by
the Indians, especially when the ravages of the Iroquois endangered the
main river sources. Another great river joining the St. Lawrence from
the north is the Batiscan. But all that they add to the St. Lawrence is
eclipsed by the great flood of the Saguenay. This vast river, whose very
name is mystery, has come down 112 miles from Lake St. John that lies
north and a little _west_ of Quebec. This lake is fed by streams from
the north and the northwest that have come down hundreds of miles from
where the watershed turns to Hudson Bay and Ungava. Here, straight from
the north, is the Peribonka (a river of some 400 miles in length), now a
part of the world's literature as the home of Maria Chapdelaine.
Westward the huge river Ashuapmuchuan still offers its majestic name to
a newer heroine. Some distance below the Saguenay begins the desolate
territory and the north shore, Jacques Cartier's land of Cain.

All this vast vision of the waters of the past, the present, and the
future--legend, history, and dreams--is spread out before us as we stand
on Mount Royal. And now, equipped as Cartier never was, we may come down
from the mountain.

       *       *       *       *       *

A man now comes on the scene of American history in the person of Samuel
de Champlain, who did more than any other single person toward opening
up these inland waterways of the continent. Exploration and discovery
had fallen virtually asleep since Cartier's time, but private interest
had kept awake. The fisheries of the Newfoundland coast had greatly
increased, with not only Breton and Norman sailors, but with a large
English fleet out of Bristol and with Spaniards and Basques from the
little port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a place older in its people and
language than all record, a fishing port for centuries, a theater of war
from the days of Henry of Navarre to those of the Duke of Wellington,
yesterday a drowsy little watering place, and now again caught up in the
fate of Europe.

The fishermen pushed farther and farther into the Gulf and adjacent
waters. The furs brought down by the Indians opened a new trade.
Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, became each summer the
gathering place of canoes and ships. But each attempt to make winter
settlement as yet meant death in that bleak region. All this trade in
fish and furs was carried on as a "free trade" by the private ventures
of the merchants and pilots of the ports or by associated groups of
them. Many persons of rank and court influence were interested. The
fisheries remained an open trade, but monopolies were obtained from the
Crown for the trade in furs and merchandise in the "River of Canada" and
successively broke down. Such a commission of exclusive trade, on
condition of settlement, was given to Franois Grav Sieur du Pont,
written also as Dupont-Grav. He made a voyage to Tadoussac in 1600,
planned greater things to follow, and in 1603 sent out Samuel de
Champlain to search for a better site than Tadoussac.

Samuel de Champlain was of Brouage, a Bay of Biscay port, a sailor from
his childhood, a sea pilot of exceptional knowledge for his day. He had
made a two-year West Indian voyage, had written an account of it, and
enjoyed a rising reputation. He was a devout Christian but a practical
man too. There is a passage in his _Narrative of the Third Voyage_
(1611), evidently meant for the eye of King Louis XIII, since it argues
the need of funds, expressing the hope of "bringing many poor tribes to
the knowledge of our faith in order that later on they may enjoy the
heavenly kingdom." Meantime he helped some of the Iroquois on their way
there with a harquebus.

With this voyage of 1603 begin the comings and goings of Champlain to
Canada that extend over thirty years, that took him from the Bay of
Fundy to the Georgian Bay, from the Richelieu to Lake Champlain, from
New York State to Lakes Ontario and Simcoe. He made in all thirteen
voyages out and twelve voyages back, ending his life at Quebec where his
remains now lie.

Champlain first landed at Tadoussac where he met a great assemblage of
savages, a war party making ready to attack the Iroquois. To these he
promised the help of France.

It has been said that Champlain was not the first to offer such an
alliance. Yet in this initial error of Indian policy there lay for
French Canada the source of as many woes as those which brought down
Troy. There is here the key to our North American history, the fate of
a continent. For the future settlements, as at Montreal, it meant a half
century of ever-present danger and the hideous massacre of the summer of
1689, the "Indian Summer" of Lachine. All of this, of course, was veiled
from Champlain, but the historical background is plain enough to us.[7]

But at any rate here at Tadoussac, at the very opening of Champlain's
career, we have the first illustration of that extraordinary instinct
for geography which made him able, as it were, to divine the secrets of
the unseen waterways of America. From his conversation with the savages
he was able to plot our the region north and west of the Saguenay. It is
strange to realize that the region of the Mistassini country remains
almost unknown to the geography of ordinary people even now; or at least
it was so till the day of the gold mines and the airplane in Canada.
Much of it is shown on the new hydrographic maps to be an inconceivable
tangle of thousands of small lakes and islands. Yet Champlain
reconstructed its broad features; the course of the Saguenay; Lake St.
John, its great tributaries leading to a farther watershed; the
distances all estimated: so many portages, so many days . . . "a lake
two days to cross" . . . "they can easily make 11 to 15 leagues in a
day" (thirty to thirty-seven miles). . . . At the divide, so he was
told, they met other Indians. . . . "These said savages from the north
say that they are in sight of a sea which is salt. I hold that if this
be so, it is some gulf of this our sea which overflows from the north
into the midst of the continent; and indeed it can be nothing else."

Thus did Champlain "discover" the Hudson Bay some nine years before he
read in a printed book the story of Henry Hudson's final and fatal
voyage of 1611.

From Tadoussac, Champlain, accompanied by Dupont, passed on to inland
discovery. "On the eighteenth of June," he writes, "we set out from
Tadoussac to go to the Sault." This--the Rapid, or the Great Rapid--was
the name widely current since Cartier's time for the Lachine Rapids, the
great central point of inland intercourse. Champlain passed through and
specially noted "the narrows," which the Indians called, as they still
can any narrows, Kebek. The French spelling of the word long obscured
for French people its Indian origin and for English people its Indian
pronunciation. Champlain speaks of a waterfall from the top of a
mountain (Montmorency) and of the beautiful trees, but of Stadacona not
a word, either of name or settlement. It seems to have vanished.

As Champlain went up the river above Quebec he came to a place which he
said was the farthest limit of Jacques Cartier's ascent. In reality he
was only at the river now called Jacques Cartier, thirty-five miles
above Quebec. Cartier had said that at that point there was a place
called Hochelay. The name had appeared with various spellings, Ochelay,
Achelay, or Hochelay, in several maps before Champlain's voyage.
Champlain at this time knew of Cartier's voyage only by hearsay, and it
seems likely that he confused Hochelay with Hochelaga, though he
mentions neither. If so this would help to explain why he never looked
for the real Hochelaga up above.

All about him in this untroubled summer voyage was the beauty of the St.
Lawrence. The farther he went, so he reports, "the finer was the
country" . . . "trees like walnut trees" . . . "islands pleasant and
fertile." Then came the broad stretch of Lake Peter; at the head of it
"thirty small islands . . . with many vines on them." Above the lake
Champlain found the incoming of the Richelieu River, called by his
guides the River of the Iroquois, since it comes down out of their
country. He tried to ascend it but was blocked by the rapids of St. Ours
fourteen miles up, now flooded over by a dam. Champlain turned back to
the main river, ascended another forty-three miles, noting the beauty of
the south shore, the islands, and the beautiful open woods in the
lowlands, the clustered fruits, "good and pleasant with many meadows,"
and thus to the island of Montreal at St. Marys current, where Cartier
had made his landing sixty-eight years before. With a fair wind astern,
Champlain's boats (a shallop and skiff) passed this current and made
their way along the shore to the shelter of a little island close to
shore and offering protection against the current out in the river.
This little island was later to be called the Ilot Normandin and then
Market Gate Island, and the sheltered water between it and the shore
was, as already said, the original Montreal Harbour. Later the island
disappeared under the quays and the docks of the port. Here they came to
anchor and went ashore. Then Champlain and Dupont, with Indian guides,
made their way some distance farther up in their skiff and, when that
failed, went on foot to the Great Sault (Lachine) and beyond.

From what he thus saw and from what the Indians told him Champlain not
only gives an accurate description of the vicinity of Montreal but a
marvelous reconstruction of what was beyond and above, all the way to
Lake Huron. He writes with no reference to Cartier's voyage, to his
"Mount Royal" and his "Hochelaga." He explains it all from the
beginning. "There are two large islands, one on the north side some
fifteen leagues long and almost as many broad which extends beyond the
rapid." This is the island of Montreal. Jacques Cartier had not
recognized it as such. It is thirty-six miles at the longest, nine at
the widest; Champlain makes it thirty-six miles long, a close estimate;
for the breadth, no doubt, he perhaps took the doubled islands (Montreal
and Jesus), thickly wooded, for one. Champlain's island to the south is
Isle Perrot. Montrealers think of it as west of them, but it lies due
south of the upper end of Montreal Island.

Champlain describes, without names, the La Prairie Basin, St. Pauls
(otherwise Nuns) Island, and Isle Ronde lower down. He speaks of a
mountain (of course Mount Royal) "visible from very far in the
interior." He describes the Lachine Rapids with something of a mixture
of wonder and awe. Indeed in a later visit, when his companion Louis was
drowned there, he says that the sight of them "made his hair stand on
end." Beyond the rapids he could not go. He took the latitude as
forty-five degrees and some minutes north. "We saw we could do no more,"
he said; "we returned to our shallop," at the harbor. Here he questioned
the Indians and "made them draw by hand." He gathered that beyond this
first rapid (Lachine) they go ten or fifteen leagues to a river in the
country of the Algonquins (the Ottawa). Farther up the St. Lawrence,
beyond where the Ottawa comes in, Champlain traces, with an
extraordinary approach to truth, all the difficult succession of rapids,
portages, and open lakes which lie between Montreal and Lake Ontario.
For example, he indicates Lake St. Francis, the great expansion of the
river between Valleyfield and Cornwall; makes it thirty-six miles long
(actually twenty-six), and gives the length of the principal rapids and
whether or not canoes must be portaged or can be paddled. Beyond all
this stretch of river and rapid, he writes, is a lake that is eighty
leagues (192 miles) long; at the upper end of it the water is far less
cold and the winter mild. This, of course, is Lake Ontario (197 miles
long), which Champlain himself was later to discover. At the upper end
is Burlington Bay with water far less cold than in Lower Canada. Beyond
this is a somewhat high waterfall, continues Champlain, where but little
water flows. This is evidently a confusion of what the Indians said.
Niagara at times runs dry, and in any case the crest of the falls looks
flat beside Lachine. Beyond this is another lake--Lake Erie--sixty
leagues long (144 miles; actually 250), then a strait--our Detroit.
Beyond that, the Indians said, was a great lake, but they had never seen
the other side of it, a lake "so vast that they will not venture to put
out into it."

This was, surely, Lake Huron, where the knowledge of the Canadian
Indians ended. They said that the sun in summer sets north of it and
that "the water there is very salt like that of our own sea." This
"salt" no doubt was a mistake, arising from the salt of Hudson or James
Bay connected by river and portage with Lake Huron. But Champlain
naturally says, "This makes me believe that this is the South Sea.
Nevertheless," he adds, "we must not give too much credence to this
view."

It is a strange thing, as already indicated, that in none of these
discussions does Champlain mention Hochelaga. He doesn't say that it had
gone. He just ignores it.

Champlain's first voyage thus ended with information that made him eager
to pursue inland discovery. But for a time other tasks absorbed him. His
next journey (in 1604) was taken up with the exploration of the Bay of
Fundy and the adjacent coasts and with his foundation of Port Royal,
near by the present Annapolis, a lost paradise of peace and plenty,
embowered in orchards and gardens, enlivened in winter by the food and
merriment of the "Order of Good Cheer"--too bright to last. Then came
his foundation of Quebec, 1608, and with it the first permanent settlers
in French Canada and a strategic center on which turned the fate of
North America. Yet Champlain's famous "habitation of Quebec" remained
for years rather a fort with a winter garrison than a real colony. Not
till 1617 appears the record of Louis Hbert, the first settler to bring
out a family. Even at that the number of French wintering in New France,
down till Champlain's death in 1635, was only about a hundred. New
France for its first century was little more than a vast project which,
to the very end, its limited population rendered futile.

The foundation of Quebec was followed by Champlain's participation with
his Indian associates, Algonquins and Hurons, in their war against the
Iroquois, now spreading their ravages far and wide. As has been said,
this ill-chosen policy was to bring evil results for Montreal and for
French Canada. For the moment it meant the temporary discomfiture of the
Iroquois by a handful of Frenchmen using firearms.

Champlain had never lost from his mind the Great Sault (Lachine) and the
lake and river route these opened to the South Sea. But it was not till
1611 that he was able to attempt a definite establishment at what we now
call Montreal. He left France (Honfleur) early in the season (March
1611) but merely learned thereby the full meaning of the St. Lawrence
ice. It took two months and a half to reach Tadoussac. From there in a
shallop (longboat) he made his way up the river to Montreal Island, to
the little harbor behind the island disclosed in his first visit. At
that point a little river, rising in a pond or small lake near Lachine,
ran down the sunken hollow that later was to hold the Lachine Canal. It
fell into the main river just opposite the little island already
mentioned (Ilot Normandin--Market Gate Island). Close to its mouth it
was joined by little streams that then ran down what is now Craig
Street, and from the mountainside flow streams, such as the Burnside of
James McGill, that now sparkle and murmur but a brief moment to fall to
the dark pollution of the city sewers.

Round this pleasant meeting place of forgotten waters was a stretch of
smooth and fertile meadowland where once the Indians of Hochelaga had
grown their winter corn. The inroads of war had long since returned it
to desolation. Here Champlain laid out his settlement, Place Royale, as
he named it. Champlain was fascinated with the place. "There are fine
meadows," he said, "which would feed as many cattle as one could wish;
all the varieties of wood which we have in our forest of France with
vines and butternuts, plums, cherries and strawberries . . . and an
abundance of fish . . . and game birds." Champlain ordered trees cut, a
building to be erected on the little island, and fields prepared. He
tested the clay of the ground for brickmaking and built a wall (an
embankment or levee) ten yards long, four feet high, and thus twelve
feet above the summer water, to see how it would be effective against
the flood season. This scientific and experimental attitude appears in
Champlain throughout. Especially he took note of the possibility of a
walled town on a larger lower island, still called, as he christened it,
by his wife's name, St. Helens Island.

Dupont joined him from Tadoussac with a large company of free traders
attracted at once by the rumor of a new center of trade. Champlain sent
out Indian messengers to summon their companions to the place. On the
thirteenth of June (1611) a large concourse of Hurons came down from the
Ottawa country. There was the usual tumultuous welcome, shouting and
noise of firearms and the inevitable Indian oratory. These Indians gave
Champlain a hundred beaver skins and eagerly asked for his friendship.

The Iroquois had now become an ever-present menace. Many savages were
afraid to come down to the Sault for fear of them. A rumor had been
treacherously spread that Champlain was going to go over to the
Iroquois. As for the French traders, the Indians trusted them not at
all; they rightly saw in them reckless, adventurous men, looking for
gain, with no common purpose. Champlain reassured the Indians; he would
ask the King for fifty men equipped with firearms; he would protect them
if they were willing to show him their country. He hoped to find, with
their help, the way to the South Sea. "I had much conversation with
them," he said, "regarding the source of the Great River" (the St.
Lawrence), ". . . the rivers, falls, lakes and lands." Some of the
Indians claimed to have seen a great sea to the west, far away,
difficult to reach. Champlain remained at and around Place Royale from
the twenty-eighth of May till the eighteenth of July. It was during this
sojourn that Champlain's companion, a servant of De Monts called Louis
(we have no other name for him), was drowned in the Lachine Rapids,
frequently henceforth called the Sault St. Louis, either in his memory
or in honor of King Louis XIII. Bands of Indians kept coming down, but
the distrust and the fear of the Iroquois hindered trade. Champlain,
promising to return, left on July 18; his shallop flew with the wind and
current in a single day from Place Royale harbor to Three Rivers,
seventy-seven miles below. Such were the varying fortunes of travel, for
a week's voyage perhaps a day's return, or for a day a week. Champlain
reached La Rochelle September 11, 1611.

This was to all intents and purposes Champlain's last connection with
Place Royale. In his journeys of 1613 and 1615 he came and went to
Montreal Island but never found time to prosecute the development of the
fort and settlement he had planned. Had he done so the history of Canada
might have received a forward development of far-reaching consequences.
But Champlain's mind was set on exploration. While in France in 1612 he
heard the news of the discovery of the great inland sea, since called
the Hudson Bay. This, we must remember, was a one-sided discovery, not
of a closed sea locked in with rugged shores, as it turned out to be,
but apparently of a great sea all open to the west. Hudson's men who
marooned him and came home had seen only the eastern side. Not till the
voyages of Captains Fox and James (1631) was the sea known to be closed.

Champlain, therefore, on his next voyage went past Montreal Island up
the Ottawa on a fruitless search for this great sea. After that there
came the most famous voyage of all, which took him up the Ottawa, hence
to the Georgian Bay, Lake Simcoe, and central Ontario and brought the
discovery of Lake Ontario itself. On this journey again Champlain
pursued his fatal policy of attempting to lead his insignificant forces
and his doubtful allies against the Iroquois. He abandoned exploration
for war, crossed Lake Ontario, and, in the Iroquois country itself (New
York State), led an attack against the stockade at Onondaga, near Oneida
Lake. The attack failed. Champlain was successfully carried away,
wounded. He wintered in the lodges of the Hurons, in the Lake Simcoe and
Lake Huron country. He meant to strike out west to the great sea in
1616. Indian war prevented this. He came down past Montreal and so to
Quebec July 11, 1616.

It is said in defense of Champlain's war on the Iroquois that he found
this policy all set on his first arrival at Tadoussac in 1603; also that
he would have succeeded and driven out the Iroquois forever if the King
would only have given the soldiers for the work; one regiment would have
been enough--nothing as beside the army of France. This plea Champlain
continued all his life.

When the English took Quebec in the war of 1629--it was held by only a
starving garrison of sixteen men--Champlain became a prisoner, was taken
to England, released at the peace of 1632, to return to Quebec in 1633,
and there to die on Christmas Day, 1635.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] To and from America--1599-1601, 1603, 1604-07, 1608-09, 1610, 1611,
1612, 1613-14, 1615-16, 1617-18, 1620-24, 1625-29, 1635.




CHAPTER III

Ville Marie de Montreal

     _Foundation of Montreal by Maisonneuve in 1642. The Missions in
     the Wilderness. The Association of Montreal. The Mission
     Settlement of Ville Marie. The Fort. The Hotel Dieu. The
     Attacks of the Iroquois._


During the thirty-one years that elapsed between Champlain's survey and
preparation of his Place Royale (1611) and the foundation of the mission
city of Ville Marie de Montreal by Maisonneuve in 1642, there was no
definite settlement, no all-the-year-round establishment at the place.
But the locality was henceforth a well-known rendezvous for traders who
came up the river and Indians who came down from the inland waters. The
name Montreal, taken from that of the mountain and used by Champlain
only in its original sense, was presently widely used both in Canada and
in France to indicate not a mountain or a city but a locality in
general.

Meantime New France was expanding not in numbers, but in the extent of
its reach. When Champlain died there were, as said, only about a hundred
white inhabitants. Even when Maisonneuve came from Quebec to Montreal,
New France only contained about three hundred French. But meantime the
arrival of priests and nuns from France led to the establishment of
those missions in the wilderness that were to become the spiritual glory
of New France. If there was in the end no crown of empire there abides
the crown of martyrdom. Priests, as said, may have come with Cartier.
They certainly came over with Champlain, at first certain Recollet
friars, a branch of the Franciscans, and in 1625 the Jesuits, whose
record and whose suffering are graven on the monuments of our history.
The Jesuits, as part of their mission, prepared reports and wrote
letters home to their order, and in these half-hundred volumes of the
_Jesuit Relations_ we have a principal original source of Canadian
history. At the time of which we speak Jesuit fathers were making their
way up to and beyond Montreal, up the Ottawa to the Huron country (Lake
Simcoe), later to be the scene of the great massacre and of the
martyrdom of Father Brbeuf and Father Lalemant. This they did in spite
of the ever-present danger of the Iroquois raids. No trail in the woods
was safe from ambush; no still lake or murmuring river but might echo to
their sudden war cry. These dangers of New France were braved by a small
band of devoted women who came thither in response to this higher call.
We cannot understand the full meaning, the sacred meaning of the
founding of Montreal without appreciating the terrible danger--never
seen but ever present--which surrounded its foundation.

Along with the coming of the priests and nuns the government of New
France had been changed from a basis of random adventure, a privileged
trade, to a definite organization. The master hand of Cardinal Richelieu
had been turned to the task. A Company of One Hundred Associates had
been formed to take over New France and colonize it. A feudal system of
land grants was established, the famous seignorial tenure which lasted
till 1854, with certain incidents only terminated in 1940. Henceforth
there was a regular governor at Quebec and a Father Superior (presently
a bishop). A convent of Ursuline sisters was established at Quebec in
1642. The whole population was still a mere handful with outposts at
Three Rivers above and Tadoussac below.

Few if any people think of Montreal today as a sacred city. Yet such it
was in its foundation. We think of it now as a great commercial
metropolis: McGill University is one of the great schools of the world;
St. James Street, like Wall Street, carries in its name all the awe and
the obloquy of high finance. But the Ville Marie de Montreal, founded
under Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve in 1642, belonged to the Kingdom
of the Spirit.

The quarrels of the Reformation and the wars that followed had set up in
France a new ferment of religion. This shows its dark side in Europe in
the cruel fury of persecution but in America its bright side, as the
propagation of the light of the Gospel. The pages of early Christianity
were rewritten in Canada, and nowhere more than in the foundation of
Montreal.

The new movement of faith in France had inspired many ladies of the
French court and of the French chteaux with a desire to aid in the
conversion of the savages. Many nobles and soldiers were inspired also
to take part in it. To such people the name Montreal, still inexact,
indefinite, came to mean a place in the wilderness where there was dire
need of Christ. There began what we might call in our current language a
"Montreal movement." This presently took on all the aspects of the
miraculous. As we read of it in the devout contemporary pages of Dollier
de Casson[8] and in the later work of the Abb Faillonn it breathes the
atmosphere of Scripture. Visions were sent to people who had never heard
of Montreal, calling them to the work. Such a vision came to Jean de la
Dauversire, a burgher of Laflche, a good citizen, a man of family, but
an ascetic who scourged and beat himself that grace might be granted to
him. Such a vision came also to the Abb Olier, a priest from Paris,
whose name is inscribed on one of the humblest of our Montreal streets.
He had just founded (1640) in Paris the Sminaire of St. Sulpice and the
order which later established the Sminaire at Montreal and became in
1663 the feudal holders of Montreal Island. Olier and Dauversire had
never heard of one another. But coming together by chance, their eyes
met; their countenances were lighted up with recognition. They clasped
hands and talked of Montreal. Yet neither, we are assured, had ever
heard of it except in a vision.

Others joined. An Association of Montreal was founded. Money was
supplied by pious ladies eager to save the distant souls of the
Algonquins and the Iroquois. There were to be three religious
orders--one of priests, one of nuns for a hospital, the third of nuns
for a teaching order.

Neither Olier nor Dauversire was in a position to lead forth the
mission. But the hour brought the man. The noble figure of Paul de
Chomedey de Maisonneuve appears on the scene of history. His monument
stands in our Place d'Armes at Montreal, and no name in our history
better deserved one. Nor must one confuse it with the random mention of
a Sieur de Maisonneuve, a trader of Saint-Malo, casually mentioned as
meeting with Champlain at Place Royale on June 17, 1613, thirty years
before. Maisonneuve was a soldier but also a man of the inner light,
inspired. "I would go there," he said when they spoke of the Indian
terror, "if every tree were an Iroquois."

The ship's company were marshaled at Rochelle. With Maisonneuve were
forty soldiers to serve as a garrison and a working body of farmers and
servants, all in one. The chief of the hospital was Jeanne Mance, of
Nogent-le-Roi, a woman not in religious orders but who had, since her
childhood, devoted herself to religious discipline. She too had received
a divine call to Montreal. She journeyed to Paris, thence to La Rochelle
to join the Montreal expedition. On meeting Olier and Dauversire she
knew "their most hidden thoughts" by miraculous intervention. Pious
friends supplied her with ample funds. Henceforth her lifework was at
Ville Marie de Montreal. This name was selected by the Associates in a
ceremony of consecration after the departure of the ship.

They sailed in 1641 but reached Quebec too late to make a further ascent
of the river. They therefore spent the winter at Quebec, now fortified
and secure, but still a population of only a handful. In the spring they
made the ascent of the river. The craft used by the traders from Quebec
to Montreal at that date were not ocean-going ships but very large open
boats, flat-bottomed, of little draft, carrying mast and sails, but
capable of being rowed. These are the _barques_ and the _chaloupes_--the
longboats and shallops--of the narratives. Larger still were pinnaces
which could have more than one mast. Small boats called _skiffs_
(_esquifs_), propelled with oars and poles, were brought along to go in
water too shallow for the bigger boats. But skiffs could be bigger than
the little rowboats now so called. They might hold half a dozen men.

Maisonneuve's river boats were built beside Quebec in the winter and
early spring. Here was a pinnace with three masts, two shallops, and
also a big barge with sails, a _gabare_--probably much like what is
called a scow, with sails added. They sailed from Quebec on May 8, 1642.
The ship's company included Maisonneuve; M. de Montmagny, whose duty it
was to hand over the island of Montreal as from the Company of One
Hundred Associates to the Associates of Montreal; Father Vimont, the
superior of the mission at Quebec; Father Poncet, who was to remain at
Montreal, and several Jesuit priests. There was also M. de Puiseaux of
Quebec, together with soldiers, the sailors of the boats, and other
artisans--in all some fifty people. The women present were Jeanne Mance
and Madame de la Peltrie who, with her maid, Charlotte Barr, left the
Ursuline convent at Quebec to share in the foundation of Ville Marie.

A week was spent in the ascent of the river. At length on May 17 they
came in sight of Montreal Island, glorious with the sunrise of a May
morning that bathed its meadows and its mountainside with light and
touched the soft colors of the budding leaves. They landed on
Champlain's ground, just under the shelter of the tongue of land beside
the little river (the Pointe  Callires). Maisonneuve no sooner landed
than he fell on his knees, and all the company as they came ashore
kneeled in prayer and joined in hymns of thanksgiving. They had no
sooner landed their first stores than they raised an altar, decorated by
the women with spring flowers, and here was celebrated the first Mass of
Ville Marie. Then Father Vimont spoke. "What you see," he said, "is only
a grain of mustard seed . . . but it is so animated by faith and
religion that it must be that God has great designs for it."

All day they labored, landed stores, and arranged their camp for the
night. When darkness fell there was no oil for a lamp, so the women
caught fireflies and put them in a glass and therewith illuminated the
altar. Then night fell. Beside them, as they went to rest, was the
murmur of many waters, whispering of unseen danger. Only faith and
courage could find sleep beside it.

The next day the Governor and his attendants left downstream for Quebec.
The colonists set busily to work, their first task to protect
themselves. Round their camp they made a ditch and some sort of palisade
with stakes; with this began the building of a chapel of bark--prayer
and defense, the signs of their allotted task.

Their situation indeed afforded little safety from attack. Montreal
offers but little natural facility for defense. In Roman times the flat
mountaintop would have made an admirable _castra_, but these were other
days and other arms. Down below the mountainside there is little
protection. Such as there was lay in the watercourses. The St. Lawrence
covers one side, and for the Ville Marie and the Montreal of the French
Regime till the conquest the sunken hollow that is now Craig Street was
a marsh and river, offering a certain cover from behind. This stream,
presently called Ruisseau St. Martin (St. Martin's Brook), ran parallel
to the St. Lawrence but in the other direction. It made a turn and
emptied into the little river already mentioned (the St. Pierre). The
first camp and the first fort were on the downstream side of the St.
Pierre. But when the colonists presently built their hospital and houses
they moved across the St. Pierre to the higher ground a little farther
upstream and thus had water on three sides of them.

This later gave the plan of defense of the walled town. Luckily for
Maisonneuve's settlers who were armed soldiers, the Iroquois who were
now armed like themselves with firearms, seldom found what is rudely
called "the guts" for a direct attack. Their method was stealth, ambush,
death by night. A few resolute armed men might face and defy them. But
the danger was present enough. Within a few weeks the Montreal settlers
were to learn what it meant. And here perhaps one may pause by the
waters of Ville Marie to speak of the Indian terror of which they
murmured. It is necessary, as the key to the next half century of the
history of Montreal, to understand the Indian situation and the Indian
danger.

The Indians of North America had migrated, long before memory and
history, from Asia and were thinly scattered over the continent. They
perhaps numbered, in what is now the United States and Canada, something
over a million. Here and there they lived in clustered lodges, on the
Pacific coast (then all unknown) probably in still larger groups. But
mostly they wandered. Their languages are numerous, about seventy-five
in all, but show them all of one family. Even the Eskimos are Indians in
the historic sense.

Of the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi the most widely spread were
the great family of the Algonquins. They occupied the country north of
the Great Lakes, the Ottawa valley, the lower St. Lawrence, the maritime
coast (Acadia), and the Atlantic seaboard of New England. They included
such tribes as the Montagnais, a northern tribe of the "Kingdom of
Saguenay"; the Ojibways (otherwise Chippewas); the Micmacs; the
Narragansetts, and the Delawares. Their language is easily recognized by
such sounds as Kebek, Mikmak, Shediac, and all that spells New
Brunswick. The Algonquins were largely a nomadic race, hunting and
fishing and moving with the game and the seasons.

Over against these, in the space between the Great Lakes, the St.
Lawrence, and the Hudson River, were the Huron-Iroquois, tribes of one
family but divided later by the dissensions that brought on the wars of
extermination. Their language is seen in the softer sounds of Hochelaga,
Stadacona, and Niagra (pronounced as it is in Indian). The Iroquois,
like the Algonquins, carry their Indian name. But "Huron" is a French
nickname from _la hure_, the boar's head, a metaphor suggested by the
peculiar tufted appearance, the particular fashion in scalp locks, of
the shaven Huron head. Huron in Indian is Wyandot.

The Hurons lived along the lakes and the St. Lawrence. The Iroquois
filled the gap between the Hudson and Niagara which proved the key point
of American strategy. There were five nations of them, known always by
the English version of their Indian names. The Mohawks lived, as one
might expect, on the Mohawk River. The French called them Agniers. West
from the Mohawks ran the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the
Senecas. Apart from the Mohawks they all were similarly named in English
and French. But the transcription of their names into the two languages
is so varied as to be almost unrecognizable. It is hard to believe that
the French for Seneca is _Tsonnonchouan_. This last nation, the most
foul and savage of the five, if comparison is possible, lived between
where Rochester and Buffalo now stand. They were the left flank of the
Five Nations. The Mohawks on the right had as their war trail the
descent of the beautiful waterways by Lake George, Lake Champlain, and
the Richelieu. The traveler of today over the Delaware and Hudson
Railway line may reconstruct, if he will, amid the beauty of the woods
and water that he passes, the ambush, the massacres, and the savagery of
the Indian war, the agonies of Father Jogues in the wilderness, and the
butchery of Fort William Henry.

To the left the Seneca and Onondaga country can recall the expeditions
of Denonville and Frontenac. Holding this central region, the Iroquois
Five Nations, ferocious beyond all record, conquered to the verge of
extermination their neighboring Indian enemies one by one and for a
century and a half played off England against France and turned the
tide, literally, of the world's history. For had they sided with France,
what then?

These Indians were savage beyond belief. To say that they burned their
prisoners alive is to say the least of it. No one wishes to dwell on the
horrors of torture, the remembrances of a cruelty long gone and passed
to its account. But, to be done with it once and for all, one must speak
of it here in order to understand the history of Montreal for its first
sixty years, in order to know what were the warnings whispered by the
moving waters beside Ville Marie. These Indians not only burned their
prisoners but burned them with slow and studied tortures that kept pain
alive and life not yet extinct. They unbound them from the stake to drag
them, mutilated and bleeding, along the trail for torture renewed every
evening and all night, dragged them to their home lodges so that their
wives and children might assist in the final scenes, might heap with
hideous childish merriment burning coals in patches on the torn bodies
dying in the ashes. Nor this to their fighting enemies alone; they stuck
little children on spits of wood to burn slowly to death before a slow
fire. They forced women to burn their husbands to death with flaming
brands of resinous wood. Nor was death the end. These unspeakable
creatures chopped up the dead and tortured bodies of their enemies, to
boil and roast them for their cannibal feasts. The choicest portion, the
brain, fell to the share of the chief. "They ate men," a contemporary
witness wrote, "with as much appetite and more pleasure than hunters eat
a boar or a stag." It was Father Vimont who wrote that, the priest who
celebrated the first Mass at Ville Marie.

Imagine such scenes of horror, and imagine among them the torn and
tortured priest, Father Jogues, crawling to reach out his mutilated
hands into the flames to baptize with a few drops of water the dying
victim in the name of Jesus Christ.

Horrors are well to avoid. But no one who does not know of these things
can understand the lights and shadows, the horror and the glory of
Canadian history.

Maisonneuve's colonists were soon to learn of them at first hand. In the
middle summer of the year, August, 1642, Father Jogues, a Jesuit of the
Huron Mission, was coming up the river from Quebec to Montreal, carrying
with him renewed supplies sent out from France for his work--sacred
vestments, chasubles, vessels for the altars, bread and wine for the
Eucharist, and such holy and necessary things. With him were three
French companions, two associated with his work, one a boatman, and a
band of Huron converts, and others waiting baptism in the faith. In all
they filled twelve canoes. Their journey brought them to a place in the
river at the western end of Lake St. Peter, where the swift current and
broken water forced them close beside the shores under the woods. Here
two hundred Iroquois, hidden in the leaves, armed with firearms,
motionless and without sound, waited for them. They were Mohawks who had
come down by the Richelieu for this ambush. At the chosen moment, with
the shriek of their war whoop and the discharge of their muskets, they
fell upon their victims. The Huron made little fight; those who could
escaped, as did one Frenchman. The others were killed or taken.

The Frenchmen stood their ground to be torn down by the savages. Jogues
had remained unresisting, baptizing his dying Hurons. The savages turned
on him. They beat him senseless and, when revived, chewed and lacerated
his fingers with their teeth. . . . Twenty-two Hurons had been taken.
Some of them were burned alive forthwith for the immediate enjoyment of
their captives. Others with Father Jogues were dragged back along the
Mohawk war trail to endure sufferings such as those described
above--beaten, mutilated, burned--to end their death in fire. Jogues
alone was kept alive. For months the savages held him to witness and to
share the torments inflicted on each new group of captives taken on the
warpath. At length the Dutch contrived to rescue him. They sent him on a
ship to France. He arrived at the College of Rennes, house of his order,
ragged, mutilated almost beyond recognition. There he was restored to
life.

It has been finely said that there is no suffering that human cruelty
can inflict too great for human fortitude to bear. Jogues returned to
his mission work in New France, once more to labor, to suffer, and to
die under Indian torment, his flesh cut into strips, a tomahawk smashed
into his brain.

Such was the news that spread from the fugitives of the massacre to the
settlers at Ville Marie in that late summer of 1642. Although a few more
colonists were added to their number that August, they scarcely dared go
beyond the shelter of their palisades. What we think of today as the
upper part of Montreal, its beautiful squares, its tall hotels, its
crowded streets, its embowered university, its spacious cathedrals, its
roaring stadium--all this was forest. In it at any moment might lurk
the Mohawk. Settlers who ventured too far might pay for it with their
lives.

       *       *       *       *       *

The settlers at Ville Marie for the opening years of their settlement
had no better shelter than their palisaded camp beside the river. Their
first real building was the Hotel Dieu (finished 1644) higher up on the
bank, its site indicated today by the intersection of St. Paul Street
with St. Sulpice Street (formerly St. Joseph). This was to be the
hospital for the ministrations of Jeanne Mance and those who followed
her to the mission. It was a large wooden building, protected with a
palisade and serving also as the first church of these days. Burned in
1695, rebuilt to be burned again in 1721, again burned in 1734, it was
rebuilt in the building used until 1861, when its place was taken by the
building still occupied on Pine Avenue West.

The building of the Hotel Dieu was followed by the construction of a
real fort, with solid walls and enclosed buildings, set on the tongue of
land between the little St. Pierre River and the St. Lawrence. A cannon
brought from Quebec was mounted on the fort. Beside it, on the tip of
the tongue of land, was laid out the first cemetery, soon abandoned as
the spring floods of the river gave even the dead no rest. Later on the
fort also was abandoned and demolished, and M. de Callires, Governor of
Montreal and, after Frontenac, of Canada, built a fine house on its
former site. Hence the place was presently called the Pointe 
Callires.

For Maisonneuve was built (1652), in a clearing of the woods between the
Hotel Dieu and the fort, a large three-story wooden structure, something
like a French chalet, and protected also with palisades. A rough track
that later became St. Paul Street ran from the Hotel Dieu to this house,
then turned and went over a little bridge to the fort. When the
Sulpician priests came to Ville Marie (1650) they lived first in
Maisonneuve's house, which was remodeled to become (1661) their first
seminary. It must be remembered, of course, that up to this time they
were present at Ville Marie only as priests serving on mission. The
feudal proprietors were still the "Compagnie de Montreal." It was not
till March 9, 1663, that the Compagnie transferred, with the consent of
the Crown, its obligations and rights to the Seminary of Saint Sulpice
at Paris. It was in 1712 that the Sulpicians moved into their "new"
seminary, the one still occupied. But even before this they had
constructed their outside fort in the woods (Le Fort des Messieurs), of
which two corner towers still stand on Sherbrooke Street West.

     TABLET ON THE FROTHINGHAN AND WORKMAN COURT OFF ST. PAUL STREET

     _Upon this foundation stood the first manor House of Montreal
     built 1661, burnt 1852, rebuilt 1853. It was the seminary of
     St. Sulpice from 1661 to 1712. Residence of de Maisonneuve,
     Governor of Montreal, and of Pierre Raimbault, Civil and
     Criminal Lieutenant General._

Pierre Raimbault lived in the house after the Sulpicians moved in 1712
into their "new" seminary, the one still standing.

Another pious foundation of the earliest days of Ville Marie was the
Church of Notre Dame de Bonsecours farther downstream than the other
building. It owes its foundation to the saintly labors of Marguerite
Bourgeoys, who came to the mission in 1653, one of the most
distinguished and devoted of the women who gave their lives to Ville
Marie. Her labors were chiefly in the work of teaching. But she is
remembered also for having brought out from France a miraculous statue
of the Virgin and the funds to erect a chapel where it might stand in
full sight from the river and serve as the guardian saint of approaching
sailors.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such, then, was the situation of the mission post of Ville Marie in the
early years of its history, the Indian peril ever close at hand. Some
Algonquins came about in the summer of 1642, but the Iroquois only
learned of the settlement in the summer of 1643 when they kept it under
watch, roving the forests in bands. On one occasion (it was June 9,
1643) six men who were cutting wood less than a hundred yards from the
fort were attacked by a band of forty savages who rushed upon them from
behind the trees. Three of them were killed outright, the rest carried
off for a worse fate. One, it was said, escaped later.

Maisonneuve forbade all wandering out. Work must be to the sound of the
bell, all leaving the fort together. Some of the more reckless of the
French, chafing at this captivity, urged Maisonneuve to go out and
fight. Their importunities, month after month, wore out his better
judgment. He ordered thirty men to get ready and come out with him to
fight. This was at the end of March (1644), with deep snow still in the
hollows under the leafless trees, before the return of the birds to the
forests. All was silent as they entered the woods. Then the hidden
savages, a band of eighty Iroquois, rushed toward them. The French stood
firm, firing from behind trees, learning the new strategy of the
American woodsman. . . . Some fell. The others, under orders, moved
back, tree to tree, toward the fort, Maisonneuve the last. The Iroquois,
seeing who he was, tried to rush him, to drag him off captive.
Maisonneuve turned at bay, fearless. As the Iroquois chief approached he
fired; the pistol missed; his second pistol shot the chief dead. While
the Indians clutched for the fallen body Maisonneuve escaped. The
French, carrying some of their wounded, reached the fort. Three lay dead
in the woods. Two were carried off and burned at the stake. After that
no one ever questioned Maisonneuve's courage or his commands.

This heroic conflict is one of the treasured memories of French Canada.
The exact scene of the actual struggle is a matter of argument among
antiquarians. We know at least that it was in the heart of the financial
district of Montreal, near by the present struggles of the Stock
Exchange.

Such scenes and such dangers marked the life of Montreal for its first
three years. To safeguard its existence the Governor General of New
France was ordered to build a fort at the foot of the Richelieu to block
the Mohawk warpath. The Indians (two hundred) ambushed the French
soldiers at their work. But they seized their arms just in time. After a
fierce fight they beat off their assailants at odds of two to one. The
Iroquois never had much heart for fighting man to man in the open.

Even at that the fort was of little service. The French were still to
learn that against an Indian raid one fort was of little value. They
carried their war canoes around it. There must be at least two and a
stretch of protected water to make the portage long and hazardous. Hence
another fort was presently built on the Richelieu beside the Chambly
Rapids. Visitors to Montreal, at no greater sacrifice than a pleasant
motor drive of twenty miles, may view the old fort at Chambly and study
Indian strategy on the spot.

Maisonneuve's historic fight had taken place at the end of March 1644.
All through that year and well into the next there was no safety. The
Iroquois seemed to swarm in the woods. Their war parties roved over all
Montreal Island till there was no place safe except the fort itself. A
small reinforcement of soldiers was sent out to New France by the
Hundred Associates in 1645, sixty men to be divided along the river at
Quebec, Three Rivers, the Richelieu fort, and Montreal. But their
numbers, as with all the little detachments sent out at intervals in the
next twenty years, were hopelessly few for adequate protection.

Yet their presence helped to induce the Iroquois to offer peace, which
marked the close of what some historians care to call the First Iroquois
War. But it closed only to open again more deadly than ever in the fall
of 1646. The Iroquois war, or rather the series of raids and massacres,
was to last, with only casual cessations, for twenty years.

Maisonneuve was absent when the war broke out; the momentary peace had
allowed him (1646) to return to France for his personal affairs and for
those of the Association of Montreal. He did not return to Ville Marie
till 1648, when the danger was at its height. The raids never stopped.
"At Montreal," so wrote from Quebec the Jesuit Superior, "there are
barely sixty Frenchmen, twenty Hurons, a few Algonquins, and two of our
fathers." "It is a marvel," said the _Jesuit Relation_ of 1651, "that
the French of Ville Marie were not exterminated by the frequent
surprises of the Iroquois bands. The Indians broke into the settlement
again and again, sneaking among the trees or along the sunken ditches.
Often ten men or less fought against fifty or eighty." Here belong the
heroic episodes of such fights as those of Charles le Moyne. At heavy
odds he drove off a band of Iroquois from Point St. Charles, leaving
them dead with only four French wounded. Here belongs also the heroic
fight for the Hotel Dieu itself. This building was now armed with two
pieces of cannon and with swivel guns in its windows. Early in the
morning of Tuesday, July 26, 1651, a band of two hundred Iroquois
swarmed against its palisades. Lambert Closse, the major of the
garrison, whose figure stands as one of those on the Maisonneuve
monument, with sixteen men fought off the attacks that never ceased till
evening. There was need of courage. The terrible massacre which had
already overwhelmed the mission of St. Louis among the Hurons on what is
now the Georgian Bay, with the martyrdom of Father Brbeuf and Father
Lalemantt, showed what might befall Ville Marie. Maisonneuve, going
again to France to seek help, was almost in despair, ready to recall the
colony.

The crowning episode of glory was found in 1660 in the voluntary
sacrifice and death of Dollard des Ormeaux and his sixteen companions, a
story that can be read beside that of Thermopylae. To save Ville Marie
by going out to meet the Indians, Dollard and his companions, their sins
confessed, their death accepted, fought off behind a rude stockade at
the Long Sault on the Ottawa River the assaults of eight hundred
savages. Only after eight or nine days did their heroic sufferings
(wounded, sleepless, and without water) end in death by extermination.
Dollard's name is also written, as by Francis Parkman, as Daulac. Such
confusion of spelling was natural in a colony where spelling was a rare
art.

Meantime in these troubled years settlement and trade struggled on as
best it could. Ville Marie in 1652 still had only something more than a
hundred inhabitants. Parties of Algonquins, arriving for shelter,
brought furs, as did even the Iroquois in the pauses of open war. But
the place as yet was in no way self-supporting. It was carried on with
the Original subscription of seventy-five thousand livres collected for
the Association of Montreal and with later contributions; Madame de
Bullion, a wealthy lady who withheld her name at the time, supplied
Jeanne Mance with twenty-two thousand francs, and other sums later, to
carry on the work of the hospital.

But indeed it was impossible for the colonists entirely to support
themselves since they were for several years almost prisoners in their
little settlement. We learn that for their first seven or eight years
they all gathered at night for shelter in the fort. Only as the Indian
menace lessened did they venture to build separate houses. It would seem
that by 1651 about half of the settlers had moved into buildings of
their own. Some fifty-five still remained in the hospital and in the
fort, anxious, we are told, to get back to France.

The old maps show a straggling row of these houses along a track among
the trees past Maisonneuve's house and the hospital. This track
presently became St. Paul Street. Farther back were other bush tracks,
at first only eight to twelve feet wide, that led to another little
cluster of houses. All were connected by a road and bridge over the
River St. Pierre to the fort. A little lower down on the shore was a
windmill. As a protection to the north (downstream) a "citadel" was
constructed on a little hill about fifty feet high, where they set up
ramparts with trenches, protected by the wooden stakes, pointed and
interlaced, that are called in French _chevaux de frise_. This citadel,
all shoveled flat later on, stood near Dalhousie Square. There were no
real "fortifications" for another generation.

Thus lived and labored those at Ville Marie till the institution of
direct royal government in New France ended its first existence as a
mission and began the career of Montreal as a colonial outpost of
defense, an inland emporium of trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Dollier de Casson, _Histoire du Montral_, 1672.




CHAPTER IV

A Half Century of Struggle

1663-1713

     _The Priests' Farm. The New Royal Government. The Sulpicians as
     Feudal Seigneurs of Montreal. Growth of the Town. Arrival of De
     Tracy and Defeat of the Iroquois. Feudal Life around Montreal.
     The Outside Seigneurie. Lachine. Longueuil. Frontenac and the
     Indian and English Wars. Treaty of Utrecht._


In the heart of the English residential district of Montreal there is,
or was till yesterday, a beautiful open space of trees and meadows, some
three quarters of a mile across, like an oasis of verdure in a desert of
brick and stone. It was called by the attractive old-time name of the
Priests' Farm. Through the gateways of the tall stone wall which hemmed
a large part of its circuit one caught a glimpse of old gray stone
buildings, of wide orchards, gardens neat as Normandy, and pleasant
avenues of trees where reverend Fathers might walk in quiet meditation.
From this beautiful open space of verdure the surrounding city breathed
in fresh air and health, as the pious order of those who founded,
owned, and occupied it breathed in the inspiration of their high
calling. For this was, and still is, a part of the property of the
Sulpician Order (Les Messieurs de St. Sulpice), whose seminary still
stands in the heart of Montreal. To them was committed, when the
original missionary Association of Montreal came to an end, the
seignorial control of all Montreal Island.

Much of the Priests' Farm is gone now. Its outward glory is departed.
Necessity compelled the commercial sale of ground coveted as real
estate. Apartment houses sprawl upon its higher slopes and cover the
"sites" that once were meadows framed in old willow trees. Its bygone
silence is lost in the traffic of new streets and driveways that pierce
its very heart. Commodious villas rise, neat with new grass and nodding
tulips, to blend a strange novelty with what still remains antique.
Their beauty is all too new--the rich inheritance of broken fortune.

Yet not all is gone. There still stands at the foot of the slope in the
angle of Sherbrooke Street and the Cte des Neiges Road, the widespread
school and dormitory buildings of the famous Grand Sminaire, the
Collge de Montral, where generations of Canadian youth have had their
training. One sees through the main gate two old stone towers, built in
1694, that stand well inside the present wall. These are said to be
among the oldest, if not actually the very oldest, surviving buildings
in Montreal. They are in reality two adjacent towers remaining out of
the four that marked the corners of the great wall that surrounded the
original building that stood here. This was the fort, a sort of outlying
protection for Ville Marie de Montreal, called Le Fort des Messieurs.
Inside stood a stone chteau built out of his own personal fortune by a
priest of St. Sulpice. The towers were for protection but were used also
as schoolrooms where the children of the converted Indians were taught
by the saintly Marguerite Bourgeoys, who was attached as an externe to
the Sisters of the Congregation of Troyes and whose name is second only
to that of Jeanne Mance in the record of good works at Ville Marie.

Higher up the slope of the Priests' Farm stands the more modern building
of the Seminary of Philosophy, the training college of the priests.
About it are still many of the old trees, the quiet walks, the gardens,
and the long pond of years gone by. Yet midway between the Seminary of
Philosophy and the College of Montreal below, on land sold to save them,
the handsome premises of the Badminton Club mock with the merriment of
battledore and shuttlecock antiquity on the right and philosophy on the
left. But for the land that is left the title deeds are still the grant
in the name of Louis XIV to the Messieurs de St. Sulpice, whose history
at the period we now reach becomes the history of Montreal itself.

We cannot, however, understand the position of the Sulpician Order and
their control of the town and land of Montreal without explaining the
general change now made in the administration of the whole colony of New
France. The government was dissatisfied with the slow progress made by
the One Hundred Associates. The company was wound up and replaced by
government under the Crown. There was henceforth at Quebec a Governor
General of New France, a Superior (presently a bishop),[9] and a Council
appointed for life, subject to the King's continued pleasure. With these
there was a new official, the Intendant, who acted as representing the
King's "business interest," his steward, so to speak. In case of
conflict these authorities must wrangle it out--and did. There was also
created a new "Company of the West Indies" to manage all North American
colonial trade, but it proved ineffective and was terminated in ten
years.

Thus the government of New France was henceforth carried on under
peculiar conditions. During the whole winter there came no word--there
could be none--from France. There was no such thing as the overland
mail, which in later days reached British Canada from the Atlantic
colonies and after that from the United States. "When the river
freezes," said the great Frontenac, "I am King." This meant for a strong
man a sort of sovereignty, for a weak man confusion. A further
consequence of this was the peculiar situation of Montreal under the
superior authority of the Governor General of New France. It is true
that a royal decree of 1647 had associated with the Governor of New
France a Governor of Montreal along with a Superior at Quebec as the
Supreme Council of Police, Commerce, and War. But as the Governor of
Montreal was normally absent from Quebec and the Superior, by reason of
his duties, frequently so, this made the situation worse instead of
better. On the other hand the grant to the Governor of Montreal, by this
same decree, of 10,000 livres a year and free transport (yearly from
France) of 30 tons of freight, with the obligation to maintain a
garrison of 30 men, helped to make his position financially independent
of Quebec, where the Governor General received 25,000 livres with 70
tons of free transport.

This position became more and more anomalous as between two centers,
each of which overtopped all other settlements, one being the center of
government but the other rapidly becoming the chief emporium of trade
and a rival center of population. The friction between the two
authorities began with Maisonneuve's first winter in Quebec before Ville
Marie de Montreal was even founded. It never ceased till the conquest.

The population of New France was still, in 1663, only about 2500. Royal
government brought in immigrants, and the population in the twelve
years, 1663-75, more than trebled (2500-7800). Among the immigrants
Normans predominated (about one fifth); those from Poitou were nearly as
many; those from Paris about one seventh, Brittany much fewer, the rest
scattered. There is no lack of statistics. Little colonies love to count
themselves as youth loves a mirror. A census of 1667 showed the French
population of New France as 4312; Quebec and the settlements hard by,
1011; Beauport, 123; and Cte de Lauson (south shore), 113. At Three
Rivers the settlement that grew up to meet the fur trade from the
interior had 666 people. Montreal had 766. Beyond these was nothing. The
settlements clung for their life to the river. Yet around these central
points agriculture was struggling into existence. There were 11,448
arpents (9000 acres) of grainland, 3000 cattle, and 85 sheep--counted,
apparently, to the last one.

At Montreal settlement had been slow and precarious. The population was
estimated to have reached 525 in 1665; 766 in 1667, as just said; and
830 in 1672. An old plan of Montreal in 1672 shows a considerable
addition of houses. There is a windmill beside the river a little way
upstream from the fort. The original bush track parallel to the bank now
appears as a regular road that was later to become St. Paul Street.
There are houses on both sides, and in this same year Notre Dame Street
was laid out by survey.

       *       *       *       *       *

Royal government, after a brief period of rule by the incompetent M. de
Mzy, sent out as Governor, began in earnest with the arrival of M. de
Courcelles and with him, as the first Intendant of New France, the
famous Jean Talon, the first in the long line of the commercial
statesmen of Canada. Although only six years in the colony (1665-71),
"his power of organization and creative genius," says Sir Charles Lucas,
"left a lasting mark on New France." With them, and set over both them,
arrived a veteran general of France, the Marquis de Tracy, whose
commission of 1663 made him lieutenant general of South and North
America (_L'Amrique Mridionale et Septentrionale_).

It was known that De Tracy's business was to exterminate the Iroquois.
From the ships that reached Quebec just before him there landed four
companies of the famous Carignan-Salires Regiment. Others followed
later in the summer, in all about twelve hundred men. These were
veterans of the war of Louis XIV against the Turks. Some of them
afterward returned to France to be reconstructed and to remain till the
Revolution as the Regiment of Lorraine. But most of them remained in
Canada after their service in the Indian war and settled on land grants
along the Richelieu near Montreal. Many families of today trace from
them their descent.

There came also with M. de Tracy to Quebec a glittering troop of young
nobles and of gentlemen of fortune attracted by adventurous prospect of
the approaching campaign in the wilderness. Their coming made a great
stir, and the arrival of the soldiers sent a thrill of joy through the
settlements. For by this time the audacity of the Iroquois was
surpassing all bounds. On April 25 of this very year (1665) they had
made a surprise attack at Montreal on the Hotel Dieu itself. Before
they could be beaten off they had killed one guard, wounded another, and
dragged off two unhappy victims for death in the flames. Early in the
same summer they had succeeded in capturing, while he was hunting on Ile
Ste. Thrse, one of the most notable of all the Montreal colonists,
Charles le Moyne. This man was to give eleven sons to the service of New
France. The eldest of them, Charles le Moyne, was Governor of Montreal
(1724-33) and Administrating Governor of Canada (1725-26). He was
created Baron de Longueuil by the French Crown (1700), a title
recognized by the British government after the conquest and still
existing. His son Charles, the second baron, held the same offices:
Montreal, 1749-55, and Canada, 1752-55. Another son of the founder of
the family was Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville (1661-1706), a sailor
from the age of fourteen, who made history by fighting the English on
Hudson Bay, both overland and by sea. With his brother, the Sieur de
Bienville, he founded Louisiana. The family seigneury of Longueuil,
across the river from Montreal, once seemed almost to rival the island
seigneury itself. Fate passed it by, a suburb with little left but the
pride of history.

This first Charles le Moyne, undaunted by his capture, carried it off
with a high hand, threatened the Indians with the coming of the French
soldiers to burn their lodges. The Indians were so impressed that they
brought Charles le Moyne down to Quebec and gave him up unharmed, as a
sort of token for peace. But the situation had gone too far. The French
knew that they must make war first.

Meantime in Montreal the rejoicing over the new sense of security was
tempered by the news that Maisonneuve was to go. The Marquis de Tracy,
with that peculiar politeness known only to a Marquis, wrote that "he
had permitted M. de Maisonneuve, Governor of Montreal, to make a journey
to France for his own private affairs." A successor was appointed for
his absence, and "this as long as we shall judge convenient." Marguerite
Bourgeoys, the famous teaching sister already mentioned, wrote that
Maisonneuve "took the order as the will of God and went over to France
not to make complaint of the bad treatment he had received but to live
simply and humbly an unrecognized man."

This intent he carried out. He reached France in 1665, twenty-three
years after his first coming to Canada. For his remaining eleven years
he occupied the second floor of an apartment in the Fosse St. Victor,
where a single servant ministered to his old age. He died on September
9, 1676. This temporary oblivion of his name and fame was to be redeemed
later on, after his contemporaries had gone long since to graves mostly
forgotten. The monument of Maisonneuve in the center of Place d'Armes at
Montreal is beautiful as art and sculpture, but still more beautiful in
what it commemorates.

       *       *       *       *       *

After the arrival of the New French troops under the Marquis de Tracy,
the departure of Maisonneuve, and the opening of the campaign against
the Iroquois, New France entered on the half century of conflict, now
with the Iroquois, now with the English, now with both, which only ended
with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. During this period Montreal gradually
lost its aspect as a mission settlement. In a certain sense the good
work was carried on and has lasted until today, as witness the Seminary
of St. Sulpice still existing in the heart of the city, and the work of
Marguerite Bourgeoys still carried on in the vast and beautiful building
of the Sisters of the Congregation, built in 1908 on Sherbrooke Street
West. But from this time on Montreal appears less as a mission than as
the organizing center of war, of western exploration, and more and more
the emporium of the fur trade, the economic basis of the life of the
colony. There are few national annals that so stir with danger,
adventure, and heroism as this half century of history; few if any that
offer so wide, so picturesque a scene of conflict in the wilderness of
forest and lake and stream. This history has been turned into a part of
the world's literature by the genius and industry of Francis Parkman.
His detailed pages quicken the past into new life. In them we seem to
hear the whisper of the forests and the murmur of the waters and to see
the morning mists of the lakes rising to reveal the war canoes of the
savages. From such volumes alone can we get a real picture of our
Canadian past. But these annals are rather those of Canada as a whole
than of the city of Montreal by itself. For our present purpose we can
venture nothing beyond a summary.

As the most striking part of this moving panorama, as the lurid colors
of the foreground, we see the march of war. The fierce war with the
Indians (1657-66) only dies down to be renewed as a struggle against
England and its Iroquois allies (1683-1701). War itself brings extension
of territory by the building of forts and the wider hold on the country.
In the pauses of war in the twenty years of something like Indian peace
(1666-83) trade multiplies, especially the trade in furs which spreads
farther and farther into the interior. The _coureur des bois_ is added
to the missionary priest. With this goes exploration, wider and wider,
in part as an adjunct of trade or mission, in part as an end in itself,
by an instinct as old as humanity and as young as everybody's childhood.
The period ends with the desperate struggle that opened the eighteenth
century, Queen Anne's War, and that ended in the disastrous Treaty of
Utrecht, foreshadowing the fall of France in America.

War came first. A chain of forts was at once built to protect New France
and to facilitate attack on the Indian country; a fort was built at
Sorel at the mouth of the Richelieu, one higher up at the rapids at
Chambly, one at Ste. Thrse, and one at the north end, the foot, of
Lake Champlain. The French struck at once, in the heart of that very
winter. The expedition under Courcelles passed up Lakes Champlain and
George and so to the valley of the Hudson and the Mohawk, ground of
which every mile is now connected with the memories and the monuments of
war. But this first war "failed to connect." The French found to their
surprise that the Hudson Valley had now become English. The Dutch, after
their war with England, had ceded New Netherland. In its place was now
New York, a proprietary colony under Charles II's exiled brother, James,
Duke of York.

The French, not being at war with England, wisely retired and went home.
But the next autumn they came again under De Tracy himself, this time to
the Mohawk Valley, and laid it waste with fire and sword, burning the
lodges and destroying the winter corn. The Mohawks fled. They had
learned a lesson. New France was free from them for nearly twenty years.

The interval of relative peace and security which now ensued and lasted
for nearly twenty years gave to Montreal its first real opportunity for
growth, expansion, and trade. Immigrants now began to come in larger
numbers and to include many women, either married or looking for
marriage, so that the number of established households grew apace. The
vertebrate structure of the old town can still be seen in the financial
district of the present Montreal. The original surveyor selected the
highest land which lay in the area between the St. Lawrence and St.
Martin Brook (Craig Street) and which was already built over here and
there. About in the center of this were the grounds and buildings around
the Hotel Dieu, already nearly twenty years old. Just behind these
grounds, that is, farther from the river, was the highest line of
ground, and here at that time a new church, the Parish Church of Notre
Dame, was already being built. Hence a long, straight street, christened
the Rue Notre Dame, formed the basis of the survey by which the town,
after 1672, was laid out into definite streets. The work was done by
Brigne Basset, the first surveyor of the colony, acting under the
direction of the famous Dollier de Casson, the Superior of the
Sulpicians and the first historian of Montreal. This notable man, who
came out to Montreal at the time of De Tracy's expedition of 1666, in
which he served, played a large part in the history of Montreal until
his death in 1701. He represents the type of the soldier-priest that
comes down from the Middle Ages with the Crusades, that appears in
homelier form in the Friar Tuck of Robin Hood, and finds a later
reincarnation in the Confederate general, Bishop Leonidas Polk,[10] who
fell fighting in the American Civil War. Dollier de Casson was a man of
gigantic stature and of a physical strength maintained by strenuous
activity. He had been a captain in the French army under Marshal
Turenne, had become a Sulpician priest, a member and presently the
Superior of the order at Montreal. Many legends run of his vast
strength, his ability to hold up a man seated on each hand or to handle
a couple of Iroquois like Indian clubs. He became the historian of
Montreal, extolling all brave deeds but his own.

The Rue Notre Dame was drawn past the church, parallel to the river,
from end to end of the settlement. The direction, as already explained,
splits the cardinal points of the compass, being much nearer to a north
and south line than to an east and west. Then and long after Notre Dame
Street and the ones made parallel to it were spoken of as running north
and south, nowadays as east and west. At its upstream end (south) Notre
Dame ended in the cross street of St. Pierre, laid out in 1673 and still
there; at the north end was Bonsecours Street. Just beyond Bonsecours
the town ended at the Citadel Hill already mentioned, for which a
fortified windmill had been built in 1656. The Notre Dame Church, the
Sminaire, and the Place d'Armes were all laid out as now existing, but
the buildings have since been replaced. The rough road already in use
since 1645 on the riverside of the Hotel Dieu now became St. Paul
Street, not lying quite in a straight line but beginning at a point on
the little River St. Pierre (Lachine Canal) farther upstream than
Maisonneuve's fort, running at first straightaway from the little river,
and then north, shifting its course a little as it went and edging
always nearer to high ground, so that Notre Dame Street, when drawn out
to its north end, is just about to meet St. Paul when it stops. Somebody
once wrote some clever verses to show that the original street of every
great city was once a cow track and still carries curves in its course
where the original cow stepped aside to graze. The deviating course of
St. Paul Street still shows where the cows of Ville Marie once wandered
along the old track or paused a moment to graze beside the Board of
Trade. The little paths among the settlers' houses became the earliest
cross streets, the oldest, older than the survey, St. Joseph (later St.
Sulpice), passing through the center, with the Hotel Dieu on one side
and the new church on the other. Maisonneuve's house, afterward the
first seminary, has already been described. The streets St. Pierre and
Bonsecours, as said, were at the ends of the town. Between St. Joseph
and St. Pierre was St. Franois Xavier (1678), between St. Joseph and
Bonsecours were St. Gabriel (1680) and, north of it, St. Charles (1677).

In 1678 there was laid out another street quite close to Notre Dame,
running parallel to Notre Dame from St. Gabriel to St. Pierre, so that
it bounded the Place d'Armes on the inland side. This street, Rue St.
Jacques, of small significance in its early days, was to come into its
own in the British Regime as the main street of Montreal and later to
rise to all the pomp and majesty of high finance as St. James Street.
Our later city has drawn away, as cities do, from its moneyed quarter.
It works there by day, but it prays still down below on Notre Dame
Street, and lives, sleeps, and makes merry upslope round Hochelaga, and
its last sleep is farther away still, with the mountain hollow as its
pillow. Here lies, in this old plan of 1673, the venerable origin of
some of the familiar jokes upon our city: of the one about the Scotchman
and the Irishman who both took off their hats in our Place d'Armes, the
one to the Notre Dame Church and the other to the Bank of Montreal; and
the one about the old French-Canadian woman from a country parish, come
up to worship in La Grande Paroisse, and was found kneeling beside the
teller's wicket in the bank.

Not only was the city laid out in streets along which a great many new
houses appear between 1673 and 1687, but it was now fortified all round.
A royal engineer, Daniel du Luth, commissioned under the governorship of
M. de Callires, encompassed the town with strong palisades thirteen
feet high, with curtains and bastions. The original fort on the St.
Peter River was now demolished, and the St. Lawrence protected the town
on the south. A canal let the water from St. Martin Brook and the St.
Pierre River down to a flour mill.

During this period the government of Montreal was a very simple matter.
In military matters the command lay with the Governor as head of the
garrison, with power, definitely expressed in a royal ordinance of 1669,
to call out as militia all the able-bodied men of the town and the
outlying settlements. Indeed necessity called them; it was do or die.
For the very simple functions of civil government the Seminary of St.
Sulpice named the officers. There was a civil judge for the whole
island and a _procureur fiscal_, or crown attorney, who brought cases to
him as a jackal to a lion. A recorder (_greffier_) kept the record.
There was in addition, for the daily care of the town, a sort of town
manager, called a syndic, who was chosen for a three-year term in a
general meeting of the townsmen. He represented the only touch of
democracy, as yet pure and primitive, for he got no pay. Even at that,
the office of syndic proved in a colonial environment too democratic for
the royal government at home, and its powers were reduced presently to
practically nothing.

The administration of property, and especially of property in land, was
much more interesting. This too is not only as a matter of history but
of current concern. For it may well be that our community settlement of
the future may borrow a few pages from this old feudal record. The
occupation of the land in Montreal and in all the country round rested
on the old feudal system of seignorial tenure, which lasted unchanged
till the British conquest, continued with modifications till its
abolition in 1854, even then left certain traces in land taxes, etc.,
not finally obliterated till 1940. This system, like everything else,
worked admirably in its proper place. It would have been as needless as
unpopular in the peaceful pioneer settlement of Ontario, household by
household and farm by farm, or in the vast homestead settlement of men
and machinery in the West, with neither man nor forest to fight. But in
old French Canada, a forest country with savages in the woods, the
feudal system came into its own as at its first establishment in the
devastated France that was remade out of the wreck of the Roman Empire.
As in old France, a thousand years before, each seigneurie in New France
became, as it were, a point of strength, a redoubt in the wilderness.
With its houses of stone, its enclosed farm buildings, its protecting
walls, its forge, its mill, it combined the community of a little
village with the security of a fort.

The earliest concessions of land in and close to Ville Marie were made
by Maisonneuve himself. But the extension and order of the feudal regime
show the master hand of Talon. The system was organized as follows. The
Sulpician Order (Les Messieurs du Sminaire de St. Sulpice) were the
feudal lords of the Seigneurie of the island of Montreal as they were
later of various holdings elsewhere. Their holdings by the end of the
French Regime amounted to a quarter of a million arpents (200,000
acres). In this capacity as feudal seigneurs they granted in the town
itself plots for building and land for gardens and orchards. Each holder
of such a plot paid ten sous, ten cents, a year. The present city taxes
on many of these lots would be about fifty thousand times as much; it
seems almost worth being scalped for. Outside the town the Seigneurie
granted larger pieces of land, thirty to forty arpents, to be cleaned
and cultivated, with an annual tax of half a cent an acre. These little
grants were held _en roture_, simple direct tenancy under the seignorial
lords. A higher stage of holding was seen in grants of land on Montreal
Island, in the quality of subfiefs, _arrire-fiefs_, the feudal tenant
here becoming the "boss" of smaller people settled on his fief. The
concessions were made without any purchase price, but the tenant was
under obligation to clear land and settle people on it. He must pay also
half a cent a year per acre as his feudal tax and as a mark of homage
must give to the seminary every year a bushel of wheat and two fowl for
every hundred acres.

More serious taxes, called _lods et ventes_, were levied on any sale of
feudal property, though not on its inheritance, amounting to one twelfth
of the price received. From the modern point of view such a tax would
cripple all movement of real estate. But that was exactly what it was
meant to do. In any case it appears that if the transaction was approved
the tax was omitted. That distinguished scholar, M. Camille Bertrand,
the archivist, tells us that as a consequence of this there are a great
many French-Canadian families still living "on the land of the first
ancestor." Higher up still were larger grants of land on Montreal Island
which became, by joint consent, _fiefs nobles_, that is to say, made
practically independent of the feudal control of the Messieurs de St.
Sulpice, though still rendering homage. The advantage to the seminary
and to Montreal was that the new seignorial houses, well built and well
defended, acted as a protection to the whole island and were so located
and spaced as to do so. The first of these grants was one made on
December 20, 1665, to Philippe-Vincent de Hausmenil, of land beyond the
St. Pierre River to the southeast. With the next one is associated the
name Lachine, which echoes down our Canadian history as undying as the
sound of its many waters. This was 420 acres granted on January 11,
1669, to the famous explorer of the Mississippi, Robert Cavelier de la
Salle. As is well known, La Salle's Seigneurie acquired the name of La
Chine by way of a joke (on exploration), one of those cherished by fond
repetition, too good to lose. Later history mistook it for earnest. It
passed from a nickname to a legality, and in the older English
translations of French books, such as La Rochefoucauld's _Travels in
North America_, it appears quaintly enough as "China." But the original
Seigneurie, which was called the Fief St. Sulpice, was not on the site
of our present Lachine. It lay on Montreal island above the rapids,
close to the present Canadian Pacific Railway Bridge. The remains of an
old mill still mark the spot. Part of the town of La Salle is built on
what was the site of the Lachine, on which was to fall the massacre of
1689. The rapids are two miles below; the present Lachine, at the
junction of canal and river, is two miles above. Another three hundred
acres, granted in 1671 to Zachary du Puys, the major of the garrison,
correspond to the present Verdun.

Beyond these the chain of semi-independent holdings (_fiefs nobles_)
extended over Montreal Island. At the lower end of the island was (1671)
the Fief of Picotte de Bellestre, which is represented by our Pointe aux
Trembles. Two others were on the "Back River" (Rivire des Prairies).
But the upper end of the island was the real bulwark against the
descending war parties. Most notable of all, perhaps, was the Fief of
Boisbriant, on the Lake of the Two Mountains, more fully discussed in a
later chapter. Near by and at the extreme upper end at the conflux of
the rivers, at the very point of danger, was the Fief of Bellevue, our
Ste. Anne de Bellevue. History records its name in Indian ravages and
near-by massacres. Its chapel was long the outpost of prayer in the
wilderness. Tom Moore's ear was later on to catch its faintly tolling
evening chimes warning the rowers of the falling night. Today all around
and beside Ste. Anne's breathes the soft atmosphere of the orchards,
meadows, and gardens of the Macdonald Agricultural College, where the
gentle voices of the female classes of teachers in training echo back
the murmurs of the river.

       *       *       *       *       *

Even more imposing in location and in history are the great outside
seigneuries granted by the Crown, independent of Montreal but forming a
part of the same general scheme of regional colonization. The chief ones
are those in Longueuil, the seigneury of the celebrated family of Le
Moyne already mentioned. With it are the historic seigneuries of
Boucherville, Varennes, and Verchres on the south shore of the St.
Lawrence; Chambly and Sorel on the Richelieu; and Chteauguay above
Lachine, all names famous in our history. Others later extended inland.

We can realize how admirably this seignorial system could work for the
mobilization of the infant colony in time of war and a guarantee of
ample sustenance in peace. The only difficulty was to keep the settlers,
especially the younger men, on their allotted holdings. The temptation
of life in the woods, the profits of the illicit fur trade, carried on
without license or permission, were too much for them. These wandering
coureurs des bois became a standing perplexity of New France. Even the
penalty of death for a second offense, as authorized by King Louis XIV
and announced by Frontenac, mattered little to men who didn't propose to
be caught for a first.

But during this period the town shows not merely an increase of
population but a change in its character. Here begin to appear the arts
and professions of peace. The first Montreal notary seems to have
hatched out from the scriveners (_tabellions_), the recorders, and the
secretaries of the seigneurs. The mass of the people in the colony being
entirely unable to read and write, and there being no printing press in
Montreal till Benjamin Franklin brought one in 1776, the ability to
write things down for other people became of itself a sort of learned
profession. The medical profession was likewise born from the casual
chirurgeons (surgeons), whose task of necessity follows the ravages of
war, and some of whom now find a permanent place as doctors, intermixed,
we are told, with quacks. Painting and sculpture are represented by a
few odd people who had brought their talent and its preoccupation with
them from France, a pursuit at least free from all taint of commercial
profit. History, the muse for which a wilderness is paradise enough,
never fails. One thinks of Lescarbot in Acadia and Dollier de Casson in
Montreal.

Not only the expansion of the fur trade but the expansion of exploration
itself centered upon Montreal in this interval of peace and even during
the war period that followed. From Montreal went out the expeditions
(1673) of Joliet and Marquette, discoverers of the upper Mississippi; of
Father Hennepin, who reached the Falls of St. Anthony; of Greysolon du
Lhut, who himself lived many years in Montreal, the site of his house
beside the Place d'Armes now marked with a tablet. Most notable of all
is the expedition of La Salle (1670-80) from his seigneury at Lachine in
that search for the Western Sea that gave it its nickname and led to his
discoveries on the Mississippi. All this, however, belongs to the
general history of North America rather than to the annals of Montreal.

Such was the situation and such the growth of New France during the
period, all too short, before the renewal of Indian war. M. de Tracy and
M. de Courcelles and Talon the Intendant were all back in France in
1671. In their stead ruled as Governor (1672-82) Louis de Buade, Comte
de Frontenac, commonly regarded as the most impressive figure in the
history of French Canada. Under Frontenac as Governor of Montreal, and
later of Canada, was his able lieutenant, Louis Hector de Callires,
whose regime witnessed the progress described above. But we are now to
turn again from the annals of peace to those of war.

Frontenac was a truly great man, born to rule, aggressive and
overbearing, looking and dressing the part. The savages knew him by
instinct; they came to heel like whipped dogs. So great a historian as
Sir Charles Lucas has defamed Frontenac's memory by speaking of "his
barbarous methods." "At Montreal itself by his orders," he writes, "the
French compelled wavering Indians to burn Iroquois prisoners to death."
This is not true. They permitted their allied Indians, on at least two
occasions, the hideous treat of burning Iroquois. We may take here the
testimony of the young officer, the Baron la Hontan.[11] He tells us
that Frontenac sent word to the Iroquois that they must stop burning
Frenchmen alive or he would burn their people if he got them. The
savages disregarded the warning. Frontenac received two Indian prisoners
at Quebec. He gave them to his own Indians to burn, as one throws a bone
to dogs. The ladies of his little court protested: "Monsieur de
Frontenac, you cannot do this." Frontenac could and did. The Indians
went to the flames, one singing, one collapsed with fear. Some people
might judge it among the best things Frontenac did. It is said also that
four Indians were burned in Montreal in 1696 by whites and Indians, with
six hours of cruel tortures. But these retaliations did more to check
Indian cruelty than a century of preaching. This is the only way to meet
the barbarity of a sunken nation. We know that now.

Frontenac understood Indian war. The time to stop it was before it
started. So he at once built Fort Frontenac at Cataraqui at the lower
end of Lake Ontario, our present Kingston. This covered Montreal and put
fear into the hearts of the Senecas, at the inside end of the Iroquois
chain. Frontenac did great things for New France, encouraged the fur
trade and restrained the unlicensed trade of the coureurs des bois. It
has been often claimed that he took a toll out of trade for himself to
help repair his own damaged estate; if so, it was part of the morality
of the time, a system of baksheesh, known long after in Egypt and Turkey
and not quite lost anywhere. Frontenac was like Admiral "Jacky" Fisher
of our own day, he thought there was nothing like "favoritism," meaning
the power to push a good man ahead, especially if he is your friend.
Hence he made enemies, and particularly with the Jesuits, since there is
no room for two despotic authorities at a time. Yet by an odd
contradiction of character Frontenac planned a sort of representative
government in Canada, something like the meeting of estates in France
and the old parliaments (courts of registration) of the French
provinces. This may have been sheer conservatism and not a democratic
leaning, the desire to put the old country into the new. Extremes meet.
We see such things again and again in the history of Canada, the
"seigneurs" of New France, the "titles" (never given) of Simcoe's Upper
Canada, even our royal societies and our Usher of the Black Rod and
such. It's a sort of nostalgia, a longing for things of the old home.

Frontenac's parliament scheme of "estates" fell through. King Louis XIV
struck it out. Frontenac was only King when the ice was there. With the
spring ships, the rule of Louis XIV came back. Nor was ever any king
more industrious or more watchful. He read all the dispatches from
Canada. He made little notes on the side: "The King thinks this. . . .
The King wishes that." And what he wished was done. Our English history,
as full of the odor of prejudice as an old cask, presents us a Louis XIV
as a butterfly among ladies all in silk, slowly turning to a crooked old
man among ladies all in wigs. In reality Louis was industry itself,
sagacity. He knew men like Colbert and Frontenac when he saw them. But
with peace established, complaints from New France reached the King
right and left, and Frontenac had to go.

But Frontenac's successors were men of no account, and the Indians knew
it. The Iroquois had been playing back and forward with the French and
English. Some had sided with the French, turned Christian, and became in
time the "praying Indians," those who founded our Caughnawaga beside
Lachine. But now they all joined in a great council (1684) at Albany and
allied themselves with the English. This time there was no Frontenac to
oppose them, nor even Fort Frontenac to cover Montreal, for it had been
abandoned. The Governor, De La Barre, moved soldiers and Indians to
occupy it again; illness broke up his camp; he moved across Lake
Ontario, threatened the Indians, like a schoolmaster who calls angrily
for order, and then retired to France, glad to be gone. After him came
Denonville, who took an army into the Seneca country, burning crops and
wigwams. But this was like knocking down a wasps' nest. They all came
back.

With that the Iroquois prepared to wipe out French Canada. All the old
danger was back again. In the middle summer of 1689 the first wave broke
on the settlements around Montreal. Montreal itself they could not now
so easily reach. For the plan of fortification carried out under a
French royal engineer had put a wall of palisades and ditches all around
it. But the outlying places were open. In the dead of night of August 5,
1689, amid the roar and glare of a Canadian summer thunderstorm, the
Iroquois fell upon the settlement at Lachine. The massacre that followed
is one of the terrible pages of our annals. Eighty soldiers, there on
guard as an outpost, and with them two hundred inhabitants, men, women,
and children, were butchered without mercy on the spot. One hundred and
twenty were carried off, some to be burned forthwith at the stake,
others to die by torture in the Indian lodges.

Frontenac came back to Canada that autumn, and a people wild with
distress turned to him with joy as to salvation. He brought it. He chose
strong men. He had with him De Callires, who was made Governor of
Montreal, and such men as Greysolon du Lhut and Nicolas Perrot, coureurs
des bois who knew the Indian country. By New Year's he was among the
Mohawks, giving them back their own. He rebuilt Fort Frontenac and
carried war into the Indian country above. But the French power had sunk
so low, the Indian danger had spread so wide, that not even Frontenac
could at once restore safety. To protect one place was to invite an
attack upon another. Witness, for instance, as a part of the history of
the Montreal vicinity, the sudden attack on the fort at the seigneurie
of Verchres, twenty miles down the river from Montreal on the south
shore, in that meadowland which Champlain had so much admired. The
garrison had been drawn off along with the seigneur himself, needed
elsewhere. The defense of the fort by the girl Madeleine de Verchres,
in command of three and a half men (one man was over eighty), is part of
our schoolbook history. The motor tourist and the passenger on the
passing ocean liner still gaze with awe and inspiration at this
consecrated spot.

Hence it took Frontenac four years to beat the Indians down. But he did
it. By 1696 he was able to set out from Montreal up the St. Lawrence
with an army of two thousand men. They went by Fort Frontenac and Lake
Ontario and laid waste all the country of the Onondagas and the Oneidas.
When peace with England came, the Peace of Ryswick, in 1698, the Five
Nations were glad enough to be, as our present slang has it, "included
out" from both sides as neutral. Frontenac's work was done. He died at
Quebec on November 28, 1698. There he lies buried as Champlain before
him and Montcalm to come.

But Frontenac, before he died, had broken the power of the Iroquois
forever as far as wiping out French Canada was concerned. Henceforth
they were just the devil allies of the British, the French having their
own attendant devils too but not so good.

When Callires succeeded Frontenac as Governor of Canada a great peace
was made between the French and the Iroquois (1701). When war broke out
again with England, the War of the Spanish Succession, North America had
to pay the price of ravage for the question as to which prince should
inherit the throne of Spain.

But this time, fortunately for Montreal, the tide of war turned to the
Atlantic coast and the St. Lawrence. The great military episodes of the
war belong to the general history of Canada rather than to the present
survey. The war ended with the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave to Great
Britain the possession of Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, but
left to France its mainland Acadia (New Brunswick), its islands, Cape
Breton and St. John, together with New France and the vast inland empire
which it might include.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Laval, 1659, Bishop of Patra in Partibus.

[10] _Leonidas Polk, Bishop and General_, W. M. Polk, 1915.

[11] _Lahontan's Journal_, Ed., R. G. Thwaites, 1901.




CHAPTER V

The Old French Regime in Montreal

1713-63

     _The Chteau de Ramezay. Montreal at the Time of Charlevoix's
     Visit. The New Fortifications of 1723. Life in Montreal. Social
     Distinctions and Classes. Slavery Under the Old Regime. Peter
     Kalm's Visit of 1749. His Happy Picture of French Canada and
     Montreal. The Lot of the People as Compared with Later Times._


The Chteau de Ramezay, once the home of M. de Ramezay, a Governor of
Montreal under the old French Regime, and later the residence of various
British Governors, stands by itself in the lower part of the town in a
beautiful isolation that time and courtesy have spared. It is at the
faraway end of old Montreal, so far from the hotels and shops of the
modern city that it seems to be, as it is, a part of another world. It
is a fine old stone building, low and long, untouched, it would appear,
by the hand of time, and looking just as it did two centuries ago. Its
iron palings guard it; its cannon are still there in case the English
come. Its row of poplar trees along the palings, diminished and
vanishing, still rustic and whisper of Normandy. All around it and
behind it is the open sky, a landscape effect impossible for modern
cities. Broad, open spaces surround it as if the newer buildings
instinctively drew back, respecting history and a lost cause. It is
quite a distance across from the chteau to the great buildings of the
City Hall and the Law Courts, or, shall we say, of the Htel de Ville
and the Palais de Justice, buildings where taxpayers anguish and murder
argues for its life. Their voices must not come across to the chteau.
More space still is added by the open Jacques Cartier Square on this the
hither side of the chteau, with the Nelson Monument by which, in a sort
of paradox of history, Jacques Cartier seems congratulating Lord Nelson
on Trafalgar.

This is the only site remaining where the remnants of old French
Montreal have the opportunity of such isolation. All the rest of its
past is intricately mixed with what is new. Maisonneuve still stands on
his monument in Place d'Armes, looking across at Notre Dame Church and
telling it what he thinks of the Iroquois. But the buildings of two
trust companies look down upon them both. The streetcars make of the
Place d'Armes a crowded turning point, and from a near-by street the
skyscraper tower building of the Royal Bank looks down on Maisonneuve
from such a height that it can hardly see him. Nor does it need to;
under Maisonneuve's management the site of the bank was only worth ten
cents a year. They do better now.

Look through the palings of the chteau and you will see from the
signboard that it is preserved thus as a museum. Anyone entering, on
some empty, silent day, its spacious old wainscoted rooms finds them
just as they were when filled two centuries ago with the soldiers and
ladies of New France. It seems as if a whisper could bring them back, as
if the creak of one of the old boards beneath their feet might make them
turn to look. It is seldom that one gets a chance to bring the past so
close. We always think of the people of past centuries in an unnatural
way, stuffed and dressed and artificial, rendered romantic by the very
thing we called romance. Here in these unaltered rooms they turn to
people like ourselves, merry or sad, and, to those of us grown old, all
young. One stands here in this old chteau, the prize of conquest, to
muse, perhaps, upon its vanity. What right has it to be, this seizure of
sovereignty, this forced allegiance by the power of arms? French Canada,
we are always assured, is now a part of the British Empire; a "loyal"
part was once the Victorian word, though we never use it now. One
wonders. Can it be that there are no regrets, no backward glances? At
least the reflection of what was here and what is should give to us in
Canada a renewed understanding of our French compatriots and a new
forbearance if ever needed.

The chteau was built by Claude de Ramezay, a Governor of Montreal
(1703-24). He came to Canada as a young officer in 1685. He served in
Iberville's expedition against the English in Hudson Bay and led a
Montreal force in Quebec in 1690 to aid Frontenac in his defense against
Phipps's vessels of war. He married and settled in Canada and built the
chteau in 1705. It is a very common mistake to suppose that the chteau
was the home of the French Governors. Indeed, De Ramezay had expected
the King of France to buy it for this purpose. This was never done, and
in the last years of the Old Regime it became the storehouse of the
French West India Company. In those days the chteau looked across into
the beautiful gardens of the Jesuits. Beside it on the town side,
standing flush along Notre Dame Street, was a heavy old stone building,
the house of the Baron de Bcancourt. This later became the warehouse of
James McGill, founder of the university, and while still standing was
commonly called the Old McGill House. It is all gone now.

Under the English Regime the chteau became Government House and
remained so until Lord Metcalfe's occupancy. It was used also by
Benedict Arnold, though not by Montgomery, at the time of the American
occupation of Montreal during the invasion of Canada. It was the
headquarters of Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues on their mission to
Montreal. After Lord Metcalfe the chteau was turned into offices, then
into law courts, then into a normal school, then into offices again, and
at last, in 1894, found a fitting repose as a museum.

There it sleeps. From such a vantage ground we may well review the old
French Regime which it so well typifies.

It was the good fortune of the town of Montreal to enjoy an unbroken
peace, or what was then regarded as such, from the Treaty of Utrecht
until the final war, the Seven Years' War (1756-63), which ended in the
cession of Canada. It is true that war between England and France broke
out again and that military expeditions were sent against western Indian
tribes, but the town itself enjoyed an undisturbed existence. We enter
here upon a period of peaceful and happy growth, not as idyllic in its
simplicity as its sister colony, the Acadia of _Evangeline_, or as
energetic in its forward movement as the British Montreal of a hundred
years later, but a place of relative comfort, of Old World manners and
courtesy, of conservative custom, and, if not of wealth, at least of no
great poverty. Much that was to be lost in France in the turmoil that
came later was here retained in Canada and Montreal, and much that was
in the Montreal of the Old Regime exists here today as the basis of the
life of our French compatriots. In looking at the old town we are
viewing not the bygone past but a section of the past carried over and
preserved in the present.

       *       *       *       *       *

We are fortunate in having Montreal depicted for us as it was only eight
years after the Peace of Utrecht, in the happy pages of Father
Charlevoix, whose name is for all time connected with the history of
Canada. Pierre Franois Xavier de Charlevoix, who became a Jesuit priest
at the age of sixteen, was sent out while still only twenty-three for
four years as a teacher at Quebec and became henceforth a historian of
New France and of America at large. He visited Montreal in 1708. Later
on he was sent out (1720-22) to make an extensive tour in New France and
the English Atlantic colonies, in the course of which he visited
Montreal again in 1721 and wrote an extended account of it. His
_Histoire et Description Gnrale de la Nouvelle France_ (published in
1744) became and remains a firsthand authority for our history.

Charlevoix, in his first journey (1708), came up the river in
summertime and noted, as did all travelers from Cartier onward, the
beauty and fertility of what one may call the Montreal district--the
country from the head of Lake St. Peter upward--as compared with the
rugged and forbidding north shore from the Gulf to Tadoussac. His second
journey (March 1721) offered the contrast of winter travel in a cariole,
along the ice at the edge of the river and lake. His itinerary as
between Quebec and Montreal gives us a view of the conditions of winter
travel in French Canada, practically unchanged all through the Old
Regime and long after, indeed until the coming of the railway. It runs
as follows: Quebec to Three Rivers (about eighty-three miles), March 4
to March 6, three days; Three Rivers to the mouth of the Richelieu
(about forty-seven miles), less than one day; thence to Montreal (about
forty-nine miles), one day and part of another. The custom of thus
breaking the journey to Montreal With convenient stopovers was usual
both in summer and winter.

Winter travel by land was, of course, vastly superior to land travel in
summer. New France, apart from the military highway from the St.
Lawrence to the Richelieu (Montreal to Chambly), was, till 1733,
roadless--at least in any large sense. It was, indeed, a part of the
obligation of the seigneur and of the habitant to open roads from one
riverside farm to the next. But as every settlement was connected with
every other by water, these sidetracks were of little account. In 1733
the surveyor in chief, M. Lanouiller de Boisclerc, traced and connected
a complete road from Quebec to Montreal, thenceforth a post road. When a
regular mail service was thereupon set up from Quebec to Montreal the
carriers went through without the stopover of the customary traveler.

"Montreal," writes Charlevoix, "has a very pleasing aspect." One notes
at once that Charlevoix calls the place "Montreal," the name "Ville
Marie" having by this time dropped out of ordinary use. Similarly, along
with the official name New France, he uses "Canada" as an alternate, a
usage becoming so general that it appears in official correspondence.
"The beauty of the country," he continues, "and of its prospects,
inspires a certain cheerfulness of which everybody is perfectly
sensible. It is not fortified, only a simple palisade with bastions, in
a very indifferent condition with a sorry redoubt on a small spot which
serves as a sort of outlook and terminates in a gentle declivity, at the
end of which is a small square. This is the place you first find on
entering the city from the direction of Quebec."

The old plans of Montreal (after 1723) show the fortifications as
constructed by De Lry just after Charlevoix's visit, the old palisades
being demolished in 1722. One can recognize this north end of the city,
of which he speaks, by the "windmill" (it was built in 1656) and the
redoubt. The outlets through the wall show the St. Lawrence Gate, one of
the five gates piercing the wall and leading out of the city toward the
suburb of St. Lawrence in the direction we now call north. The main
gateways in the direction up and down the river give us at the upper end
the Porte des Recollets (corner of the present McGill and Notre Dame),
through which Amherst's victorious soldiers entered in 1760, and through
which the defeated American General Hull and his fellow prisoners, 375
in number, were brought in 1812. One notes that one of the two roads
which branch apart on leaving the gate is marked "Chemin de la
Montagne." People who write to the Montreal papers at recurrent
intervals to say that our "Mountain" Street is called after Bishop
Mountain (the first Protestant bishop) will do well to study this map
which was made before the bishop was born. The gate at the same end
nearer the river is the Porte la Chine, recalling again La Salle and his
seigneurie. The other two main gates were the Harbour Gate (Porte du
Port) and the Porte St. Martin on the lower end of the town, leading out
of it toward Quebec. This naturally acquired the name the Quebec Gate.
There were also lesser, or postern, gates.

"The seminary and the parish church," writes Charlevoix, "the convent of
the Recollets, the Jesuits, the Daughters of the Congregation, the
Governor, and most of the officers dwell in the upper town." By this he
means St. James and Notre Dame Street. Of these buildings the Seminary
of St. Sulpice (to which the seminary moved in 1712) is the only one
still standing, though of course the beautiful grounds, reaching all
the way to St. Paul Street, are practically all gone, nothing left but
an embowered garden, so walled in, so lost and forgotten, that most
Montrealers are unaware of its existence. The parish church of Notre
Dame is still there as rebuilt in 1824. A tablet on the corner of Notre
Dame and St. Hlne streets (north of McGill Street) reads: "_Here stood
until 1866 the church and monastery of the Recollet Fathers (1692), in
which the Anglicans from 1764 to 1789, and the Presbyterians from 1791
to 1792, worshipped._" This also, through all the French Regime, had
spacious grounds and gardens.

The establishment of the Jesuits at this date was only a large church
and one small house, but their beautiful gardens occupied the north end
of Notre Dame Street where it met the Rue St. Charles, a space which is
now represented by the Court House, the City Hall, and the Champ de
Mars, with Jacques Cartier Square opposite. Nothing in the present
Jesuit establishment in Montreal (Collge Ste. Marie) and the beautiful
Collge Brbeuf behind the mountain corresponds to the site of this
earlier foundation. The order was suppressed by the Pope in 1772. After
the death of the last surviving Jesuit in Canada, Father Cazot, in 1800,
the estates of the order lapsed to the Crown. The papal ban was lifted
in 1814, but the Jesuits did not return to Canada till 1839, when their
own Montreal premises had been long since turned to other uses.

The Daughters (Sisters) of the Congregation of Notre Dame spoken of by
Charlevoix are now the great teaching order whose schools for girls
extend over North America. They date from Marguerite Bourgeoys (1653)
and the foundation already described. In Charlevoix's time, and long
after, their establishment was at the junction of Notre Dame and St.
Jean Baptiste with spacious grounds adjoining those of the Hotel Dieu on
St. Paul Street below. In 1853 they bought the beautiful country
property of "Monklands," for a brief time previously the residence of
the Governor General of Canada and the scene, as told below, of Lord
Elgin's tribulation at the time of the Montreal riots (1849). From that
they moved into the spacious abode on Sherbrooke Street West, built for
them in 1908. "In the lower town," writes Charlevoix, by which, of
course, he means St. Paul Street, "are the Hotel Dieu, the royal
magazines, and the Place d'Armes." By this Charlevoix does not mean the
Place d'Armes of today. At the time of his visit the old Market Place
was also called the Place d'Armes, as appears on the map of the royal
engineer, M. de Catologne, of 1723. It opened off St. Paul Street on the
riverside between St. Franois Xavier and St. Joseph (St. Sulpice)
streets. "Here also," he says, "is the quarter in which the merchants
for the most part have their trade." These merchants represented,
overwhelmingly, the fur trade, and oddly enough the fur trade, such as
it is, is there still after two hundred years, strung out in dingy but
venerable old wholesale houses surviving on St. Paul Street.

The Hotel Dieu was still in the same location as the original Hotel Dieu
of Jeanne Mance, but the first building had been burned in 1695. There
was still standing Maisonneuve's house, occupied after his departure by
the Sulpicians. It lasted until destroyed in 1852. The (old) Market
Place just mentioned was not only a market but a grim theater of justice
where stood the gallows, the pillory, and the jail. Here executions were
held. Here (in 1752) a criminal guilty of a revolting murder was put to
the terrible death of being broken on a wheel. His body was buried
outside the town, under what is now Guy Street. The spot was marked with
a cross. When Guy Street was made the cross was moved into the grounds
of the Grey Nunnery beside it.

Such relentless "justice" was rare in the colony. As a rule pity
intervened. The Negress who set fire to the town in 1734 was sentenced
to be burned alive; instead, they hanged her and burned her dead. Let it
be recalled that at a date, almost as late as this, in New York Province
a man was burned alive by sentence of law.

Beyond the Market Place again, and across the little Rivire St. Pierre,
there stood the house built by Callires in 1672. Near by was the
General Hospital, a work of piety at large, founded in 1688 by Franois
Charron for the care of the sick and the infirm and for the instruction
of youth.

"There has been for some years a project," says Charlevoix, "for walling
Montreal around. But it will not be an easy matter to bring the
inhabitants to contribute to it." The fortification began next year with
the demolition of the old palisades and works and the construction of a
stone wall all around the city. The walls were eighteen feet high, four
feet thick at the base and three at the top. The gates and sally ports
were protected by bastions. But the opposition of the townspeople toward
paying a contribution of six thousand livres (francs) toward the cost of
fortification was far more reasonable than Charlevoix realized. They
were a generation bred to war and knew all about it. The proposed
fortifications were of a kind to repel a direct attack of savages, the
height of the wall and the projection of the bastions rendering it easy
to guard the gates. But the townspeople were now too numerous and too
well armed to fear Indian attack. Against attack by artillery the walls
were useless. The event was to prove it forty years later.

It was just after Charlevoix's visit (June 1721) that a great fire swept
the lower part of the town. Accidentally started in the Hotel Dieu, it
not only destroyed that edifice itself but with it about 126 houses, or
half the town. In a sense the fire, as is so often the case in rising
cities, was a blessing in disguise. It encouraged the building of stone
houses, though Montreal remained mostly of wood till the conquest; it
led to attempts to straighten and widen streets and to adopt some
rudimentary fire protection. The inadequacy of this was shown, however,
when a second fire, that of 1734, destroyed the newly built Hotel Dieu
and with it a large part of the lower town, forty-six houses. The Hotel
Dieu built at the first settlement (1644) had been burned down, it will
be recalled, in 1695, so that the building now erected and occupied
until 1861 was the fourth occupied. The Hotel Dieu of today, on Pine
Avenue, replaced it in 1861.

The fire of 1734 was started, as said above, as an act of vengeance by a
slave woman. We so seldom connect slavery with French Canada that it is
with surprise we learn that slavery was perfectly legal and that there
were slaves there all through the French Regime, and for a generation
into the British. The French government wisely prevented any general
slave trade of import from Africa, as they thought slave labor unsuited
to the colony. But people, rich enough, brought in Negroes as house
servants, and there was a certain importation of "Panis" (commonly
written Pawnees), a peculiar race of Western Indians captured and sold
to the French outposts and, by an exception among their race, soft
enough to work. The Iroquois wasn't. Like the British he "never, never"
would be a slave.

Not only was there slavery,[12] but Montreal, all through this period,
was a place of class distinction and social inequality. French
historians who speak of the colonial simplicity of New France are
speaking of it only in a relative way, as compared with the social
setting of Versailles, where noble birth was estimated in quarterings
and noble blood by the quarter pint. Longfellow, in his _Evangeline_,
has given a picture of the other New France, that Acadia on the Bay of
Fundy, where "even the richest was poor and the poorest had in
abundance," and where class distinction was unknown. This may have been
true of Acadia. It was not true of Montreal. Almost, if not quite, in
its earliest days social distinctions appeared. It is true that in the
mission days of Ville Marie there was the common equality of prayer, the
common devotion of the spirit; and there was, in the Iroquois wars, the
common equality of danger, the brotherhood of combat. But as danger
passed and security grew, social distinctions reasserted themselves.
There was nothing in the spirit of the time to stop them. The
distinctions of birth brought from France were maintained, so too the
distinction of wealth as brought out by individual colonists; the whole
seignorial system was one of class, the holder of a seigneurie
outranking the holder of a fief noble, and both of them above an arrire
fief, and all far above the peasant (en roture) on a plot of land. If
one adds to this the new inequalities that came with fortunes of
expanding trade, we can easily see that New France was not a place
where everybody was as good as everybody else. Indeed such places, even
in America, were still hard to find. New England had its gentle and
simple; even Pennsylvania had its degrees of piety, and in Virginia
inequality grew as easily as tobacco.

There was added the existence of a governing class, since there was no
popular election. The Governor General, visiting Montreal from Quebec,
the Intendant, the Governor of Montreal, and the military officers were
at the top. With them were a number of appointed officials, people with
many functions but no real authority, what the French call officials _
faade_, like a big shop front clapped on a little shop. All these
people, seigneurs, Governors, officers, and officials ranked above the
people still called "the vulgar."

Yet here, as in all North America in early days, the poor had at least
the escape to the land and to the woods. In a new open country, with
land still free and the woods empty, industrial poverty can never take
so cruel an aspect as it later assumes. When the land is gone and the
woods are closed industrial poverty becomes a prison. There is no way
out. Most of all was such escape ready and easy in Montreal. For the fur
trade was at the door and the woods beyond, and the adventurous might go
forth, or the "habitant" turn to a coureur des bois, or even the idle
"go Indian."

Apart from the slaves the population of French Canada was almost
entirely French. A few British drifted in, chiefly as prisoners of war
who stayed on after the peace, Roman Catholics who found the environment
congenial. These married French girls. Their unpronounceable English
names were converted by current convenience to the sound of flowing
French. Ordinary people couldn't spell. The notaries wrote the new names
by ear. The language of these incomers disappeared in their family, and
in the course of generations nothing but tradition connected them with
British descent. It seems doubtful whether all the "Sylvains" of
Montreal today (there are about sixty of them) are aware that their name
is Sullivan.[13] A good many of the two hundred "Phaneufs" may not know
that this name began as Farnsworth, in the person of an ancestor
prisoner of war in about 1700. The French Canadians from the beginning
until today may be reckoned as a singularly unmixed stock.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fur trade represented the chief, practically the only "business,"
the main economic support, of New France and the mainstay of Montreal as
its chief emporium. It was carried on partly by direct trade into the
city and brought with it the perplexed problem of the Indian and his
firewater. There were, as usual, stringent regulations which avarice, as
usual, sought to circumvent. Other trade came down from outlying posts
as far back as Michilimackinac. Its speculative nature and the life of
adventure that the fur trade involved gave it an irresistible
attraction. It drew the young men from their settlements to the woods
and thus, while seeming to enrich, in reality impoverished the colony
and undermined its existence. French Canada had rich farmlands that it
never used, not only along the Richelieu but in those eastern townships
hard by, the richest land of the province of Quebec, untouched till the
days of the Loyalists. Higher up the St. Lawrence was the still more
fertile Upper Canada (Ontario) with the garden territory of the Niagara
district and the western peninsula, which the military power of France,
if really exercised, could easily have seized and held, to make it a
land as luxuriant as France itself. Nor was farming all. Beside Three
Rivers was iron ore from which a feeble and halfhearted operation
produced rude instruments. For shipbuilding all the material was at
hand. Shipyards such as those established by the English a hundred years
later could have proved the salvation of both old France and new. A few
ships indeed were built, but the models were unsuitable, the timber was
ill chosen, and for lack of patience and experience the shipbuilding of
New France proved a failure.

This misdirection of economic life was clear to the wiser of the French
themselves. There is preserved a report of Raudot, an Intendant of 1706,
in which he says, "The English do not leave their homes as most of our
people do; they till their ground, establish manufactures, open mines,
build ships, and have never yet looked upon the fur trade as anything
but a subordinate part of their commerce."

With the fur trade of the period went the continual exploration that was
at once the guiding star and the will-o'-the-wisp of French Canada. The
sequel showed the country utterly inadequate for the support of its vast
and imposing claims on the territory of North America. But to these
French explorers still belongs the honor of their achievement. The chief
name is that of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Vrendrye, whose
family belonged to Three Rivers but whose enterprises, in which his sons
participated, were conducted from Montreal. Their discoveries of the
western prairies of Canada and the Rocky Mountains of the United States,
like so many other achievements of the French, only allowed others later
to reap where they had sown. Vrendrye himself died in Montreal in 1749.

Seen in the light of this misdirection of effort of which it was the
center, the picture of old French Montreal is not without a touch of
pathos. Here were vast schemes for reaching the Western Sea, journeys
through empty desert in pursuit of a mirage of trade and fortune that
had no existence, the empty glory of maps and names--all this on the
part of a community that in reality had wealth lying at its feet. Yet
even such failure carries its peculiar credit and honor. It appeals to
us in the same way as the likable quality seen in individuals whose
careers have failed or whose achievements never got started.

We have spoken of this period as one of peace. This is true of Montreal
but of course does not apply to England and France and to North America
at large. Just as the question of a successor to the throne of Spain
convulsed North America from 1702 to 1713, so the ravages of war must
spread again (1744-48) over the question as to the succession to the
throne of Austria. This time Montreal was entirely spared, and its
district was almost so. An expedition under Rigaud de Vaudreuil in 1745
made a ravaging foray into the Mohawk Valley and Massachusetts, a second
raid being made in 1746. This led to ravages by small Mohawk parties in
which a few settlers were killed or captured at Chteauguay, at Isle
Perrot, and Ste. Anne's. The main brunt of this war fell on Acadia,
where Louisburg was captured (1745) by an expedition from New England
aided by the royal navy. The only other military features of Montreal in
this happy period were the expeditions sent out, with success, in 1728
beyond Fort Michilimackinac against the Indians of Green Bay (the
Foxes), as a means of striking the Indian peril at its source.

During the old French Regime we can hardly think of Montreal as a
seaport in any proper sense or with any meaning more than that there was
continuous water communication to the sea. Quebec was the ocean port and
also the port at which shipbuilding, such as it was, was carried on.
Even below Quebec there were no proper charts to the sea until the
famous Captain James Cook charted the St. Lawrence below Quebec for
Wolfe's expedition. Between Quebec and Montreal the natural channel as
yet unimproved offered no greater depth in certain stretches than eleven
feet and was rendered difficult for ships under sail by shallow currents
and below Three Rivers by the tide. Navigation in the French Regime had
no heavier cargoes to provide for than the carriage of persons, personal
goods, and the export of furs. For this purpose canoes, boats, and large
boats under sail easily sufficed. References to "ships" refer to these
large _bateaux_. "The bateau," writes Mr. Lawrence Tombs in his
admirable _Port of Montreal_, "was a large flat-bottomed skiff, sharp at
both ends, about forty feet long and six to eight feet wide in the
center, and capable of carrying about five tons of cargo. It was
provided with masts and lugsails, with about fifteen feet hoist, an
anchor, four oars, and six setting poles shod with iron. The bateau was
manned by a crew of four men and a pilot."

Little, therefore, could be done to improve the position of Montreal as
a port from below. But already in those early days people planned its
improvement from above so as to make it easier to bring the fur trade
down the St. Lawrence and carry goods up. Hence the project, and to a
certain extent the actuality, of a Lachine canal is among the first
public enterprises of the colony. It will be recalled that the rapids of
the Great Sault (Lachine Rapids) block the river above Montreal. More
than that, the course of the river at the rapids is swung off so as to
make it a long way round to Montreal even if one hazards the risks of
shooting the rapids and incurs the labor of trekking and portaging at
the side. The distance by the path of the river from the quieter water
above the rapids themselves and via La Prairie Basin to Montreal is
about fourteen miles down the rapids. But a straight cut across the land
is only eight and three quarter miles. Moreover, the straight cut, the
present bed of the Lachine Canal, is largely a natural sunken hollow
very easy to turn into a watercourse. The amount of fall from the water
above the rapids varies with its flood and volume. But the fall of the
ground itself may be reckoned from the fact that the Bonaventure Station
is forty-eight feet above sea level, Lachine Station eighty.[14]

We have seen that a little river, Rivire St. Pierre, originally ran
down this hollow and emptied into the St. Lawrence under the Pointe 
Callires behind the Ilot Normandin (Market Gate Island). If one follows
this river up for five or six miles one finds its source in a body of
water that was a marsh or a big pond or a little lake, according to
water and season. The old maps show it as Lac  l'Outre. Between this
water and Lake St. Louis there is no great rise of land, and to cut a
canal would be no great matter, except that in part the rise of land is
rock. With such a cutting made, with the pond made permanent and the
River St. Pierre deepened and cut straight, an easy passage by canoe
would be substituted for an arduous effort and a dangerous risk. Hence
it was that as far back as the days of Dollier de Casson (he died in
1701) efforts were made toward a canal, or at least to improve this
watercourse. A system of locks to let large boats up and down was too
expensive, but it was thought that even with the natural flow of water
boats might go both up and down, with a minimum of portaging. A certain
beginning was made, but lack of funds left the project still incomplete
at the conquest.

And here we may pause a moment in the narrative, as happiness pauses on
the brink of disaster, to view in some little detail the old French town
of Montreal as it was in its last years of peace and allegiance, before
it was overwhelmed in the British conquest.

Strangely enough, the circumstances of our present city offer a peculiar
opportunity for such a retrospect. The lower part of it, the "business
section" of Montreal, corresponds very closely to the area covered by
the old walled town. Now this "city" shares with the "city" enclosed in
London the peculiarity that many work yet almost none sleep in it, so
that it falls on a Sunday to a silence and emptiness unknown elsewhere.
This is true most of all in the heart of winter when the harbor is
frozen over and the port deserted, the warehouses along the water front
closed and tenantless, the water front itself overwhelmed in snow. At
such a time the place has turned, as it were, to a ghost city of the old
French Regime, whose outline it still bears, and whose old stone houses
are still to be seen here and there built in and built over in its
crooked streets.

On such a Sunday morning the silence seems to fall all the deeper with
each successive snow that blocks the narrow streets, buries the
sign-boards, and mantles in frozen billows, ready to fall, the edge of
every roof, the projection of every cornice. On such a day the footsteps
of the rare passengers seen here and there upon the streets fall
noiseless on the snow. They too seem ghosts, moving, as it were,
nowhere. There is no sound or movement except that at each successive
service the deep bells of the Notre Dame parish church echo the hours,
and the parishioners flock to and fro across the Place d'Armes to the
office of the Mass. Yet somehow they too--as different from the
businessmen of the weekdays as the Iroquois themselves, wrapped and
muffled against the cold--have taken on the air of old French Canada
itself, as if a part of the ghost picture.

To make it still more real there stands Maisonneuve's statue in the
Place d'Armes in front of the church, its pedestal and its pedestral
figures half buried in snow. The crouching form of Major Lambert Closse,
his pistol ready to fire, looks out, more vigilant than ever, from under
his canopy of snow. Here projects from under its white mantle the
treacherous arm of a buried Iroquois, there the sickle of a habitant
settler.

In such a place and in such a company we can build up again the town
that was. Here, still plain enough, is its plan and outline. This St.
James Street--the Rue St. Jacques--still runs its full length along the
upper side of the town. Notre Dame is still there just below it, and St.
Paul, broken with many crossings and intersections and little squares
punched out of it, still staggers its unsteady course lower along the
slope. But the values of these streets are all reversed. St. Jacques was
the least of them. Notre Dame, the first street really laid out with a
surveyor's line (1672), was the main street, the street of quality and
fashion, the chief road of entry by land. St. Jacques was a smaller,
later street which there was just room to squeeze in between Notre Dame
and the sharp slope of the hill behind, where the land fell to the marsh
and river.

In the old French town on the Rue St. Jacques we should have found
ourselves close beside the fortification wall, looking down into the
hollow and across it to the snow-covered gardens and woods and
mountainsides above. St. Paul, of course, was the oldest street in
another sense, for it was the first pathway, the track through the
trees, that connected Maisonneuve's fort (on the other side of the
Rivire St. Pierre, the Lachine Canal of today) with the buildings by
the riverside, Maisonneuve's own house, the Hotel Dieu, and those built
later. Presently the fort was demolished, the town itself built along
St. Paul and Notre Dame Streets, and the old French town of which we now
speak, the fortified wall with its bastions and river gates, passed
along just below St. Paul. Hence St. Paul too had a grandeur of its own,
looking down on the Common (Commune) along the riverside, on the landing
places, and across the river, and having on it the Chteau de Vaudreuil,
the residence of the Governor General of New France when in residence.
In front of this residence was the aristocratic grandeur of the Marine
Parade. Thus St. Paul held the water gates while Notre Dame held the
main entry by land.

We can thus see the plan and scope of the old town in this frozen,
ghostly outline of silent stone. Yet perhaps it would be better if we
could somehow wave a magic wand over it and see it, not in the death of
winter of today, but in the warm life of the summertime two hundred
years ago. Such a wand by good fortune we possess in the description of
Montreal and its surroundings that was written in the summer of 1749 by
Peter Kalm, a visiting Swedish naturalist. We open the pages of the
English (1771) edition of Kalm's _Travels_, its very print and its form
giving a sympathetic touch of antiquity, and in a moment (for Mr. Kalm
possesses the unconscious art of interest) we are transported to a place
so different from our ghost city that we realize we have substituted a
skeleton for a living being. This is no longer a stone city cramped
behind its narrow fortifications. This is a large, spacious place with
trees and gardens everywhere. The place seems too large if they ever had
to defend it. And this town is not built of stone. There are indeed
beautiful stone houses like the chteau that M. de Ramezay built or the
Chteau de Vaudreuil itself, but most of the houses are still of wood.
Mr. Kalm will presently tell us that this is very different from Quebec,
where most of the houses are of stone. Indeed the difference ran all
through the French Canada of 1749, all through its rows of farms that
now reach along the St. Lawrence from Quebec to Montreal, and along the
Richelieu, and from the Richelieu to Montreal, and all around the
islands of Montreal and Jesus. Wherever these river courses could reach
there were now the seigneuries and the river farms of New France. But
beyond that were only forts--that of Cataraqui (Kingston), a fort at
Niagara, and the Fort Rouille that was to give place to Toronto. Of
these houses some were built of stone and some of wood, and this--Peter
Kalm guessed it as cleverly as we do--was because they built with
whatever came best to hand. But all the houses ran to the same ground
plan, the flat front, the small windows, and the tall pointed roof.

But let us, however, view Montreal with Peter Kalm's own eyes. It may be
explained that Kalm was a Swedish naturalist, described as a Professor
of Oeconomy (whatever that is; certainly not Economics) at the
University of Aobo in Swedish Finland (wherever these are). He was
mainly interested in studying plants and gathering seeds, and his
journeys took him to the British provinces of North America and into and
through New France. Kalm's London editors of 1771 seem to think he
showed an anti-British bias which they correct in meticulous footnotes.
It is hinted that he was peeved at the British ownership of the once
Swedish colony that became New Jersey.

But as that conquest had happened a hundred years before and was made by
the Dutch, not the British, such peevishness would seem extreme even in
a professor. Kalm's picture of New France is certainly idyllic. But he
saw it under idyllic circumstances, in the glow of a Canadian summer and
in the halcyon days of Canadian autumn, a scene as peaceful as ever
contemplated by a kingfisher on a bough. For the latest final peace,
that of Aix-la-Chapelle, had come in 1748, and all North America smiled
like a garden. Especially for Peter Kalm, for when the Governor of
Quebec (M. de la Galissonnire) and the Governor of Montreal heard of
Kalm's garden mission, they insisted that he must be the guest of the
King of France, paying for nothing. Royal government is able to do
things in a royal way.

Far different was the country that Peter Kalm saw around Montreal from
what Father Charlevoix had seen a generation before. There had not, it
is true, been that extraordinary transformation that a hundred years
later changed all the best of Upper Canada from wilderness to farmstead
within forty or fifty years, for that was the work of many hands, when
dense forests fell before axes that multiplied every year, working in
peace and security. But even in New France the change is notable.
Beautiful it all seemed indeed to the traveling Peter Kalm in 1749,
arriving with certain fellow Swedes by the Lake Champlain route. He was
rowed across on a July morning from La Prairie, the walls and houses and
spires of Montreal visible all the way over. They landed below one of
the water gates. "We found," he writes, "a crowd of people at the
gate . . . very desirous of seeing us . . . because Swedes were a people
of whom they had heard something but whom they had never seen." This was
flattering, but still more so was the arrival of a captain to take Kalm
to the house of the Governor, the Baron de Longueuil. "He received me
more civilly and generously than I can well describe and showed me
letters from the Governor General at Quebec, the Marquis de la
Galissonnire, which mentioned that he was to supply me with whatever I
should want, as I was to travel in this country at the expense of His
Most Christian Majesty."

After this first visit to Montreal Peter Kalm went down to Quebec, where
he was received with great courtesy by M. de la Galissonnire. He came
up the river again, still the guest of the King of France, in a boat
with six rowers, what sailors would call a gig, with a canopy over his
head to keep his precious brains from the Canadian sun. Everyone in
Canada seems to have greatly appreciated Kalm's horticultural mission as
a benefit both ways. He was in Montreal again for a month that autumn,
so that much of his description of the town is made after his return and
compares the two localities of Quebec and Montreal.

Kalm notes the fine buildings surrounded with beautiful trees and ample
gardens. "Some of the houses of the town," says Kalm, "are of stone, but
most of them are of timber though very neatly built. Each of the better
sort of houses has a door toward the street with a seat on each side of
it for amusement and recreation in the morning and evening. The streets
are broad and straight [Kalm is here thinking of city streets in the
Europe of 1749] and divided at right angles by the short ones. Some are
paved but most of them are very uneven."

       *       *       *       *       *

Peter Kalm's pictures of the life of the town are of special interest,
preserving for us what no maps or official records can recall. "Every
Friday is market day, when the country people come to town with
provisions . . . the only market day of the whole week. On that day
likewise a number of Indians come to town to sell their goods and buy
others. . . . There is not anything, however dear to them," says Kalm,
"that they would not sell for brandy."

Peter Kalm, for all that he is a professor and a naturalist, has a keen
eye for the ladies of French Canada and devotes several pages to them,
attempting to classify them as only a naturalist would. He distinguishes
the French ladies from France and those native to Canada; the later are
subdivided into ladies of Quebec and ladies of Montreal. Class I (French
ladies) "possess the politeness of the French nation." Class IIA (Quebec
ladies) "are equal to the French ladies in good breeding, having the
advantage of frequently conversing with French gentlemen and ladies."
Class IIB (Montreal ladies)--some of these, indeed, seem to have laughed
at Peter's French. Having no opportunity to hear bad French, an
opportunity grown larger in Montreal with the centuries, it sounded
funny to them. Kalm takes his vengeance when he says that "they are
accused of partaking too much of the pride of the Indians and of being
much wanting in French good manners." Kalm's picture of Montreal and its
environs is one of peace and plenty. There are bountiful gardens, fruit
in abundance, and all about the town the wheat fields, as his visit drew
on, bathed the landscape in yellow. He visited La Chine (so he spells
it), a "fine village with a fine church of stone and farmhouses lying
along the river about four or five arpents from each other." An arpent
then, as now, was a French measure either "long" or "square"; as length,
192 feet, hence as surface (roughly), four fifths of an acre. Kalm tells
the familiar story of how "M. Salee (La Salle) talked of nothing but his
new short way to China," and hence, "the place got its name, as it were,
by way of a joke." This is the sole joke in Kalm's three volumes. He
visits also the Sault de Recollet, a little settlement where even the
church is built of wood, but with cornfields, meadows, and pastures all
around it, but the old people said they remembered it as all forest.

Kalm left New France in 1749. He saw nothing of the Canadian winter. Nor
could he have realized how the peace and relative plenty all around him
in that golden autumn were to change to the carnage, the distress, the
desolation of ten years later.

       *       *       *       *       *

For people of curious mind and for economists, we may here attempt to
form some idea of how the economic side of life under the Old Regime in
Montreal and in French Canada may be compared with that of later times
and of today. Were the people, the plain people, better off than those
of today? It is very difficult to give a tabulated answer since life in
those days depended greatly on barter, on exchange of services, and on
self-support. The people, says Peter Kalm, "all seem poor." But
elsewhere he notes that "it is easy for anyone to set up as a farmer
and live well at small expense." The daily drink of the plain people was
water. Kalm tells us that they brewed no beer. The glory of John Molson
was yet to come. The rich drank imported wine, none being made in the
country. Indeed the only manufactured drink was the seasonal spruce
beer.

It is very hard to give any adequate notion of money and prices. The
nominal scale of money[15] was based on the livre. This in origin had
meant a pound weight of silver but had gone down and down by the
depreciation of French coinage, so that it presently reached practically
the same level as a quite separate unit called a franc, and the two
words became interchangeable. A livre was divided into twenty sous.
Three livres made an _cu_, a word commonly translated as crown but not
really equal to it. Compared with foreign money, the British pound of
those days was supposed to equal twenty-two livres. The shilling in
England, where it existed as a coin, went at twenty to the pound
sterling. The great unit of New World trade was the Spanish dollar. At
this time the amount of silver in a dollar made a pound sterling worth
four dollars and forty cents. But in the American provinces there were
no shillings as actual coins but only as a way of counting. In New York
Province and in North Carolina they counted eight shillings to a dollar
(the "York shilling" of old-time Ontario that some of us still recall);
in New England and Virginia, six shillings; in Pennsylvania and
elsewhere, seven and sixpence. Hence a penny, the twelfth part of a
shilling, was about the hundredth part of a colonial dollar; hence the
use of "penny," still current in the United States for a cent, or
"centavo." Thus, in summary, twenty-two livres, or two hundred and forty
sous, were worth a pound sterling, or four dollars and forty cents;
roughly a sou was two "cents"; a livre or franc was twenty cents. A New
York shilling, being worth twelve and one half cents or pennies, was
equal to six sous.

All of this by way of account. French Canada had no circulating coins
except a few sous and battered pieces of mixed metal. Circulating money
was paper. The Intendant issued government bills to pay for government
purchases, in sums down to as little as one livre or less. These passed
from hand to hand. In October, before the last ships went out, all who
wished cashed these bills in with the Intendant for bills on France to
buy goods for import. The government also at various times printed "card
money" and other issues. The whole currency was a mess till after the
conquest.

       *       *       *       *       *

Using these units as best we can, we find that in Montreal at the close
of the regime current wages of plain labor stood at thirty to forty sous
(sixty to eighty cents) a day; skilled labor, four livres (eighty sous).
Servants' wages seemed very high to European visitors; a footman
received one hundred and fifty livres a year, a maid one hundred. In
spending these wages fifty livres (twelve days' skilled work) bought a
cow; in 1880 it would have taken at least twice as much; one hundred to
two hundred livres bought a horse; six livres bought a sheep; a hog was
worth, live weight, one tenth of a livre, or two sous a pound; a day's
plain labor was worth twenty pounds of live hog (in 1880 about ten
pounds). Eggs sold in Montreal at three sous a dozen, a pound of butter
at fifteen to twenty sous, a minot of wheat, the old term for a
boisseau, or bushel, sold at forty to sixty sous. No cheese was made.
People smoked their own tobacco. They made their own maple sugar. They
largely made their own shoes, clothes, candles, and moccasins. Anything
that they didn't have they went without. Things not yet invented they
never missed. Judging by the conditions as remembered by the author of
this book of farm life in Ontario in the 1870s, they were better off.

The profits of trade it is difficult to compute. At its uninterrupted
best it would mean greater opportunity than now. But it was never
uninterrupted. Montreal sold to the Indians muskets, powder and shot,
coarse white cloth, blue and red cloth for fancy petticoats, hatchets,
knives, needles and steel for flints, kettles, earrings, vermilion to
paint their faces red and verdigris to paint them green, looking
glasses, burning glasses, and glass beads. In return they brought down
all sorts of furs, and in particular beaver, elk, deer, bearskins,
otter, foxskins (black and gray and red), muskrat, marten, and a list
that seems interminable. All these had prices attached in Montreal
(beaver, three livres; fox, three; otter, five; bear, two, etc.), but
with the Indians they went as trade. If an Indian exchanged, as he did,
a black foxskin, which with us might represent hundreds of dollars a
skin, for a few glass beads worth with us about ten for a cent, it is
hard to make any commercial comparison. Each party to the bargain got a
lot for a little.

The rich lacked only the opportunity to buy. Kalm quotes a price of
250-300 francs a hogshead (sixty-three gallons or, roughly, a livre a
bottle) as representing an extreme wartime price for French wine in
Montreal.

Such is the picture of Montreal in the last years of the French Regime,
a picture not without its shadows, but with bright and happy tints that
only needed peace and good will to deepen them to enduring color.

It was not to be.

Within a few years the colony was to be racked with the war that ended
with the capitulation of Montreal and the cession of Canada.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Ida Greaves, _Slavery in Canada_, 1927.

[13] C. Bertrand, _Histoire de Montral_, 1935.

[14] _Altitudes in Canada_, Commission on Conservation, 1915.

[15] A. F. Dodd, _History of Money in the British Empire and the United
States_, 1911.




CHAPTER VI

The Capitulation of Montreal

1760

     _Vaudreuil Surrenders Montreal. The Close of the Seven Years'
     War. The Capitulation. Military Government in Montreal. General
     Murray and the King's New Subjects. Civil Government in 1764.
     Conflicting Elements. The Quarrel between Britain and America.
     The Quebec Act._


On a September Evening in 1760 the Marquis de Vaudreuil, Governor and
last Governor of New France, sat with an assembled group of officers in
the beautiful old house that was his official residence in Montreal. The
house was the Chteau de Vaudreuil, and it took its name from his father
who built it and who had been a former Governor of Montreal. The King of
France having contributed one thousand livres toward building it, this
house ever since had been placed at the disposal of the Governor General
of Canada whenever he might come to Montreal from Quebec. It stood with
its grounds and gardens at what was then the corner of St. Paul and St.
Charles streets. This would mean on the map of today the corner of St.
Paul Street and Jacques Cartier Square. It faced the water, overlooking
the Military Parade, the Quai, and the river beyond. The house was not
as beautiful in design as the Chteau de Ramezay, which was situated
near by, but it seems to have been taller, with something more of
grandeur. We know it only from its pictures, for the house has been gone
for more than a century.

The Marquis de Vaudreuil, round whose memory centers all the pathos of a
lost cause and of a vanished regime, was a handsome man of sixty-two,
with the characteristic appearance of a soldier and a nobleman. History
has made of him one of its scapegoats, for history must have its
characters, its heroes, its villains of the piece.

We must admit that Montcalm wrote home of him as "tame and rather weak,"
but Montcalm's standard was wild and strong, and even he admits that
Vaudreuil had good sense and "knew the country." He ought to have known
it. He was born there (Quebec, 1698), had spent much of his life and
service in Canada, and married a Canadian widow. Toward officials and
officers sent out from the mother country he felt that mixture of
antipathy and jealousy which was felt by both British and French
Canadians almost until today. They called it then _le prjug colonial_
and now the "inferiority complex." This had colored all the relations
between Vaudreuil and Montcalm. Yet even Francis Parkman, who darkens
Vaudreuil almost beyond washing, admits the industry and zeal of his
service.

It is true that when Vaudreuil went home to France he was indicted along
with fifty-four other officers and officials for embezzlement,
inefficiency, and misgovernment, and as many other things as the
indictment could think of. History seems to forget that Vaudreuil was
acquitted. Vaudreuil, it says, was full of gasconade and bluster, tall
talk and loud threats. So was Frontenac, only Frontenac succeeded and
Vaudreuil failed. Frontenac, history whispers, was crooked and smiles
the accusation away, then shouts out loud that Vaudreuil was crooked.
But some of us like to connect the memory of this last Governor of New
France with the wistful, affectionate phrase that he used of Canada when
he said good-by to it--"vast and beautiful country."[16] That is so
much nobler than the snarling sour grapes of the "acres of snow" that
comes down in history beside it. Little good is left of the Governor's
name except a parliamentary county and, perhaps better, the neat little
railway station of Vaudreuil, at the upper end of the island system of
Montreal where the railways join the mainland, and even these, with the
usual hard luck of the Marquis, are not from his name but from his
father's.

So the Marquis sits that evening in the candlelight of his salon to
discuss with the officers what he must do. He and they and a diminished
French army of some twenty-four hundred are in Montreal, but in the
night outside the British armies are gathering thick as autumn leaves
all around them, in size such armies as America had never seen before.
The fires of their camps and bivouacs are strung out in the fields and
orchards southwest of the town, from what we now should call Notre Dame
de Grace, all the way to Lachine. This is General Jeffrey Amherst's army
that was assembled up above on Lake Ontario and has come down the St.
Lawrence in hundreds and hundreds of boats, leaping the foam of the
rapids in such a flock, one right on the other, that French skirmishers
along the shore were powerless to impede them. Right across the river on
the south shore is another army under Captain Haviland, moving down by
the Richelieu. Their hold on the river shore is extending to join hands
with the great fleet that has carried the third army up from Quebec, a
fleet with hundreds of bateaux crowded with men, and also of actual
vessels of war. The British ships hold the river all the way to Quebec;
they hold Quebec itself and the river and the gulf below to where it
reaches Cape Breton Island and the conquered fortress of Louisburg,
conquered the year before. From the sea there can be no help.

For the Marquis de Vaudreuil and those who sit with him this is the last
throw in the game for North America in the great war for the destiny of
a continent that had begun six years before. It is the last throw, and
they hold no cards. It is the end. Some of Vaudreuil's officers, with
the Chevalier de Lvis to lead them, passionately beg for permission to
throw themselves with their regiments onto St. Helens Island, the only
ground left to them, and fight it out to the end. But this is not a real
proposal, only a gesture of courage and despair. Montreal itself is of
no avail to them. When Amherst's cannon open on it, it cannot last an
hour; they are prisoners on it, not defenders. "We were pent up in that
miserable place," wrote afterward one of the surviving French officers,
"without provisions, a thousand times worse than a position in an open
field, whose pitiful walls could not resist two hours' cannonade."

But it is not only the military situation that is hopeless. The state of
the country all about them is hopeless too. The war has stopped all
import of supplies, has stopped trade. Even malignant nature has not
played fair and has thrown hard winters and scanty harvests into the
scales of war. In this land of plenty of Peter Kalm ten years before the
people are starving: they are eating the horses off the farms; their
clothes are worn, their fields unplanted. Their men have been drawn into
the fighting militia for every season and every raid and conflict from
the fight at Fort Duquesne in 1754 till this autumn itself, seven years
of it. There is no village street, no river row of farms in all French
Canada that has not its desolate homes, its unreturning men, its
children working in the fields. In some places, as in the environs of
Quebec, their misery had reached its depths. "Their houses," wrote an
eyewitness, "are burned, their cattle taken away, their goods pillaged.
Our poor women may be seen emerging from the depth of the forest,
dragging their little children after them, eaten by flies, without
clothes, and crying with hunger." Nor is the affliction of the Canadian
habitants yet over. General Amherst has warned them that if any of their
men leave home again to fight their houses will be burned down, warned
them and made the warning good. Vaudreuil has sent messengers to warn
them that if there are any of them who do not leave their homes to fight
their houses will be burned down, has warned them and will make good
when he can. Those who wonder why the peasantry of French Canada
accepted so quietly the British conquest, why they were content to get
back to their river farms and wayside crosses, will find the answer if
they will read these inner pages. The outer pages of history, all drum
and fife, all fire and smoke, move these "Canadians" around, like pawns
upon a board, beside the "regulars" and the "Royal Americans," and the
other pawns. But these pawns had homes to be burned.

[Illustration: A Quaint Scene on the St Lawrence, with Montreal in the
distance, in the Days before the River Teemed with Great Vessels.]

History always speaks as if the Seven Years' War that decided the fate
of North America was settled on the Plains of Abraham by Wolfe's victory
over Montcalm on September 13, 1759. This is not so, or at least it is
only so because it turned out to be so. In spite of increasing
exhaustion and in spite of odds, that need not have been the end.

The case stood thus: The war had been going on, so it must have seemed,
for ever so long; to be exact, for already six and a half years, since
the so-called Seven Years' War lasted (from the first shot fired till
the pen and ink of peace) nine years. It was not a fight of England and
France for Canada, as Canadians naturally like to suppose. The English
didn't want Canada. They had already given it back once and might have
done so again. This was a war for the Ohio country; in other words, for
the vast inland America now seen in its true light. Both English and
French had extended their trade inland over the mountains and up the
lakes inland till they reached the region where the two great rivers,
the Allegheny and the Monongahela, unite to form the Ohio. This, "La
Belle Rivire," then flows westward through a country of endless beauty
of woods and meadow, looking for the sea.

Both nations wanted the Ohio territory; hence there came the building of
rival forts, where actual fighting went on without actual war. Then came
the French establishment of Fort Duquesne at the great river junction.
The real war began with Braddock's defeat in trying to seize it. It took
the English seven years to make it Pittsburgh. Even for the motor
tourist today it is a far cry from Pittsburgh to Cape Breton Island and
Louisburg. Yet the war roamed and ranged all over that territory. The
English from the start had the advantage of potential numbers, their
1,500,000 colonists against 65,000 French. But the French had the
temporary advantage of despotic control as against colonial apathy, and
of the master generalship of Montcalm. The war for the Ohio turned on
attacking Canada chiefly by the Lake Champlain route, where today every
town and every railway station seem to recall in their names and local
traditions the mingled glory and savagery of the war. The other path of
attack was by Oswego and the St. Lawrence. The French, on both other
routes, as at Duquesne itself, at first beat the English back. But at
last the British sent over, and recruited, armies of such size as
America had never before seen. By June of 1758 they had 15,000 men at
Lake George; Montcalm a quarter as many. The French government, hampered
in Europe, never could, or at least never did, send troops adequate for
the task. The French perforce abandoned their posts on the Ohio and at
Ticonderoga. They drew back into Canada itself. A great fleet came up
the St. Lawrence; the skill and instinct of its Admiral Saunders and his
captains (James Cook was among them) brought it right to Quebec and past
it. The surprise attack and the victory of General Wolfe by way of the
high ground above Quebec changed, so we are told, the destiny of North
America. But this was not the inevitable end; the cause was desperate
but not yet lost.

       *       *       *       *       *

The end came a year later with what we are witnessing now with the
Marquis de Vaudreuil and his officers in the Chteau de Vaudreuil. The
Battle of the Plains of Abraham by which Quebec was captured had taken
place a year before: a strange, swift battle, practically without
artillery or cavalry, fought and all over in one short crisis, to be
measured in minutes, as between two sets of infantry moving like toy
soldiers on a table. It gave the English Quebec but not Canada. The
British fleet sailed away from the St. Lawrence in October 1759, bearing
with it the embalmed body of General Wolfe. A British garrison remained
in Quebec. The French were still outside, still held all the banks of
the river, still held Montreal. The winter froze the river; sea power
was off; the big ships were gone. In the spring the French, under the
brilliant leadership of the Chevalier de Lvis, fought a second battle
on the Plains of Abraham, sometimes called the Battle of Ste. Foye, and
turned the tables. The English were driven into Quebec with the river
still frozen. They had lost a thousand men. The French losses were even
greater and included two hundred Canadians. Yet we are told that joy ran
through the colony as the news of Lvis' victory spread from parish to
parish. As the ice honeycombed and broke and began to drift out, the
fate of Quebec, not for ever but for then, turned on which fleet might
come. The French of those days were not beaten off the sea as after
Trafalgar. They built better ships than the English and had fine
sailors. Thirty years later the French, under D'Estaing in the American
war, gained the temporary mastery of the Atlantic coast and made
possible Washington's coming victory.

This time it was not to be so. The British fleet appeared in the river,
and the British resumed their mastery of the St. Lawrence. The French
perforce withdrew to Montreal. Three British armies gathered for the
enveloping attack: yet there was still hope. The armies had to come long
distances by separate ways up the St. Lawrence from Quebec, down from
Oswego and Lake Ontario, and down from Lake Champlain and the Richelieu.
If not timed to arrive together, the three armies might have been beaten
one by one, a strategy as old as schoolbook Roman history. Lvis might
have effected this, for it is said that he was a better strategist than
Montcalm. But the chance never came. The ordered movement and the timed
arrival of the separate armies, separated by hundreds of miles of wild
country, have been much extolled. Hence Montreal, with a total garrison
of about 2000 men, had to face the army of Amherst from the St.
Lawrence, 10,170 men; Haviland from the Richelieu, 3400 men, and
Murray's army of 2200 converged in a fleet of thirty-five bateaux, three
frigates, and three gunboats.

This was the situation over which the Marquis sat in council that
September evening. With Vaudreuil were a group of officers, veterans of
years of war, some whose names were yet to make history. There was the
Chevalier de Lvis and Bourlamaque, who had commanded on the Richelieu.

One in especial deserve mention: Bougainville, a captain of dragoons,
then thirty years old, who had been aide-de-camp to Montcalm. Later he
was to become celebrated as a sea captain, an explorer, a Pacific
navigator who gave to France its possession of Tahiti and to the gardens
of Europe the lovely flowering bougainvillaea that bears his name. He
lived to a great old age, the fires never dying down: as an old man he
begged Napoleon to let him back into naval service to avenge Trafalgar.
He died, full of years and honor and a senator of France, just in time
(1811) to see nothing of the ensuing downfall. Montreal may well feel
proud that the name of Bougainville belongs in its history.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was indeed no choice before Vaudreuil and his generals on that
fateful evening of September 6, 1760. The end had come. All that they
could hope to do was to obtain honorable terms of capitulation.
Vaudreuil had drawn up and showed to his generals a long list of
articles (fifty-five) which became presently the basis for the
capitulation of Montreal, one of the charter documents of Canadian
history. Most of these provisions, in regard to persons and property and
in respect to the departure and transport of French officers and
officials, soldiers and civilians leaving for France, were such as the
British could readily accept, for although the surrender included not
only Montreal but all the remaining inland territory and forts, and thus
ended the operations of war, the capitulation was not a final treaty of
peace, and General Amherst was not concerned with the cession of Canada
in any real and final sense.

Two points, however, created difficulties over which messengers went
back and forth during the day (September 7) following the council of
war. One concerned religion. Vaudreuil asked for the free exercise of
the Roman Catholic religion. Amherst would grant it only "as far as the
laws of England would permit." On this he was inflexible; yet in the
sequel the modified clause proved the stronger instrument, bending where
the other would have broken. Inflexible he was also on the "honors of
war" which Vaudreuil had claimed. This signified the right to march out
with colors flying, the regimental bands playing, and the men fully
armed, their cannon with them. This to the officers meant everything. It
was the honor paid, in more chivalrous days than ours, by the victors to
the vanquished in tribute to the gallantry of their defense. Amherst
refused all military honors on account of the "infamous part the troops
of France have acted in inviting the savages to perpetuate the most
horrid and unheard of barbarities in the whole progress of the war." It
may be left to impartial history to judge the facts in the case. At best
it seems a pot-and-kettle accusation. It is true that Amherst had, on
the eve of the capture of Montreal, forbidden Sir William Johnson's
Indians to torture French prisoners. But a last-minute conversion is
easy. The allies of the Senecas could wear no mantle of purity, and one
recalls the "inciting of savages" and the massacre still to come, in the
Revolutionary War, in the Mohawk Valley and in Wyoming Valley of
Pennsylvania. But Amherst refused all pleading. In vain De Lvis and
others begged Vaudreuil's permission to occupy St. Helens Island and
fight to the death. The gesture was noble but chimerical. There was no
real hope in it. For by that time--the afternoon of September 7--they
could see the British army from the Richelieu encamped across the river
and now in touch with Murray and the ships. The town was held fast on
all sides.

Early in the morning of the eighth Vaudreuil signed the capitulation and
Amherst occupied Montreal. "Colonel Haldimand," writes Amherst in his
dispatch, "with the Grenadiers and the Light infantry took possession of
one of the gates of the town." On the ninth the French army--2132 of all
ranks--surrendered themselves and their arms on the Place d'Armes. No
flags were surrendered. Vaudreuil said he had none; he did not add that
De Lvis had burned them all the day before. On the eleventh a
glittering parade of Amherst's united armies, again on the Place
d'Armes, received Vaudreuil as a personal honor. Here present were men
whose names remain a part of the history of Canada--Generals Murray,
Burton, Gage, and Howe, all of them later military Governors of
Montreal; Colonel Fraser, whose Highlanders settled among the habitants,
their descendants presently talking nothing but French; Colonel
Haldimand, a French-speaking Swiss, later Governor of Canada; and, most
notable of all, Sir Guy Carleton, a veteran of the last war, a victor of
the next, later as Lord Dorchester to be the Frontenac of British
Canada. More dubious presences were those of Sir William Johnson, leader
of the Iroquois, and Captain Rogers of the Rangers.

Thus entered a British garrison into Montreal to remain a feature of its
civic life, with the brief alternative of an American garrison in
1775-76, until after the Confederation of Canada (1871). A happy omen of
its entry was Amherst's general order forbidding "the least appearance
of inhumanity or any unsoldierly behavior in seeking for plunder." Thus
the entente between French and English in Montreal begins on the day of
its occupancy with the friendly personal relations of Amherst and
Vaudreuil and the peaceful intercourse of soldiers and civilians, old
subjects and new. Many of the French soldiers asked and obtained leave
to take the oath of allegiance and remain in Canada.

The French troops left Montreal on September 22, 1760, embarking for
Quebec and thence for France. There left Canada in all 185 officers,
2400 soldiers and 500 sailors, domestics, women, and children. By
permission the ships sailed under a flag of truce, for it was still
wartime at sea. Vaudreuil, with 142 officers and civilians and their
families, left. After the French were gone the organization of the
government of Canada was a very simple matter since it was regarded as
only an interim arrangement. Amherst still commanded in America but left
for New York, his headquarters (October 5, 1760), and never saw Canada
again. His attention was soon diverted from Canada to the new Indian
danger, occasioned by apprehension of absorption under British rule,
that presently led to the rising (1763-66) known as Pontiac's War.
Montreal fortunately was far from this conflict.

Under the military rule which lasted from September 1760 until April
1764 there was a Governor at Quebec, one at Three Rivers, one at
Montreal. After civil government began there was a Governor at Quebec
and a military commandant at Montreal. The first military Governor of
Montreal was General Gage, who left in October 1763 to serve in the
operations against Pontiac; after him, until civil government, Colonel
Ralph Burton. Under the military government, based on Amherst's
departing orders, recognizance was made of the organized militia; its
officers and the seigneurs were appointed, along with British officers,
to settle civil disputes as under the customary French law. Military
courts tried criminals. The church was let alone. The "laws of England"
were conveniently stretched to allow Roman Catholics on juries and in
various offices.

A few words are needed here for the proper chronology and geography of
the Peace of 1763 and the thirteen-year interim which followed. The
Peace of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763. George II had died
during the war, October 25, 1760. George III had been proclaimed in
Canada (at Quebec) on January 27, 1761, the day after the news reached
that city overland from New York. Civil government was provided by a
Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763. It did not go into force until
eighteen months later (April 1764), to allow time for Canadians to leave
Canada if they wished. The name of the new province was Quebec; it
remained so till 1791. Both General Murray and General Carleton had
reported that it was impossible to find out the extent of territory
called Canada. But the word Canada was the common designation of the
country from now on.

The boundary of the province of Quebec of 1763-74 was peculiar. On its
south and east sides it was much as now, but with the adjacent territory
still called Massachusetts, there being no New Brunswick till 1784 and
no Maine till 1820. It crossed the St. Lawrence River in latitude 45
(present southern boundary). Then it struck off on its own account in a
beeline for Lake Nipissing, then a beeline to Lake St. John (northwest
of Quebec City), then another beeline to the sources of the River St.
John (of the north shore), and down this to where it met the St.
Lawrence north of Anticosti Island. These "beelines" were never drawn
and were forgotten after 1774. They passed through country, some of it
little known and some of it not known at all. No one then knew where the
headquarters of the St. John were, and it is tribute to the vastness of
our country that even now, or as late as the official map of 1940,
nobody knows it. It is filled in with little dots, unexplored. Few
people even in Canada have ever heard of this St. John (St. Jean) River.
But it is there, about the same length as the Thames.

       *       *       *       *       *

Much has been said about the exodus from Canada at the conquest,
including those who returned to France immediately after the
capitulation of Montreal, and those leaving as permitted within eighteen
months after the final signature of peace in 1763. The legend grew into
our history that all the "best" people abandoned French Canada after the
conquest, leaving behind only the lower town classes and the peasantry.
Even accepting the word "best" in the dubious use here made of it, it
hardly seems that the legend has support. In the first place there is no
doubt that a great many of the "worst" people went away in the persons
of Bigot the Intendant and his pack of fellow crooks, Cadet, Pean, and
company, the officials whose rapacity had impoverished the country. The
trials that followed in France acquitted the Marquis de Vaudreuil of any
personal guilt but sent a number of his subordinates to prison.

In the next place it seems to be shown that a substantial majority of
the seigneurs of the colony remained in Canada. The French-Canadian
authorities themselves differ on this point. But the Harvard historian
of the seignorial system, Professor W. B. Munro, finds that the exodus
was "in all probability not so great as historians have usually
supposed." Above all, the clergy remained at their post. The late Judge
Baby of Montreal made a painstaking survey of the case and concluded
that 130 seigneurs, 100 gentry, 125 traders of mark, 25 lawyers, and 25
or 30 doctors, with the great majority of the notaries, remained in
Canada. The number of seignorial holdings before the conquest is put at
218, but at any given time the number of individual seigneurs would be
less.

What further complicates the matter is that after the conquest
British-owned seigneuries came into existence. General Murray granted
two before the final treaty: Murray Bay to Captain John Nairn, and
Mount Murray to Captain Fraser. Many seigneuries also were bought by
British officials, officers, and presently by rich merchants. Sir John
Johnston got Argenteuil; General Burton bought three or four; Haldimand
had Sorel, and presently Simon McTavish had Terrebonne. Montreal, of
course, remained as it was under the Sulpicians, and it seems certain
from the list of seventy-four names compiled by Judge Baby that
practically all the prominent French merchants remained in the town.

Unhappily the British garrison was not the only British element, so
called, which took up its quarters in Montreal at this time. It was a
misfortune for the town, and it gave an unhappy turn to its history,
that the first English-speaking incomers were birds of a poor feather.
In those days every army on the march drew to it a miscellaneous
assortment of "camp followers," "traders," "sutlers," and miscellaneous
hangers-on who followed its march as birds follow a ship. Victory
brought them like vultures to a corpse. The people here concerned, no
doubt with many honorable exceptions, were rather birds of prey than
patriots. Yet, being "old subjects" of King George and being
Protestants, they were able to represent themselves as on an entirely
different footing from alien "papists" newly taken over. Moreover, the
proclamation of civil government had authorized the summons of an
assembly as in the other provinces. The recent summons of an assembly at
Halifax (1758) seemed to point the way. But such assemblies consisted
solely of Protestants elected by Protestants. Such an election in Quebec
would be as impolitic as it would be unjust. The common sense of the
military men would have none of it. But the traders clamored for it,
noisy as rooks.

General Murray was round in his denunciation of such people. Murray,
like most of the British officers and soldiers now left in Canada, got
along admirably with the French Canadians and especially admired the
plain people of the colony, their simplicity of life, their sincere
religion. He resented the disturbance occasioned by the newcomers, the
trickery of their trade, their clamor for privilege and favors, their
attempts to introduce the British practice of imprisonment for debt as
an adjunct to their dealing with their local debtors. "Most of them," he
wrote home, "were followers of the army, of mean education, or soldiers
disbanded at the reduction of the troops. All have their fortunes to
make, and I fear few are solicitous about the means when the end can be
obtained. I report them to be in general the most immoral collection of
men I ever knew, of course, little calculated to make the new subjects
enamored with our laws, religion, and customs, far less adapted to
enforce these laws and to govern. . . . Magistrates," he continued,
"were to be made and juries to be composed from four hundred and fifty
contemptible sutlers and traders."

Murray's denunciation of these rapacious and unscrupulous traders has
passed into history. With it goes the warm and affectionate words in
which he speaks of the French-Canadian people, the "King's new
subjects," as the phrase of the moment had it.

"Little, little," wrote Murray (October 29, 1764), "will content the new
subjects, but nothing will satisfy the licentious fanatics trading here
but the expulsion of the Canadians who are perhaps the bravest and best
race upon the globe, a race who, could they be indulged with a few
privileges which the laws of England deny to Roman Catholics at home,
would soon get the better of every national antipathy to their
conquerors and become the most faithful, the most useful set of men in
the American Empire."

Murray's intemperate language betrays itself. It is like that of the
lady in Shakespeare, who "doth protest too much." It has been criticized
and overcriticized by the historians. One even calls it "childish,"
forgetting that out of the mouths of children comes truth. And the truth
is that Murray shared with most gentlemen of his day the feeling of
class, the liking for aristocracy, for military officers as opposed to
men in trade, and the desire for a lower class, lowly and submissive, as
even the rubric of the church could wish them. Yet his language is truth
stated in hyperbole. When we say that our friend is the best fellow in
the world we know exactly what we mean, and equally so of our opponent
as the lowest skunk out of jail. Murray spoke and wrote that way; there
are many of us who still do and can understand him. He meant that the
French Canadians were a mighty decent people and that a lot of the new
traders were crooks.

But in reality General Murray, like Sir Guy Carleton after him, paid the
French colony but a sorry compliment. They were soldiers. They dreamed
of French Canada as a military outpost of the King, loyal and devoted,
with a "stubborn peasantry" ready at any time to leave the harvest field
for the field of war, without asking why. The "sutlers" and "fanatics,"
after all, had a better dream, and it came true.

These latter people who came to Montreal immediately with, and on the
heels of, the British armies no doubt were in the main a poor lot. But
it is necessary here to make a proper distinction between these early
"fanatics," these birds of prey who settled on the conquered country,
and the solid British, particularly Scottish, business element which, as
it were, presently effected a reformation of Montreal. We can call these
newcomers, if we wish, for purposes of humor, the original Montreal
"businessmen," but in reality we must distinguish the sheep from the
goats, and particularly the first nondescript class who came on the
heels of the army, and the people of means, or at least of honorable
industry and capacity, who came later. Nor did the distinction always
turn on wealth itself.

The truth is that for Montreal the age of commerce and finance, of the
Northwest fur trade and the timber and shipping trades, now began in
earnest. The conquest brought great opportunities for the expansion of
legitimate trade and legitimate profits from the new route to the West
now afforded. The fur trade of the Great Lakes, and even of the Hudson
Bay territory, could henceforth be reached by Montreal, to say nothing
of the now-open access to the Ohio country. But these earliest incomers
were attracted rather by the hope of immediate gain on the spot than by
the more distant prospect of further enterprise.

Let us take as illustrating the period the two contrasted types of
British citizens of Montreal as seen in Thomas Walker and James McGill.
Walker's name, long since gone to deserved oblivion in popular memory,
filled an undeserved space in the annals of the day. He was not,
however, an impecunious camp follower but a man of wealth who had come
up from Boston to make hay in the new sunshine. It is said that he
brought ten thousand pounds sterling. He thus commanded influence with
the authorities in London. Money can be seen a long way off. Indeed it
was Walker's influence which presently led to the petition for General
Murray's (undeserved) recall in 1766. Walker, from his first coming,
took the lead in the true-British ultra-Protestant movement, demanding
popular rights and using his wealth and influence to advance his
fortune. This attempt, which seemed like the exploitation of a beaten
enemy, so angered the officers of the British garrison that presently
Walker's house was broken into, he himself "beaten up," losing part of
an ear (December 6, 1764). Later on, amid great excitement, a group of
officers were arrested, taken down to Quebec, and placed in custody. The
indictment failed for all but one. The affair dragged for years. But the
episode, as said, enabled Walker to use his influence to get Murray
recalled. As the trouble with the American provinces grew, Walker turned
his British coat inside out and was warm in sympathy with the
Continental Congress. Sir Guy Carleton, who evidently detested Walker,
had him arrested when the "Army of Congress," as will be seen, was
preparing to attack Montreal. He put him in irons in a cell for a month
and, when compelled to leave Montreal, he took Walker along, still in
irons, in the hold of a ship. The capture of the ship set Walker free.
We can hardly wonder if he turned rebel in earnest. Back in Montreal he
sat on the right hand of Benedict Arnold in the winter of the American
occupation and as a result had to clear out when the Americans were
forced to withdraw. Benjamin Franklin, who found himself Walker's fellow
traveler on his Canadian pilgrimage, wrote him down, along with his wife
for good measure, with his usual insight: "I think they both have an
excellent talent for making themselves enemies, and I believe, live
where they will, they never will be long without them." Walker never
returned to Canada.

But compare James McGill, a newcomer of the same period. Walker's name
is forgotten, but that of McGill never will be while students can still
sing. The campus of McGill University echoes with his praise at its
every outing.

    _James McGill, James McGill,
    He's our father, oh, yes, rather--
    James McGill._

McGill was a young Scotsman who had migrated to North America. He came
up from the provinces to Montreal a few years after the cession. He was
one of the first of many such young men from his native land, with no
great means, looking for opportunity, and bringing energy, brains, and
character to offer for it. He throve early and honestly. It was his
peculiar lot to be one of the little committee which surrendered
Montreal to General Montgomery without a fight. This was plain
necessity, Carleton and the soldiers being gone. But McGill threw in his
lot with the old flag; he filled a large page in the history of the
city, and, dying (1813), left the noble bequest which has made his name
known round the world.

This vexed situation lasted for the ten years from the institution of
civil government till the Quebec Act of 1774. The fate of Canada was
still uncertain, but the reports sent home, as in particular by General
Murray, of the fertility and resources of the country were making for
its retention as a British colony. This led to suggestions in certain
quarters for making it truly British, for setting up Protestant schools.
"The intention," writes Dr. Atherton, after reviewing the evidence of
public documents, "was precisely to tolerate for a time the Romish
religion and gradually to supplant it." Fortunately unforeseen obstacles
turned aside the current of events.

But naturally the period was perplexed and uncertain. The military
Governors, on excellent terms with both seigneurs and habitants, let the
French go their own way. They applied the French customary law, which
they found in use, to all controversies over property and other civil
matters, applying the British criminal law, as was equally natural, for
the punishment of crime. Sir Guy Carleton, who followed Murray as acting
Governor of Canada in 1766 and Governor in 1768, shared Murray's views
and attitude toward the French Canadians and was equally severe in his
general view of the newcomers. Yet in a sense they brought, or helped to
develop, a boom in trade. A customs house was set up in Montreal in
1763, and for the first time the harbor assumed the appearance of a real
port. The British merchants claimed, as early as 1771, that "they have
set examples and given every encouragement in their power to promote
industry . . . and carry on three fourths of the trade of this country."
This plea appears in the petition sent to England in 1771, signed by
thirty-one merchants of Quebec and Montreal, asking for an assembly.
Among the Montreal names are to be recognized those of James McGill,
Alexander Henry, John Porteous, Isaac Todd, and other fathers of civic
history.

As against this there went to London a petition from fifty-nine
"Canadians?" praying for the retention of their old laws and customs.
Hence imperial policy was locked in a dilemma. To create an assembly,
under the existing law of England which shut out Roman Catholics, would
obviously be as unwise as unjust. To deny it to British Protestant
subjects seemed a breach in the walls of Britain. It was hard to know
what to do.

As usual something else happened instead--that "unexpected" which the
proverb says always happens. The fate of Canada was tied up with that of
the American provinces. The dispute over taxation that followed the
close of war in 1763 began as controversy, then turned to legislative
action with the taxes of the Stamp Act of 1765, repealed on protest, but
with an act of 1766 protesting that it was justified. Then came more
legislative acts with customs duties, made and repealed, all except the
tea tax, then open resistance and the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773.
But as yet, as Franklin said afterward, no one talked of independence,
whether drunk or sober.

To punish the provinces the British government passed the Quebec Act of
1774. This act extended the boundaries of Canada (still called Quebec)
to take in all the vast, scarcely known country between the Ohio and the
Mississippi; this territory would be thus placed out of reach of
provincial interference and under the safe control of the Crown. The act
declared it inexpedient to call an assembly, thus cutting the ground
from under the feet of popular liberty over an area that reached from
Labrador to the Mississippi. More than that, the act protected the Roman
Catholic Church, giving it not only full freedom of worship but the
right to collect its wonted tithe (an agricultural land tax) from its
own people. This practically meant "establishment" or something very
close to it. The act was, and remains by its continuation through the
statutes of 1791, 1841, and 1867, the palladium of the privileges of the
Roman Catholic Church. It meant, in the sequel, the retention of Canada
by the British Crown. But it was dearly bought at the price of losing
the American provinces. The oil thrown on the troubled waters of
Canadian discontent was oil on the flame of American rebellion.
Controversy was exchanged for war. Within a few months Montreal found
itself again occupied by an alien army.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Letter to the Minister at Paris, September 1760.




CHAPTER VII

The American Occupation of Montreal

     _The Old House on Notre Dame Street. The American Revolution.
     The Invasion of Canada. Ethan Allen's Attempt at Montreal.
     General Montgomery and the Army of Congress Occupy the City.
     Benedict Arnold at Montreal. Benjamin Franklin. Close of the
     Revolution and the Coming of the Loyalists._


There was placed on an old house in the business district of Montreal,
on the corner of Notre Dame and St. John streets, a tablet to the memory
of that brave and honorable man, the American general, Richard
Montgomery. He was killed, as all remember, outside the gates of Quebec,
in a hopeless attempt at assault, in a driving snowstorm, made late at
night on December 31, 1775. This tablet serves to remind us of that
peculiar episode in the history of the city, the American occupation of
Montreal in 1775-76. Montgomery himself, with his "Army of Congress,"
was in Montreal for only about two weeks. But after his departure for
his attack on Quebec, American forces occupied the city all the ensuing
winter and spring, until the change in the fortunes of war compelled
their withdrawal.

The house thus marked was a sturdy stone building of 1767, still defiant
of wind and weather after almost two centuries of existence. It stood,
as we might expect, on what we now call the south side (the riverside)
of the street. Notre Dame Street on the other side has long since been
rebuilt as the back door of the opulence of St. James Street. But on its
lower side it still carries the trace of the old French town. The house
disappeared under demolition only a year or so ago.

Richard Montgomery[17] was a very striking man whom both friends and
enemies were glad to honor. He was American only in the sense that he
had settled in America. Born in Dublin County, Ireland, he entered the
British army and served at Louisburg and under Wolfe in the Battle of
the Plains of Abraham. A little after the war (1772) he left the army,
settled in New York, and married into the famous Livingstone family. His
enthusiasm led him to join the forces raised by the Continental
Congress. At the time of his Canadian enterprise Montgomery was a fine
upstanding man, universally liked and respected. "He was tall and
slender, well-limbed, of a graceful address and a strong and active
frame." The quotation is from a eulogy pronounced in his memory in
Congress.

The situation which had placed General Montgomery in these headquarters
at Montreal was this. The Quebec Act of 1774 had blighted the last hopes
for conciliation. The Americans of the thirteen colonies saw themselves
thereby robbed of the vast inland Ohio territory, which the recent war
had just disclosed as a promised land. It was to be handed over to the
government under the Crown, without popular rights, with a feudal tenure
of land, without the common law or trial by jury. This seemed the
eclipse of colonial freedom. Still more could be made, for indignation's
sake, and was made, of the privileges granted to the Roman Catholic
Church throughout this vast "Quebec" of the Quebec Act (1774). The
pulpits of New England thundered against idolatry.

Events moved fast. The colonists called a Congress at Philadelphia. The
Congress denounced the Quebec Act in unsparing terms. Both sides,
malcontents and military authorities, reached out to seize arms and
munitions. This led to the clashes of Lexington and Concord, to the
seizing of the key point of Ticonderoga, to the raising of a Continental
Army, to the battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775) and the investment of
Boston.

An early and obvious move was to invade Canada, not to conquer it but to
call it to liberty. As early as May 1775 American revolutionary bands
appeared round Lake Champlain.[18] Carleton's attempt to raise local
forces to meet the threat showed at once how matters stood. The French
Canadians mainly kept themselves aloof from a quarrel between two
British factions (_les Bostonnais_ [Yankees] and _les Anglais_). The
English Canadians, most of them from the provinces, were largely on the
side of the Congress. In Montreal on May 4, 1775, a meeting composed of
most of the English of the town was harangued by a New England delegate
and urged to send two deputies to a new Congress which was to assemble
in Philadelphia on the tenth of the month. Carleton wrote to England in
June of the failure to induce either habitants or Indians to take up
arms.

The first American forces withdrew, but their reconnaissance was
followed by a definite invasion of Canada by an "Army of Congress,"
under General Schuyler, coming by the familiar gateway of Lake
Champlain. Schuyler falling ill, his place was taken by Richard
Montgomery. The plan included the entry into Canada of a second force
under Colonel Benedict Arnold, by a sidetrack through the Massachusetts
(now Maine) wilderness. The armies were to converge on Quebec as welcome
liberators, its gates to open at their approach. Unfortunately the
sympathy of the Canadian seigneurs and the clergy, if not of the mass,
had been lost at the start by the fierce denunciation by the Congress of
the Roman Catholic religion, as embodied in their "address to the people
of Great Britain." They declared that it had "deluged your island with
blood and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion
throughout every part of the world."

With that, and the invective of the pulpits, the invitation to join
Congress (October 26, 1774) seemed like that of the wolf to the lamb,
the call to the ducks on the pond. Meantime Sir Guy Carleton remained in
Montreal but began to realize that any attempt to gather local forces
adequate for defense was impossible. Carleton wrote to England from
Montreal (September 21, 1775): "The rebels have been more successful
with the habitants and have raised them in great numbers." At the same
time his deputy (Cremah) at Quebec wrote to him: "No means have been
left untried to bring the Canadian peasantry to a sense of their
duty . . . but all to no purpose."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was plain, therefore, that neither the French Canadians nor the
French-Canadian Indians would take part in the conflict. All turned on
the relative strength of the irregular "Army of Congress" and Carleton's
available troops. It was soon plain that Carleton's were hopelessly
outnumbered. The Congress forces descended the Richelieu and surrounded
St. Johns (September 1775). Its fall would leave Montreal helpless. Yet
the first attempt to take Montreal, while Montgomery was still investing
St. Johns (July 25, 1775), failed utterly. It was made by that strange
character, Ethan Allen of Vermont, whose name is in every American
school history. He was a great giant of a man, blasphemous and fearless,
the leader of the gang called the Green Mountain Boys, who lived in a
perennial state of protest and violence against the land claims of the
province of New York to their native mountains.[19] Allen, a mixture of
mountain bandit and village atheist, was the natural leader of such men.
Violence was his trade and profanity his breath. The province had
outlawed him; the Revolution made him a patriot. He it was who broke
into Fort Ticonderoga on the night of May 10, 1775, driving the
frightened sentries in front of him and shouting, "In the name of the
Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." The schoolbooks stop there.
They do not record the series of oaths which followed, "so shocking,"
says Allen's latest biographer, "that his own men listened in rapt
wonder."

Ethan Allen had joined in the invasion of Canada. He was not exactly
part of Schuyler's army. He had just "come along." He had no commission
and was only "colonel" because the "boys" had made him one by choice at
Ticonderoga. Schuyler and then Montgomery let him act as a sort of
scout. He went on down the Richelieu, his strange personality gathering
forces to join him. He presently had two hundred followers, mostly
Canadians, partly armed, and with a commissariat of six hogsheads of
rum. He wrote to Montgomery: "I could raise two thousand in a week's
time."

In the same district was another leader, Major John Brown, with two
hundred men. He proposed to Allen that they seize Montreal. Ethan Allen
was all for it. "Montreal," he said, "or a turf jacket." He made his
plan: Brown to come from La Prairie and attack the upstream end of the
town, Allen to cross from Longueuil and fight his way into Montreal by
the Quebec road. Brown's signal that he was ready to assault was to be
"three loud huzzas."

The whole attempt was a strange fiasco. Allen's men, when they changed
from rum to fighting, fell away at once. Only one hundred and ten got to
Longueuil, ninety of them French Canadians. They were induced to stay by
a promise of fifteen pence a day and a share of the plunder of Montreal.
Allen got his raggedy army across from Longueuil by night in boat- and
canoe-loads, trip by trip. They gathered somewhere below the city on the
Quebec road close to Longue Pointe. The sun rose; day came. There were
no "huzzas" or signals, and it is doubtful if they could have been heard
anyway (McGill Street to Longue Pointe). Major Brown, from lack of faith
or lack of courage, had dropped out.

Word reached Carleton's garrison. A sortie of five hundred men--in part
regular troops and Indians--made resistance hopeless. Yet Allen fought.
As a piece of tactics he ordered half his men to "outflank" the
regulars. They "outflanked" them so far that they were never seen again.
Allen sent a second flanking party on the other side. They too flanked
for good. Allen and the rest (thirty-one men) fought from behind stumps
and in ditches. Many fell wounded, none dead. Then they surrendered.
Indians leaped at Allen to kill him. He grabbed a British officer and
used him as a shield. The officers treated Allen with admiration and
respect. But at Montreal General Prescott flew into hysterical rage and
raised his cane. "By God, sir," said Ethan Allen with his great fist
shaking in Prescott's face, "you will do well not to strike me, for I'm
not accustomed to it."

They treated him abominably. He was put on board a ship in the river,
heavily ironed to a bar eight feet long. Thus he stayed six weeks before
being taken to Quebec and thence to England. The story of his brutal
treatment makes sad reading but happily does not belong in the present
record. Allen remained two years in chains, was exchanged back to
America, founded, after the Revolution, the independent republic of
Vermont, but died in 1789 before it became a state.

Carleton was sufficiently encouraged by this defeat of Ethan Allen to
form hopes of staying on. He gathered, with the help of the seigneurs, a
force of eight hundred men on St. Helens Island. The attempt was
hopeless. His men deserted at the fate of thirty or forty each night.
The fall of St. Johns (November 1775) left no hope except to save the
citadel of Quebec. Carleton put what forces he could on ships and
bateaux and left for Quebec: taking Thomas Walker as a prisoner, as
already said. American forces, operating on the river, captured all but
Carleton's own boat. Walker returned in triumph to Montreal. Tables
turned quickly in such unstable days.

Montgomery, having taken St. Johns, moved on Montreal by way of La
Prairie and across the water to Nuns Island (St. Pauls). Resistance
being hopeless, a committee of leading townsmen, chosen in a general
meeting, six French, six British, came out to arrange terms of
surrender. The French were Pierre Panet, Pierre Mezire, St. George
Dupr, Louis Carignant, Franois Malhoit, and Pierre Guy. The British
included James McGill, John Porteous, Richard Huntley, John Blake,
Edward William Gray, James Finlay.

They had prepared a long, indeed a windy, list of terms, French
eloquence here mingling for the first rime with Scottish
exactitude--free religion, free this, free that, open trade with
England, etc., etc. Montgomery, with characteristic sense and humor,
waved it all aside. The city, he said, was his for the taking. As for
these liberties, he had no intention of taking away any of them. The
only one he could not offer was trade with England, a thing beyond his
power. "Come then, my brethren," he said, "unite with us in an
indissoluble union; we will run toward the same goal."

Thereupon Montgomery's Army of Congress marched into Montreal, as
Amherst's army had, by the Recollet Gate, at the corner of McGill and
Notre Dame. This time, however, there were no Highland pipes, no tossing
feathers, no scarlet uniforms--except some that Montgomery's army had
taken from his prisoners. The "Army of Congress" was a raggedy lot. The
men were dressed mostly in hunting suits, carried rifles and short axes,
tomahawks and long knives. The flags they carried were plain crimson
cloth, some with a darker rim. There were no stars and no stripes. The
stripes appear on Washington's flag of the next new year (1776), a
British Union Jack of the day (no Ireland), and thirteen red and white
stripes. The glory of the stars only came after independence. The Stars
and Stripes never flew over Montreal. Why should they? For the oddity of
the whole invasion is that from the beginning to the end all the parties
to it were subjects of King George III, some loyal, some disloyal, and
most nothing in particular. In any case the invasion was all over (June
14, 1776) before the Declaration of Independence.

Montgomery's own stay in the city, at the headquarters spoken of, was
very brief. He left Montreal (November 28, 1775) with his main forces
for the real object of his expedition, an attempt to seize Quebec. In
this he was to be joined by the force under Colonel Benedict Arnold, the
Judas Iscariot of the American Revolution, still serving his first
master. Arnold was a dressed-up soldier with a real uniform, with a hat
all plumes, and a commission from Congress. Ethan Allen, with a volley
of oaths, had put Arnold into his place; namely, none at all, at
Ticonderoga. But he has contrived, partly perhaps by his hat and
feathers, to impose himself on American history. His march to Quebec
"through the Maine wilderness"; that is, by going up the Kennebec River
and coming down the Chaudire, has been extolled as a great feat of
history. As the Revolution drifted into the past the march became a
legend, and heroic accounts were written such as Judge Henry's
"Hardships and Sufferings of the Band of Heroes," dictated in extreme
old age. Such stories tell how the men upset their food in the river,
ate their moccasins, and how a great number deserted. If so, they must
have managed very badly. The venerable Canadian historian, Professor
Kingsford, who wrote his voluminous pages with the detachment of a
mathematician, says that Arnold's expedition "through the wilderness"
was much the same as what Canadians now regard as a camping holiday. The
season was just right, too late for flies, too early for winter. The
route had all been marked out some years before as a blazed trail by an
English military officer. There were no enemies and no casualties. They
left friendly people on one side of the divide and found friendly people
on the other. Kennebec and Chaudire are still there, and anyone can go
and make the portage. If he upsets his canoe and eats his boots he is
scarcely a hero.

Reaching the St. Lawrence, Arnold made what is called his "unsuccessful
assault on Quebec." There was no assault. His men approached the
fortress and gave three rousing cheers, expecting a welcome. Instead
they roused the discharge of a cannon. Arnold retreated upstream,
waiting for Montgomery. While he was waiting Sir Guy Carleton, in a
canoe with muffled paddles, slipped past Arnold's forces at night and
got into the citadel.

Montgomery arrived. On the night of December 31, 1775, he led his forces
in the dead of night in a snowstorm up a sideways road against the main
gate of Quebec. They never reached it. A single discharge of a cannon by
an alert night watch laid Montgomery and twelve of his men dead. The
snow buried them as they lay. The garrison dug them out in the morning.
And Montgomery was buried under the bastions. All the world praised him.
"The whole city of Philadelphia," says Bancroft, "was in tears." Even in
England "the defenders of liberty vied in his praise." "He was a rebel",
said Fox, "but all saviors of their country have been called rebels."
Arnold's forces remained around Quebec until the spring.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meantime, Montreal was under the charge of the veteran General Wooster,
whose role was that, so familiar now, of the old hero of the last war,
no good in this. Things in Montreal went from bad to worse. Overseas
trade was gone. The "Army of Congress" brought no ready money except the
continental dollar (just issued, July 1775) and Massachusetts bills.
Local sympathizers, betting on the wrong horse, subscribed funds at
first, James Price as much as 20,000 in all, but such sources soon ran
dry. Wooster's rule was of that mixture of lenience and severity which
always fails. Many Tories were arrested and fined, a good number sent
away to New York Province. In social life the "best" people kept away
from the Americans.

The town, by the end of the winter, was in a ferment. Colonel Hazen, who
commanded at Montreal after Wooster left for Quebec (March 23, 1776) and
till Arnold arrived, wrote to General Schuyler: "The clergy are
unanimous . . . against our cause . . . with respect to the better sort
of people, both French and English . . . seven eighths are Tories, who
would wish to see our throats cut."

Arnold arrived back from Quebec in May 1776. Headquarters had been moved
to the Chteau de Ramezay, exactly the thing for Arnold's vanity. From
what we read, he attempted entertainment in fine style, but the people
he most wanted stayed away. There then arrived in Montreal, as apostles
of concord, the famous Congressional mission of Benjamin Franklin.[20]
The commissioners were men well chosen: Franklin himself; Samuel Chase
of Maryland, an honorable and patriotic man, and Charles Carroll of
Carrollton, Maryland, the richest man in America. They said he was
"worth" 150,000; from all records his heart was worth more. Carroll was
a Roman Catholic, and he brought his brother John Carroll, who was a
Jesuit priest or had been until the recent suppression (1772). Both the
Carrolls spoke French. The mission brought with it a printing press duly
installed in the basement of the Chteau de Ramezay with a French
printer, Fleury Mesplet, the first in Montreal to work it. The idea was
to disseminate light among the French habitants.

The mission on its arrival was entertained with a party of Montreal
society in the chteau. They were lodged in the Besancourt house, just
beside the chteau, as mentioned in the last chapter, occupied at the
moment by Thomas Walker, lately rescued from the British and now the
leading rebel of the town. The mission from the start was a flat
failure. Franklin has left hardly anything on record about it; one may
judge that he was ashamed of it. Later on the printing press "in a
community where only one in five hundred could read and write" struck
him as funny. "We ought to have brought schoolmasters," he said. Yet the
printing press turned up trumps, or at least type. When the commission
left, Mesplet stayed on. He printed little books, works of devotion, and
such. The first book printed in Montreal was _Rglement de la Confrrie
de l'Adoration Perpetuelle du Saint Sacrement_ (1776). A press brought
to Quebec had printed a manual of devotion as early as 1765. Presently
Mesplet got out a French newspaper, _La Gazette_ (1778), which became
bilingual in 1788, and presently forgot its French to become the city's
metropolitan English morning paper.

The Carrolls failed also. Not even a Jesuit could persuade people that
the Roman Catholic religion would be happier under the Acts of Congress
than under the Quebec Act. Carroll's argument reminds one of the famous
plea of a later American trust magnate, "Leave the consumer to us." It
was equally unsuccessful. As danger gathered down the St. Lawrence the
commissioners cleared out, Franklin on May 11, 1776, in company with
Walker and his wife; the rest on May 29. Arnold and his "Army of
Congress" also cleared out (June 17), Arnold taking with him from
Montreal a lot of plundered goods which he sold in Albany.

All this happened before the Declaration of Independence of July 4,
1776.

With the close of the American invasion of Canada, Montreal ceased to be
a part of the theater of conflict, and the history of the long years of
war that ended only with the Peace of 1783 belongs elsewhere. Only for
one brief period did it look as if war might come again to Montreal. The
entrance of France into the war as the ally of the United States (1778)
put a new complexion on the scene. Already the young Marquis de
Lafayette, coming to America to join Washington "on his own," had
eagerly advocated the invasion of Canada. The French alliance and the
arrival of the French fleet opened a wide opportunity. Lafayette
obtained the warm support of Admiral d'Estaing and a favoring vote of
Congress. He proposed to ask France for five thousand new troops. He
would invade Canada at both ends and in the middle, striking at Montreal
by way of the Connecticut River. Congress approved the plan. D'Estaing
sent to Montreal a proclamation (October 28, 1778) entitled _Dclaration
Adresse au Nom du Roi  Tous les Anciens Franais de l'Amrique
Septentrionale_. It called upon the French of Canada to return to their
native allegiance. "You were born French. There is no other house so
august as that of Henry IV, under which the French can be happy and
serve with delight." But the note was wrongly pitched. Many plain French
Canadians, after eighteen years of fairly fair play and of religious
freedom, felt less sure of Henry IV. But even at that the appeal shook
French-Canadian clerical and seignorial opinion. Sir Fredrick Haldimand,
who had succeeded Carleton as the Governor of Canada (1778-86), wrote
home: "Since the address of the Count d'Estaing and a letter of M. de
Lafayette many of the priests have changed their opinions." Jesuit
missionaries, it was reputed, were seeking to rouse the Caughnawaga
Indians for the Congress. Haldimand buried himself with defensive
measures on the Richelieu to cover Montreal. But the danger passed.
General Washington himself averted it. To his sagacious mind a French
conquest of Canada would turn back the clock of the history of North
America. There was no invasion. Without it, revolt in Canada was
impossible.

       *       *       *       *       *

But though the war of the Revolution, after its opening phases, affected
Montreal but little, the conclusion of peace affected it and all Canada
a great deal. For it led to a new American occupation which settled the
future destiny of the country by the incoming of the United Empire
Loyalists. Their migration, which brought forty thousand settlers to
British North America within one generation, was on a scale unknown to
the world of that day. Even before the peace was ratified they were
leaving New York in shipfuls; after it, in fleets. They swarmed into
Nova Scotia when a fishing village such as Shelburne became a town, or
rather a camp, as large as Boston. The mainland section of Nova Scotia
became New Brunswick with twelve thousand settlers in 1784. Other
Loyalists made their entry across New York State by way of Oswego and
Niagara. Others again came all the way round by river and sea, with
Montreal as the great point of distribution. For many this trip took two
seasons, the winter spent on the way. Many stayed in Montreal.

The new settlers transformed the country. They brought the English
language on their lips and British freedom, as expanded in America, in
their hearts. Patterned on their minds were the Massachusetts
schoolhouse, free education for all. Thanksgiving turkey, town
government, election to office, everybody at least as good as everybody
else and perhaps better. This incoming flood broke the mold in which
French Canada was cast. Into empty Upper Canada it came, to use a
metaphor older than our glass bottles, as new wine to a new bottle,
needing all the bottle to itself; into Lower Canada, as new wine into an
old bottle, endeavoring to stretch the skin. Hence the clamor from
Montreal for the government to open up land that was not seignorial and
to divide it into "townships," to make it seem like home. Hence
presently the Eastern Townships. Here belongs the famous petition from
Montreal (November 24, 1784) asking for an assembly. It carried 246
names, all British except Levi Solomons, and a few odd names difficult
to classify. The second name is James McGill. With this from all British
quarters came the desire and the demand for British institutions, for
government by vote, for separate rule in Upper Canada.

Strangely enough, Lord Dorchester--the title borne by Sir Guy Carleton
soon after his return as Governor General of Canada, Nova Scotia, and
New Brunswick in 1786--was lukewarm in the cause of change. He thought
it unwise to divide the provinces, argued that the demand for an
assembly came only from the commercial class in Montreal and in Quebec,
and that the gentlemen and the clergy were still against it. Dorchester
was sixty-two years old. Age will have its way. Thus divided councils
held action in suspense.

The current stirred not only political life but economic life as well.
Here begin for Montreal new industries, of new character and importance,
such as the first attempts toward the export timber trade that presently
made the St. Lawrence raft a unique feature of the Canadian scene. Men
of brains and energy were attracted by the new Montreal as by a magnet.
Here enters on its annals, in 1782, the name of Molson, which henceforth
echoes down the history of the city in the throb of the steamship, the
tinkle of the bank tellers' coins, the whisper of the college library,
and the roar of the college stadium. At its first coming it breathed in
a softer atmosphere. Young John Molson, aged eighteen, came out from
Lincolnshire, a country where the moist climate of the fens and fields
breathes malt with the air and where brewing is a hereditary, domestic
art. This art, unknown in French Canada, Molson brought to Montreal. Mr.
B. K. Sandwell, the biographer of the Molson family, speaks of young
John Molson's opportunity with something like awe. "He found a large,
prosperous, and growing population entirely without local supplies of
the national beverage." Molson built his brewery a little way downstream
from the town, close beside the river. Archaeologists can easily locate
the spot as the brewery is still there.

But if the man found the opportunity, the opportunity had also found the
man. Within a decade brewing was but one of Molson's many activities. As
Henry Ford, exactly a hundred years later, tinkered in his back yard
with a "gasoline buggy," so did Molson on the riverbank tinker with a
"steamboat." Accentuate both syllables instead of one, "steam, boat," as
they named the thing yet to be contrived, and the past will rise before
you.

Nor was Molson the only man of opportunity, remaking Montreal. There
were dozens of them. Most of all is this true of the fur trade which at
this period got the new impetus that created the Northwest Company and
wrote history. There are certain trades and avocations dear to the human
heart, and certain others repugnant. All the world loves a sailor,
suspects a lawyer, and avoids a professor. The fur trade is one that
carries a peculiar attraction--the open air, the splash of the canoe,
the smell of the pine woods, the campfire, and the lullaby of falling
water. . . . This native attraction now joined with new opportunity. Now
that England owned all America to the sunset, British explorers could go
and search for it, as witness Captain Carver's _Travels through the
Interior Parts of North America_. British fur traders could go West by
the new route of the lakes and rivers. Exploration and trade went
together. We may doubt if such men as Alexander Henry and Alexander
Mackenzie knew which they were doing. Henry came first, coming to
Montreal at the time of Montgomery's invasion, and entered on the
Western fur trade, spending many years beyond the Great Lakes on the
plains. On Henry's trail followed a flock of independent traders, every
man for himself, striking out from Montreal into the Lake Superior
wilderness. Common sense showed the folly, in the fur trade among
Indians, of every man for himself, which meant every man for today and
no man for tomorrow. The Montreal traders, under the leadership of
Henry, joined in an association called the Northwest Company. At this
time, there being no statutory companies or company law of
incorporation, except by single charter, the company was really a
partnership. The headquarters were at Montreal, housed presently in the
famous Beaver Hall that stood well outside of the town, southwest of it,
on the slope that perpetuates its name in Beaver Hall Hill. At this
time, and for another thirty years, the fur trade was the leading
commerce of Montreal. Many, if not most, of the substantial men were in
it, there being sixteen shares divided as follows: Todd and McGill, two
shares; Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, two shares; McGill and Paterson,
two shares; McTavish and Company, two shares; Holmes and Grant, two
shares; Walker and Company, two shares; McBeath and Company, two
shares; Ross and Company, one share; Oakes and Company, one share.

Among these Montreal traders was formed in 1785 the famous Beaver Club,
originally of nineteen members, all of them men who had wintered in the
wilds. Later on they let in tamer men, who lived in town, and had
fifty-five members with ten honorary members. They held club nights and
club dinners, told tales about the bush, mixed hot scotch, and sent an
aroma of good cheer down the decades. Their ghosts still walk in the
Montreal Curling Clubs.

This new stimulus to trade affected to some extent the character of the
Port of Montreal. More ships came up from the sea in what was then an
all-British voyage protected by the Navigation Acts. But the number was
still trifling. Except with a very special wind, ships had to be hauled
up against St. Marys current with long teams of oxen, as many even as
forty. The bateaux, as already described, carried practically all the
trade, with transshipment at Quebec. The Durham boat, used in the
States, does not appear in Montreal till later. The steamboat was too
weak to offer a tow--a "tug"--up the current for many years after its
invention. It had all it could do to tug itself. But on the lakes up
above shipbuilding began with settlement itself.

It had been quite obvious that the government of the province of Quebec
(still so called) must be altered, indeed that the province itself must
be altered. The American Loyalists and the French new subjects had too
little in common to amalgamate. Hence the new Constitutional Act (or
Canada Act) of 1791 that cut Quebec in two and set up Lower and Upper
Canada. The ultimate wisdom of this may be left to historians to argue.
It looked like common sense to people in Upper Canada at the time. There
were about 150,000 French and about 15,000 English-speaking Canadians,
with rural French Canada still entirely French, as the Eastern Townships
were not yet opened, and the new Upper Canada settlements entirely
English-speaking.

The new act reiterated the guarantees to the Roman Catholic Church. It
set up provincial legislatures at Quebec and at Toronto, each with an
appointed legislative council and an elected assembly. Montreal now
found itself a parliamentary constituency sending up, or rather down,
four members to Quebec, to the Assembly of fifty. Montreal, meaning the
district around, also sent two members, being one of the new "counties."
With characteristic inanity the government of the day christened the
counties of French Canada with English names and divided Upper Canada
into German districts. Later on both were painlessly removed. When the
first Assembly met at Quebec on December 17, 1792, the Montreal town
members included James McGill--nothing was now complete without him--J.
B. Durocher, James Walker, and Joseph Papineau. In the new Assembly
sixteen members were British and thirty-four French. It was from its
cradle bilingual both in speech and record. It met, though it didn't
know it, on the very eve of England's entry (February 1793) into the
first great war that had already begun and was to last out the lives of
many of them. At the moment no such thought troubled them. The British
were as slow in realizing the approach of war in 1792 as in 1913 and
1938. In Montreal the new members' thoughts were elsewhere: Papineau's
no doubt in his warehouse or on his clever son, Louis Joseph, then six
years old and attending the seminary in Quebec; McGill's thoughts on his
fur trade; Molson's on steam, and all on the pipe of peace.

Thus shifted noiselessly the scene of history. In place of French Canada
was now British North America; the walled French city of Montreal
knocked down its walls (1803) and opened its Harbour Gate to the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] J. L. Lemoine, _The Sword of General Montgomery_, 1870.

[18] V. Coffin, _Province of Quebec and Early American Revolution_,
1896.

[19] See anecdote in _Tree Toad_, R. H. Davis, 1935.

[20] _Journal of Charles Carroll_, 1776.




CHAPTER VIII

Lower Canada

1791-1841

     _A Half Century of Lower Canada. The Great War and the News of
     Trafalgar at Montreal. The Great Peace. A Rapid Age.
     Steamboats. Gaslights. City Government. The Coming of the
     Immigrants. The Cholera Years. Opening the First Railway. The
     Rebellion. Execution of the "Patriotes."_


By an odd coincidence of Canadian history the half century from 1791 to
1841, like the previous 1713-63, actually means a definite period. It
corresponds to the life of the province of Lower Canada, created under
the Act of 1791 and expiring in 1841. Read in the false light and from
the false angle of history as written, until yesterday, to be learned at
school, it seems all fire and smoke, all war, anger, and rebellion. Here
first is the shadow of the great war in Europe, beginning in 1792 and
lasting with just a little break (1802-03), hardly observable from
Montreal, till the city heard in July of 1815 the news of the Battle of
Waterloo of June 18. The war is hardly over till we are dragged forward
to the Rebellion of 1837-38. In such history any little intervals of
quiet seem like boating at Chippewa, above Niagara Falls.

But in reality the period as seen in retrospect by old people in
Montreal in 1841 would not seem like that at all. The war to them was
something like a shadow that came and went, darkening and passing. An
old man might remember the excitement and apprehension that went with
the outbreak of the French Revolution, but more likely, as nothing
happened, he had quite forgotten it. He might remember having heard
people say that Napoleon was going to send a fleet against Montreal.
Among the vivid memories that never left him would be those of Montreal
in 1812-13, with the streets full of soldiers, with every able man under
arms or under a pitchfork, the cheers and shouts, when they heard about
the battle, right close by, at Chteauguay and how three or four hundred
of their own side, they said, had beaten ten times as many Americans.
Still more vivid, only yesterday, only three years ago, would be the
recollection, brief but lurid, of the Rebellion, of the fighting on the
Richelieu, the cruel slaughter in St. Eustache Church, and the hangings
in Montreal.

But those pictures, lurid in the foreground, were not the real scenes of
life, but only patches of fire seen against a wood as evening falls.
Real life, as it came down the years, carried different recollections.
If you were to let the old man tell you all about it (a dangerous
permission to give) you would find that his main recollection of that
half century in Montreal was the terrific change from a period ever so
slow to a period ever so fast. It is with all old men. In fact, the old
man would admit that he didn't know what the world was coming to. Old
men never do. He could recall from his childhood the old French town,
all gardens and seminaries and soft with the sound of the church bells;
could recall looking forty feet down from the great walls of the
fortification (eighteen feet high) at the pasture of the common and the
river and the bateaux hauled up on the mud. Why, in those days you took
a good part of a week, or even more, to come from Quebec. Ships would
lie down there, below the current; they might be a fortnight waiting for
a wind. But now, in 1841, a steamboat runs you back and forward over the
river or rushes you across to La Prairie to get on a train that whirls
you away to St. Johns at fifteen miles an hour--another steamboat and
off again--and in less than a week, in a few days, you're in New York.

Think of that sleepy old French town with perhaps two hundred English
families in it, and this great city of 1841 with forty thousand people,
where you hear English spoken all day, with ocean ships all the way from
Liverpool, with this great Lachine Canal where the little river and the
marshes used to be, but now steamers up and down from the Great Lakes.
Think of the wonderful new gaslight, of this plan for a great bridge to
be made across the river, and people talking of this new fangled
invention they call a magnetic telegraph that takes a message forty
miles through a piece of wire. The old man hopes he doesn't live to see
anything of that sort in Montreal. Perhaps he didn't. It came in 1847,
but he may have died of cholera first.

The enthusiasm of the opening French Revolution, almost bloodless in its
early stage, awoke in foreign lands echoes of sympathy, of sentiment, of
silliness. "The greatest event in the world," said Fox when the Bastille
fell. British "friends of the people" and "Constitutional Clubs" held
gatherings, where lords and lackeys met as equals, "in childish
imitation," says a British historian, "of what was going on across the
channel."[21] In the United States a wave of ultrarepublicanism, with
Phrygian liberty caps and songs and demonstrations, swept the country.
"The American people," says McMaster, "went insane."[22]

Something of this, accentuated by its French nationality, swept over
Montreal also in the early years of the French Jacobin republic
instituted after the execution of the King. Our local histories expand
the disaffection in Montreal into something like a Jacobin movement. But
this is out of all proportion. We have to remember that although Great
Britain and France were at war from February 1793 and all intercourse
suspended, the United States and France remained at peace. Diplomatic
ministers and agents came and went. There was thus an easy access to
Montreal, from Vermont, of all kinds of agitators and spies, people with
no real connection with Canada, sent in by Gent, the new republican
ambassador to the United States, and by Fauchet, his successor. It was
rumored too that the new state of Vermont, looking for new trouble to
replace its old quarrel with New York, had suggested an invasion of
Canada. Dorchester called for two thousand militiamen, a call answered
by only nine hundred. The Governor's common sense told him that this
meant not disloyalty but the disinclination of people grown accustomed
to peace. A certain disaffection there was, but history should rather
stress how little it amounted to than how much.

Take the case of the violent and treasonable pamphlet circulated in
Montreal in 1794 under the title _Les Franais Libres  leurs Frres
Canadiens_. It emanated all too plainly from France. It rang false. Just
as D'Estaing's proclamation of 1778 about Henry IV was too aristocratic,
setting up a throne, this document was too republican, setting up a
guillotine. Its contents, to most plain French Canadians of the day,
whether seigneur or habitant, would seem abominable. It not only
proposed Canada as a free state with equality for all, votes and offices
for all, but it cut out all hereditary rights, titles, and claims, as
also all the rights of the Roman Catholic Church, making all religious
cults equal, with clergy elected by the people. This overshot its mark
and effected nothing, except a sort of open invitation to rowdyism that
broke out now and again when Dorchester's strong hand was gone (July
1796). There were many arrests and trials.

The assumption of power by Napoleon (1799) ended this form of Jacobin
propaganda. It led instead to a sort of standing Napoleonic scare, rumor
of invasion by a French fleet. There was also "secret" information that
Jerome Bonaparte was going to lead an expedition against Montreal from
the States. British agents in New York sent his description to Montreal,
"twenty-one years of age, five feet six or seven inches high, slender
make, sallow complexion, etc., etc." This was Napoleon's youngest
brother Jerome, at that time in Baltimore, "marooned" in the States by
the British Atlantic fleet. Later he was King of Westphalia and fought
at Waterloo. From him descends the surviving Bonaparte family. If he
actually came to Canada all record of it is lost. But, oddly enough,
Napoleon did plan an invasion of Canada, of which these people never
heard. It was not by way of Montreal. It was to be a roundabout attack
from the rear, initiated from Louisiana and the Mississippi under the
command of General Bernadotte, who told of it later when King of Sweden.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 canceled it.

All this Napoleonic scare passed away with the Battle of Trafalgar. Here
is how the news came to Montreal. On a December evening in 1805 a grand
assembly and ball were being held at the Exchange Coffee House (St. Paul
and St. Peter streets). The supper merriment was at its height when a
messenger came in out of the snow with a great packet of English
newspapers just arrived via New York. They contained Admiral
Collingwood's dispatch recounting the victory of Trafalgar of October
21, 1805. In an instant the whole assembly was in a tumult of
excitement. The very building, we are told, shook with the roaring
hurrahs. But in the midst of the excitement many of the ladies suddenly
broke into tears when it was announced that the victory had cost the
life of Admiral Nelson. In this scene of emotion the chairman, Samuel
Gerard, leaped up and proposed a subscription for a monument to Nelson's
memory. All thronged to write their names. Enough money was subscribed
in a few minutes. This is the Nelson Monument, completed in 1809, and
now standing in Jacques Cartier Square.

These memories, alarms, and dangers, condensed into a page, look
crowded. Spread over ten years they are too thin to attract attention.
Life looked elsewhere. Above all it looked in Montreal to the rising
commercial life, the new fur trade to the Northwest, the English
settlement of the near-by "townships," the continued passage of
immigrants bound for Upper Canada, and the new commerce of the river,
now being revolutionized by steam.

In the eye of history the momentous event was the coming of steam
navigation. Molson's riverside experiments took form. The
_Accommodation_ was launched as steam's first bride of the river,
clumsy, bulky, but still a bride. She slid into the river sideways, down
beside the brewery, in 1809. There are many pictures of this pioneer
steamer, but none, we are told, that can be guaranteed, for photographs,
even the fading daguerreotype in the silk case, were still unknown. But
there is a picture, with every attempt at truth, in the charming little
memorial volume, _Old Montreal_, a treasure of pictured history
published--or may we say "brewed"--by the Molsons when the brewery was
150 years old (1936). We may put with the picture the contemporary
account given by the Quebec _Gazette_ of November 9, 1809, of the first
trip of the _Accommodation_ down to Quebec.

     _The Steam-Boat, which was built at Montreal last winter,
     arrived here on Saturday last, being her first trip. She was 66
     hours on the passage, of which she was at anchor 30. So that 36
     hours is the time which, in her present state, she takes to
     come down from Montreal to Quebec (over 160 statute miles). On
     Sunday last she went up against wind and tide from Brehault's
     wharf to Lymburner's; but her progress was very slow. It is
     obvious that her machinery at present has not sufficient force
     for this river. But there can be no doubt of the possibility of
     perfectioning it so that it will answer every purpose for which
     she was intended; and it would be a public loss should the
     proprietors be discouraged from persevering in their
     intention._

Little did the Quebec _Gazette_ realize that the main "purpose for which
she was intended," or which she intended herself, audible in every clank
of her engine, was the overthrow of the Port of Quebec. That, of course,
was a long way off. For two full generations yet, Quebec was the great
overseas harbor, the great shipyard of Canada. Nor was Molson in any way
discouraged from persevering. He lost no time. Within two years he had
the _Swiftsure_ in the water, in 1811. Here was a steamboat one hundred
and twenty feet by twenty-four feet. She did the trip in twenty-four
hours, laughing off a head wind as she came down. The innocent Quebec
_Gazette_ sang its own swan song in praise of the boat's "celerity" and
"security" and "equality" to the best hotel.

The outbreak of the war with the States checked, but only halted for a
time, the progress of the steamboat in the St. Lawrence. From now on
John Molson, among his other claims to eminence, was hailed by his
French compatriots as the "_bourgeois des steamboats_."

The title carries a great meaning. It suggests the entire good will as
between such leading British men of business as Molson, James McGill,
Isaac Todd, and their French fellow townsmen. McGill, like many others,
had married a French wife. It is true that many murmurs of discontent
were already heard, presaging the Rebellion of the next generation. The
new constitution granted just enough rights to give a taste for more.
Money was still controlled and wrongly spent by the Executive. There
were sinecure offices and favoritism, including the attempt to favor the
Anglican Church. The Assembly at Quebec fomented controversy. The
newspapers spread it abroad. But as yet it filled little place in the
life of the community.

       *       *       *       *       *

The War of 1812, while dislocating the course of trade and commerce, was
only directly felt at Montreal for a smaller period. Recollection of it
afterward must have been vivid and intense, but brief. The first main
incident was the entry into Montreal (September 10, 1812) of the captive
American, General William Hull, with his officers and men, which carries
something of a comic-opera touch. Hull had been defeated by General
Isaac Brock at Detroit, and he and his men were sent to Lower Canada for
safekeeping. But their entry into Montreal appears in the record much
like a civic reception. There were military bands, "escorts" of
soldiers, the streets illuminated, with General Hull riding in an open
carriage accompanied by Captain Gray. The procession headed for
Government House, where General Hull was presented, to His Excellency,
Sir George Prevost, who invited him "to take up his residence in
Government House during his stay in Montreal." The American officers
were "guests" at the barracks and their men comfortably housed in town.
. . . There is really much more than comic opera in this, namely, common
sense and common decency. Acts such as this have helped to unite North
America. The comic opera is that Hull, after a short stay, was exchanged
for thirty British soldiers, went home, and was sentenced by a
court-martial to be shot. President Madison canceled the sentence on two
grounds: (1) that Hull had served well in the Revolutionary War, (2)
that he was too old to shoot.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here, then, we may pause, at the renewal of peace in 1815, and take a
look around Montreal as it was in its happy, peaceful expansion between
the peace and the Rebellion. All excellent guide is found in the map of
Montreal, as issued in 1835 by order of the Mayor and Common Council, in
the new pride of their life as a city which began in 1832. It shows at
once the city limits as vastly greater, several times as great, as those
of the old French town. The suburbs (_les faubourgs_) are now well
occupied. The Recollet suburb and, west of it (the use of _west_ instead
of _south_ now begins), the Ste. Anne, St. Joseph, and St. Antoine
suburbs carry the inhabited city out to and past Guy Street to end at
"Canning" Street (four streets on). Guy Street, as now, runs on up the
hill as the Cte des Neiges Road. The largest suburb, St. Lawrence, runs
all along between Craig Street, now named but not all developed, up to
St. Catherine Street. This last runs east and west across St. Lawrence
Main, reaching beyond Bleury Street on the east and about three times as
far (to St. Helen Street) on the west. Dorchester Street cuts through
the center of the St. Lawrence suburb, then takes a dive after the known
fashion of Montreal streets and comes up west again. Lagauchetire
Street, just below it, takes a similar dive east. The space between the
St. Lawrence and the St. Antoine suburbs was relatively open. Here on
the hillside stood Beaver Hall. In the life of a growing city early
priority spells later poverty. The palace becomes the slums. The suburb
presently houses the newer palace. This open space (from the Windsor
Hotel to the Bell Telephone Building of today) was later to be the
grandeur of Montreal. Above St. Catherine Street lie the beautiful farms
and country houses extending to the foot of the mountain. Two very large
ones, just beyond the west end of St. Catherine Street, are those of
McGill, at this period under legal dispute, and the McTavish property
reaching halfway to the Cte des Neiges Road. Cutting through the
farms, from the McGill estate across to St. Denis Street, runs a
beautiful country road called Sherbrooke Street, with already two or
three houses on it. East, in the direction the French called north, lies
the Quebec suburb greatly extended. The Bonsecours Church by the river
still serves as a guide. This church, our Lady of Good Help, had indeed
a special, a mystic meaning. It was first built, as already mentioned,
in 1657, to carry above its roof an image of the Virgin Mary, brought
from France by Marguerite Bourgeoys. The Virgin, looking down the river,
watched over the safety of the sailors. Thank offerings were laid on the
shrine. To her marvelous intercession was ascribed the great storm on
the Lower St. Lawrence which broke up Admiral Walker's fleet, about to
attack Quebec in 1711. The citadel, at the bottom end of the French
town, has all been shoveled flat to make Dalhousie Square; the gates are
gone and the city goes on and on for about a mile with Fulham Road as
its last street downstream, and St. Marys Road (later part of Notre Dame
Street) its main highway.

The new directions of east and west appear in the official parliamentary
division of the two wards, for the Assembly set up in 1791. They are
divided by the "main street of St. Lawrence," the East Ward being
downstream and the West Ward upstream. They are all wrong with the
compass; as explained above, the trouble rises in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, where the north shore _is_ the north shore, and it comes all
the way up. This makes Longueuil the south shore of the St. Lawrence
which, at Montreal, it isn't. But if we call Longueuil south we must
call Longue Pointe east.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the lower town, of course, a great many of the old buildings public
and private of the French Regime were still there. The Chteau de
Ramezay was Government House. The Hotel Dieu was still on St. Paul
Street. Old Notre Dame Church was still standing, but a new one, the
present one, was begun in 1824. The old Bonsecours Church was still at
the north end of the city, and the Recollet Church at the south. The
Grey Nunnery was still the Charron Building, the Hospital General of a
century before. But the changes were more striking than the survivals:
the wooden houses had mostly disappeared from the main part of the town.
In their place were stone, rubblestone, and brick. There were now about
100 occupied streets and about 2500 houses, all numbered in the older
city and partly so in the suburbs. The total population is put at 9000
in the year 1800, 22,000 in the year 1825. Montreal was as populous at
night as now, for in those days all the merchants slept over their
places of business and officials and professional men in their offices.

But the great change was that the old fortifications were gone, all
knocked down except a few survivals on McGill Street and elsewhere.
There are many lesser changes. The Jesuits being gone, their property
has been built over with the Court House (1800), the gaol, the so-called
"Old Gaol" of 1806-36, and the Champs de Mars, extended now to a space
of 227 yards by 114, a parade ground and a fashionable promenade. In the
new Jacques Cartier Square has been erected the Nelson Monument just
mentioned. The Chteau de Vaudreuil, used for a time as a school and
college, was burned. In its place is the new college, the Petit
Sminaire, in the Recollet suburb. Large stone barracks have been built
near where the Quebec gate stood. Spacious hotels stand on the Place
d'Armes, and near the river, St. Paul Street, the main thoroughfare is
crowded and busy all day. There is a new stone customs house (1836)
built on the old French market square.

Between these days and the present time the whole aspect of Montreal,
even of the lower town, has of course been altered, its river front, as
it used to be, obliterated by the remaking of the harbor, the Craig
Street hollow drained and built upon, St. Paul Street sunk to its
present shabby appearance, Notre Dame Street altered from a dignified
residential street to be the mere back annex of St. James Street, and
the latter a narrow thoroughfare between tall buildings and skyscrapers,
unrecognizable as the "Great St. James Street" of a hundred years ago,
broad and half empty.

A sign of the movement of the times is the appearance and the
multiplication of coffeehouses and hotels, things hardly needed under
the Old Regime. In those days "hotel" meant a private mansion such as
the Hotel Vaudreuil. A public inn was presently called a "hotel" as a
sort of flattering compliment, like the word "funeral home" of today.
But now with steamers up and down the river and the canal, ships from
overseas, mail stages from Quebec and Kingston (for York) and to New
York and, above all, with immigration on the move, the hotel came into
its own. So we find now the Exchange Hotel and Coffee House, 170 guests;
Orr's Hotel in Notre Dame; the Montreal Hotel, also called Dillon's, on
the Place d'Armes, and half a dozen others. Most conspicuous was the
spacious and beautiful Mansion House. This was a fine stone building,
originally built by Sir John Johnson (of Mohawk fame) after he settled
in Montreal. It stood near the Bonsecours Church, overlooking the river.
John Molson bought it and added two big wings to it. It had a great
terrace, 144 feet long and 30 feet wide, with an unimpeded view of all
the stretch of river, islands, shore, and mountains that lay before it.
Life in the Mansion House, with dinners and suppers and dances unending,
with officers in uniform and beauty in the flowing dress of the day,
with champagne at a few shillings a bottle, with the Beaver Club and the
Bachelor Club to keep it moving, and the public library in the great
room on the premises to keep it quiet, with the Thtre Royal just over
the way with French opera at five shillings a box, with boats for hire
for a row on the river on a summer evening, with a military band in the
distance and a tangle of fireflies in the foreground--perhaps the good
old limes were not so bad after all.

The old hotels are gone now. The Mansion was burned in 1812. Where
Dillon's guests made merry is now the buried silence of a trust company.
Where the guests gathered at the Exchange Coffee House once shouted the
news of Trafalgar, the cable company and brokers' offices now click more
vital news from Europe. All are gone except only the last of them,
Rasco's Hotel, built just at the end of the epoch 1836 as its last word
in grandeur. Rasco's is still standing today, ignominiously crowded out
by a market, battered, dingy, its ornamentation gone, its garment
divided, its very lettering fallen in part away, with nothing but the
recollection of Charles Dickens' visit there in 1842 to keep a faint
breath of survival stirring.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Mansion House, we say, stood beside the water, and in front of it
was the private wharf built by Molson for his steamers for Quebec and
for La Prairie, from which town ran stages to St. Johns and thus to the
States. This wharf was one of the first real attempts at improving the
port and harbor facilities. The ships that came before the peace era
were small, mostly about 150 tons, and very few. For example, in 1813
only nine ships in all came up to Montreal from the sea, a total of 1589
tons. These could lie almost alongside the riverbank, in places where
the current had scooped the water deep, or so close that improvised
stages were built out from the shore's edge to the deck. With this went
the plan of running out horses and carts deep into the water to reach
vessels hauled up, bow on. With the ships were the bateaux and the new
and bigger type of Durham boat that came in after the American war.
These were big flat-bottomed sailboats eighty or ninety feet long, with
"center boards," which enabled them to beat to windward. In the harbor
also floated the rafts, a conspicuous feature for more than half a
century. There were firewood rafts bringing down cordwood for town use
from farms up the river and big sections of rafts of square timber on
the way to Quebec and England. These had come over the Lachine Rapids
and were made up again in La Prairie Basin or below Montreal for Quebec.

But in the period after the war ended (1815), the port and harbor woke
up. Wharves began to be built after 1819 alongside the riverbank. In
1824 a permanent town wharf 200 feet long was built. Steamboat
navigation as between Montreal and Quebec greatly increased in the
period between the peace of 1815 and the Rebellion of 1837. Molson had
followed the _Swiftsure_ with the _Lady Sherbrooke_, the _Car of
Commerce_, and other vessels, which did service in the war and after it
in general transport. The year 1821 saw the inception and the year 1825
the opening of the Lachine Canal. Limited at first to only four feet of
depth it was little more than a barge canal, but it underwent a century
of continuous deepening.

Steam, grown stronger, appears in Montreal, with the _Hercules_ of 1823,
in the tugging and towing service which was rapidly to revolutionize all
the ports of the world. For Montreal overseas steam voyages were not
yet. The _Savannah_ had crossed the Atlantic in 1819, a clipper-built
full-rigged ship, using auxiliary steam and very little of it at that.
The _Royal William_ built at Quebec crossed the Atlantic (Pictou to
London) in 1833, an all-steam trip. Her engines (200 horsepower) were
made in Montreal, and the _Royal William_ was towed up from Quebec to
receive them, at the foot of St. Marys current, tug power unable to haul
her farther.

Sail and steam were to fight it out for fifty years, but for far-sighted
people, Cunards and Allans, the end was in sight. A Mr. David Munk began
building sailing ships in a yard at Montreal as early as 1806. He and
his partners and others built various ships of about 200 to 300 tons,
one even of 600 tons, before the War of 1812. After steam had got well
started and the Lachine Canal opened, the building of steamers went on
from 1829 to 1841 at a rapid rate on an increasing scale. The building
firm of Shay and Merritt built for the shipping firm of John Torrance
the _British America_, 170 feet long; the _Brittania_, 130 feet long;
and for the Molsons, the _John Bull_, 182 feet long. All these were for
the river trade, Montreal to Quebec. For overseas trade also were built
sailing craft, the _Toronto_ of 1834, a ship of 345 tons for the
Liverpool trade; the _Brilliant_ and the _Thalia_, 472 tons each,
sailing to the Baltic, and various other ocean craft.

The number of vessels entering the port had greatly increased in this
period. The year 1839 showed a total of 78 vessels from the sea, of
which 16 were full-rigged ships, 26 barques, and 36 brigs. The following
year the number reached 97 vessels. The tonnage for the two years was
29,760, showing an average for the vessels of 170 tons.

The newspaper sailing notices of the day carry us back more than a
century to the passage of the seas, as it then was, from Montreal.

Here is the Montreal _Gazette_ of November 11, 1830:

     _From Montreal the brig_ Canadian, _Robert Hamilton, master, will
     take wheat flour or ashes. . . . Excellent accommodation for
     passengers Montreal Nov. 1830 James Millar._

     _Freight and Passage to London. The fine new fast regular
     trading Ship_ Arabian, _Andrew Carr, master, now in port
     discharging her inland cargo, will be ready in a few days to
     receive Ashes, Wheat and flour. She can comfortably accommodate
     eight passengers in her cabin, it having been expressly fitted
     up for this number. She will leave this port about the 5th and
     Quebec the 10th of November, Montreal Oct. 28 1830._

We note the easygoing journalism of the day, the "notices" still
inserted after the ships have left. The "ashes" carried as export were
the dry hardwood ashes (potash) used for potassium, a great export of
the day.

Under "FALL ARRIVALS" we read:

     _T. S. Brown is now receiving by the_ Niagara _from Liverpool a
     large additional supply of Hardware and cutlery which enables
     him to offer the most complete stock in town._

This peaceful T. S. Brown of the hardware business had come to Montreal
in 1818. His memoirs written some fifty years later (1870) are very
interesting and often quoted, all the more so as Brown turned into a
rebel "general" in the outbreak of 1837.

The most notable change was the installation in 1830 of a Montreal
Harbour Commission with an appropriation of $4000 a year, which enabled
them to begin building wharves along the shore. A mole was built to join
to the mainland the little island, whose existence made a harbor first
possible, the Ilot Normandin, Market Gate Island, Oyster Island. The
wharf on the former island becomes from now on the principal wharf of
Montreal.

There was also set up a branch of Trinity House, with the same
commission as that of the famous Admiralty institution, to improve
navigation by charts, buoys, and lights. There was much talk of
deepening the insufficient natural channel. Preliminary surveys of Lake
St. Peter were made in 1838, but the task was still too great. A
further difficulty, not overcome till the present century, was found in
the spring floods which lifted the river above all the structures along
the foreshore.

Dotted along the years are those little features of town improvement and
public works that mark a rising city; things that are tiresome to relate
in detail but indicate in summary the milestones of civic progress.
Waterworks began with the new century. Till then Montreal pumped water
from domestic wells and hauled it in carts from the river. The town with
9000 people in 1800 had grown too crowded for that. A private company,
the Proprietors of the Montreal Water-Works, undertook in 1801 to bring
water from a mountainside pond in wooden pipes. The scheme failed. In
dry weather there was too little water; in wet weather too much; in
summer the pipes dried; in winter they burst. Some of these old pipes,
banded with iron hoops and jammed together end to end, were found long
after under Notre Dame Street. A second company laid down iron pipes in
1819 and pumped water from the river. The city bought the plant in 1845
and blasted out a reservoir below the mountain. The continuous
concussions nearly blasted out of existence the feeble McGill College,
just two years old as far as actual operation.

With water came better fire protection. Mention has been made above of
the great fires of 1722 and 1734 in the old French days. A great fire
(1765) just after the cession swept away 215 houses. With that began
compulsory fire precaution, ladders, and buckets, etc., in every house.
Then came a volunteer Fire Club, after that a Fire Society (cheerier
still), created by statute; thirteen citizens were given by the justices
of the peace the doubtful honor of membership, without pay. They
organized volunteers and captains and bought engines. After the real
city government began (1832) a fire Department was part of it.

With fire went light. The old French town, apart from moonlight, was
very dark. Yet there was little theft, all men being armed and the
gallows ready. In the civic life of peace thieves bred fast. Hence the
lighting of St. Paul Street, still the busy main street of Montreal,
with whale-oil lamps set out by the merchants. People could now go
shopping after dark. Other streets followed. Town lamps were supplied in
1818. Then came gas (1836), the latest European novelty, supplied by the
Montreal Gas Light Company with the younger John Molson as its chairman.

A town with water, light, fire, and thieves needs police. In older days
the justices of the peace kept order as best they could, with sheriffs
and sheriffs' men and, if need be, soldiers. In 1818 appeared
twenty-four "night watchmen," carrying long blue sticks and lanterns,
with rattles and whistles to keep them awake. They cried "All well" at
each half-hour, meaning "All awake," and they had a "station" at St.
Peter and Notre Dame.

       *       *       *       *       *

The influx of British Protestants after the conquest, and still more
with the coming of the Loyalists, had long since made it necessary to
supply places of Protestant worship. For this the Anglicans were
permitted to use the Church of the Recollets (1764 to 1789) and later
the Jesuit Church till they built their own Christ Church on St. James
Street in 1814. After it was burned (1856) they moved up from the lower
town and built, in 1859, the beautiful Christ Church Cathedral now
standing on St. Catherine Street.

The Presbyterians also at first shared with the Anglicans the Recollet
and Jesuit churches till they built a church of their own on St. Gabriel
Street in 1792. A Protestant bishop, Rev. Jacob Mountain, was appointed
at Quebec in 1793, and his son, Rev. George Mountain, became the titular
Bishop of Montreal in 1837. The See of Montreal dates from 1850.

In a sense--the sense of lawyers--the greatest change of the time was in
the institution in Montreal of city government. Hitherto Montreal,
French or English, had been governed from above. Since the conquest,
apart from the military authorities, there were, as said, the justices
of the peace. The citizens, both French and English, had long agitated
for city government. Nothing was done. Petitions and meetings
multiplied. At length the Harbour Commission just spoken of was granted,
in 1830, as a first installment. The year 1832 saw an act to incorporate
the city of Montreal. It was of the usual type then running round the
newly democratic world: eight wards, with sixteen councilors electing a
mayor. The right to vote was given to all male citizens, at least 21
years old, qualified by property and residence. The Mayor received a
salary of four hundred dollars. There is no need to give details. The
act and the system lapsed in 1836, started again in 1843, and began that
series of starts and stops which has represented for a hundred years the
quest of Montreal for a new, clean, efficient government. A series of
about a dozen new brooms, 1840, 1851, 1874, 1899, 1912, etc., etc., have
attempted to sweep Montreal clean, and all have failed. There is a bill
now under discussion to get clean government in 1943--or later.
Municipal government has proved itself the blind alley of modern
democracy, and if there is any duller subject to read about, most of us
don't know of it.

With this period begins for Canada and for Montreal the incoming flood
of immigration that made the country. The end of the great war in 1815
opened the new period of the "great peace," an era of progress and
expansion as never before seen. Yet the first aftermath of war was the
sudden slump of depression and unemployment, the hard times that still
puzzle the economist. It was a thing that presently righted itself,
"with no other aid than starvation and cholera." But at the outset the
blow fell hard, especially on Montreal. From the first expansion of the
epoch expressed itself in migration, indiscriminate, unlimited, and
without control or care.

The British people were free to go. This was the new period of
liberalism and liberty, glorious in its wider aspect, terrible in its
unforeseen consequences. The new home of liberty, in which England
became the workshop of the world, was a habitation bright with flowers
in front, all darkness and filth behind. Behind the palace was the slum;
behind the workshop, was the workhouse. People were free to live or free
to starve, to quit work and start starving any time they liked.
Particularly they were free to go to any place, British or not--the glad
good-riddance of the poor. Off they went, dirty and singing and
triumphant, often in ships so foul and rotten that there was bubonic
plague, the Asiatic cholera of the day, in every filthy plank in the
dank, sunless steerage. Out they went to Quebec and on to Montreal, ever
so many, dead or dying, the rest singing still, and plenty more to
follow.

The policy of the day threw them on the colonies, as on Montreal, to
live or die. In brisk times there would be bread and work for all, but
in this opening era only for a few. Montreal had to look after the
homeless and the sick as best it could. And here happened a strange
thing, light coming out of darkness, good out of evil. There was in
Montreal no English hospital. The little premises that humanity
supplied, a four-room building on St. Joseph and Gabriel, called the
House of Recovery, with a doctor in charge, and later the large house
bought on Craig Street, with four attendant doctors (1818), turned into
the Montreal General Hospital (1819). A lot was purchased on Dorchester
Street, well out of town for the fresh air, and a building, the nucleus
of the present hospital, opened in 1822. At that time there was no
organized medical profession. This made one. Here began the Medical
Institution of Montreal. There was as yet no teaching of medicine; this
compelled it. And presently, when, McGill University began actual work,
this body became the Medical Faculty of McGill. All the glory of the
General Hospital, of the Royal Victoria, and the Neurological, the
Maternity, and the Children's Memorial, all the immortality of Osler and
of--we know them--the McGill immortals of today, still mortal--all this
was there under the humble roof of the House of Recovery. One can't get
over it, so to speak. Those who watch in the present city the daily
pilgrimage of the outdoor patients moving to the free clinics of the
great hospitals of Montreal may see in fancy, hovering over them to
direct their steps, the departed spirit of the stricken immigrant, from
whose death came life.

Such was immigration into Montreal in its earlier days, and such the
shadow of want and pestilence that darkened its coming. The better to
understand this scene, in this shadow under which it lay, and in the
sunlight that was later to illuminate it, we may recall the picture of
Montreal as seen in 1830, the great cholera year, by Mrs. Catherine
Parr Traill, an English lady arriving as an immigrant on her way to the
bush settlements of Upper Canada. Mrs. Traill was one of those
distinguished Strickland sisters who showed what women could do fifty
years before other women did it. Her book, _The Backwoods of Canada_,
and the well-known book of her sister, Mrs. Susannah Moodie, _Roughing
It in the Bush_, are firsthand pictures of Canada of the period of great
interest. The fault of both writers lies in a greater ability to see
present hardships than to foresee future happiness. Just as Charles
Dickens could see nothing but swamps and ague where now rise the great
American cities of the Middle West, so the Strickland sisters "roughed
it in the bush" and could not see that the "collection of log shanties"
was going to be the beautiful city of Peterborough. Mrs. Moodie
concluded her book with the statement that if it kept only one family
away from Canada it was worth the writing of it--an odd statement for
those of us who remember her immediate descendants as among the
wealthiest and most respected people of Toronto--the fate that migration
to the "bush" brought them. So too one must make similar reservations
against Mrs. Traill's views.

     _We were struck_ [she writes] _by the dirty, narrow, ill-paved
     or unpaved streets of the suburbs, and overpowered by the
     noisome vapor arising from a deep open fosse that ran along the
     street behind the wharf. This ditch seemed the receptacle for
     every abomination, and sufficient in itself to infect a whole
     town with malignant fevers._

     _The cholera had made awful ravages, and its devastating
     effects were to be seen in the darkened dwellings and the
     mourning habiliments of all classes. An expression of dejection
     and anxiety appeared in the faces of the few persons we
     encountered in our walk to the hotel, which plainly indicated
     the state of their minds._

     _In some situations whole streets had been nearly depopulated;
     those that were able fled panic-stricken to the country
     villages, while others remained to die in the bosom of their
     families._

     _To no class, I am told, has the disease proved so fatal as to
     the poorer sort of emigrants. Many of these, debilitated by the
     privations and fatigue of a long voyage, on reaching Quebec or
     Montreal, indulged in every sort of excess, especially the
     dangerous one of intoxication; and, as if purposely paving the
     way to certain destruction, they fell immediate victims to the
     complaint._

     _In one house eleven persons died, in another seventeen; a
     little child of seven years old was the only creature left to
     tell the woeful tale. This poor desolate orphan was taken by
     the nuns to their benevolent institution, Where every attention
     was paid that humanity could suggest._

Nor were sanitation and the prevention of disease the only things as yet
defective at this period. Education also lagged behind. Under the French
Regime what education there was was carried on by the Seminary and by
the Congregation. The mass of the habitants got none. After the conquest
the old Chteau de Vaudreuil was used, first for elementary teaching,
then as a college. This building was burned in 1803. The Sulpicians
built a college, the new college or Petit Sminaire, in what had been
the Recollet suburb outside of the Recollet gate, that is to say, beyond
McGill Street on a street that became College Street, now a continuation
of St. Paul. This is "The College" mentioned in _Hochelaga Depicta_ and
books of the period. It had accommodation for 160 pupils, entering at
eight to ten years old for a course of eight years.

Dorchester Street was, as said, only laid out in part. At this period
all the ground beyond the angle of Dorchester Street and Cte des Neiges
was called the Priests' Farm. It originally contained the old walled
fort with the corner towers, and these premises (then called La Maison
des Prtres) were used as a week-end place of rest for professors and
students of the seminary and the college. The Collge de Montral (Grand
Sminaire) was built later (1854-57).

The incoming of the Loyalists led to a demand for schools, for a school
system. Elsewhere, as in New Brunswick, they succeeded at once; not in
Lower Canada. A number of private schools struggled into existence. To
aid them there was created by an act of the legislature in 1801 a
shadowy body called the Royal Institution for the Advancement of
Learning. This was supposed to act as a trustee, to receive funds and
make grants.[23] But as the main purpose set forth in its creation was
to teach English to French Canadians, it was born into the shadow of
dislike. The French Canadian would rather know nothing in French than
everything in English. Help was given to the British and Canadian
(meaning French and English) school opened on Lagauchetire Street in
1826. But the French children dropped out when the political troubles
began. It was to the Royal Institution that the aged James McGill, after
much consultation with his young friend, the Rev. John Strachan, later
the famous bishop, bequeathed, in 1811, 10,000 and his Burnside estate
of forty-six acres and the manor house and buildings thereon. McGill
died in 1813. Ill-omened fairies put the college asleep in its cradle
for thirty years. McGill, as apart from the group of doctors mentioned
above, never taught a student till 1843. But the Royal Institution still
signs its name to the salary checks.

Thus not only college education but any general school system had to
wait.

Yet while learning withered at the root finance grew apace. But the
discussion of the epoch marked by the formation of the Bank of Montreal
in 1817 is best deferred to the more spacious days that followed the
union of the Canadas.

Montreal had no sooner started on its civic life than storms began to
gather over it. What had been twenty years before little more than
casual murmurs of discontent, the recollections of a lost cause, the
memories that refused to die, now begin to ferment into a fierce
quarrel--the "two nations warring in the bosom of a single state"--of
which Lord Durham was to speak.

In Upper Canada the agitation that led to the Rebellion of 1837 was mere
restive protest against the unfair privileges of a petty aristocracy and
of a favored church. There was not enough to fight for, and in the
sequel no one fought. In Lower Canada this grievance was there also but
was lost in the deeper hostility of race against race. As agitation grew
it centered mainly around Montreal rather than Quebec, for in and
around Montreal was where the French and English were most mixed. Quebec
was and remained quiet. The rebel agitators among the French were not
really agitating for responsible government or even better government
but for some method of voting the English off their backs. Louis Joseph
Papineau and his associates presently (1834) put their grievances into
the famous "ninety-two resolutions." They could have said it all in one.

What the English agitators of Lower Canada wanted was some way of voting
monarchy off their backs. The basis of this was the call of the
republic, so powerful in the springtime of democracy, and not weakened
in Canada by contemplating across the water the morality of George IV or
the intelligence of his honest brother. The racial call claimed Louis
Joseph Papineau; republican freedom claimed such a man as Wolfred
Nelson, and both called forth such generous youths as George tienne
Cartier, later a conservative Father of Confederation, and Dr. Chenier,
whose statue stands in Montreal today, eager even in dead stone. With
others, as with Dr. O'Callaghan, the sorrows of Ireland were added to
the cup.

The agitation in the country was kindled in the legislature at Quebec,
its flames fanned by the speeches of Louis Joseph Papineau. But the real
seat of the trouble was in Montreal and in the district around Montreal
Island and Isle Jsus and in the settlements on the Richelieu. Papineau
lived in Montreal, his house being situated on St. Paul Street. He sat
as one of the two members for the West Ward.

The year 1832 saw the first outbreak of violence. A by-election in the
West Ward, involving after the old-time fashion several days of voting
at the open poll, led to the gathering of a mob around the closing poll.
In the scene of tumult which ensued the garrison soldiers (Colonel
McIntosh with the Fifteenth Regiment) were called out. The Riot Act was
read. The crowd refused to go. The soldiers advanced toward the mob in
the Place d'Armes against a hail of stones which injured many, including
the colonel. After ineffectual warnings McIntosh ordered a volley from
the front platoon. Three of the crowd fell dead, two wounded. The rest
vanished. Artillery was set to command the streets. McIntosh was
arrested on a coroner's warrant but set free afterward. The French
paper, _La Minerve_, shouted massacre. Five thousand people, among them
Papineau, speaker of the House, walked in the funeral of the men killed.

It seems strange to think that it was just after this scene of disorder
that there came to Montreal its first and most terrible visitation of
the cholera, brought by the immigrant ships. In the middle of June of
that year (1832) the deaths ran to 100 a day. In all there were some
3384 cases and 947 deaths in June.

After this first outbreak, meetings, organization, and agitation
continued; the Papineau majority blocked all official business in the
Assembly. The "ninety-two resolutions" were passed by the House in 1834.
The British party formed Constitutional Associations in the same year.
In Montreal many French Canadians adhered to the government side. But in
the general election of 1835 the vote showed in Montreal 13,714
demanding reform against 6254 opposed. Circulars went from Montreal to
the country, and to England, sent from both sides. Lord Gosford was sent
out as Governor on August 23, 1835, specially commissioned to compose
the quarrel. Sir John Colborne, ending his term as Lieutenant Governor
of Upper Canada in 1836, was made Chief of the Forces in Canada. After a
brief journey to England he took command at Montreal.

Even among these events the broken lights of history flicker between
shadow and sunshine. Here in these mid-dangers we may forget a moment
Louis Joseph Papineau and turn to a pretty midsummer scene, so often
depicted and so full of sunlight (July 1836), the opening of the
Champlain and St. Lawrence Railway Company, the first railway in Canada.
The railway is to connect Montreal to New York by covering fifteen miles
from La Prairie to St. Johns. The rest is just a matter of steamers, and
a short rail journey in the state of New York. There is the scene under
the trees--the train on its toy track of wood with strips of iron, its
engine thirteen feet long, its two quaint cars like wooden playhouses,
and all about it a sylvan scene of bright uniforms, gay crinolines,
gentlemen in top hats, Lord Gosford, the Governor General, and off at
fifteen miles an hour to St. Johns, and on arrival such a banquet and
junketing, champagne and speeches, that we can for the moment quite
forget Louis Joseph Papineau--or we could, except that Papineau was
there, one of the top hats.

Thus began the railway, innocent as a summer day, gentle as a kitten,
later an octopus, and then a "problem"--the machine age's first-born
son, gone wrong.

At a meeting at St. Ours (above Sorel) Dr. Wolfred Nelson called for
armed rebellion. "Sons of Liberty" were organized in Montreal. Papineau
moved among the meetings. "The game which Mr. Papineau is playing cannot
be mistaken," said Sir John Colborne, a veteran of Waterloo, smelling
powder and ready to begin. Monsieur Latigue issued a mandament against
revolt. A fierce riot took place in Montreal (November 6, 1837) between
the Sons of Liberty and the Constitutional crowd, fighting up and above
St. James Street and St. Lawrence Main. Thomas Storrow Brown was one of
the injured. This was the Brown from whose peaceful memories of old age
we have just quoted. He was one of the fierce young men of 1837, bitter
against injustice. "A sense of justice," he wrote in his later memoirs,
"that generous inheritance from a British ancestry, urged me on."
Meetings and processions were forbidden. Warrants were out for Papineau,
Dr. O'Callaghan, and T. S. Brown. Papineau left Montreal. Detachments of
the military sent out to make arrests met resistance at St. Denis on the
Richelieu. Thirteen rebels were killed and six soldiers. One of the
British officers, Lieutenant Weir, was captured by rebels and hacked and
shot to death. There came another fight next day (November 24, 1837) at
St. Charles against troops better armed. Many rebels were killed,
certainly nearly fifty, rumor said a hundred and fifty. Colborne led a
column to St. Eustache. The rebels were trapped in the village church,
in a scene of hideous slaughter. Dr. Chenier was shot attempting to
escape by a window. Among those present was Captain Marryat, the famous
veteran of the Great War at sea who lived it over again in his sea
stories. He was on an American tour and joined Colborne. He wrote:

     _I have been with Sir John Colborne, the Commander in Chief,
     and have just now returned from an expedition of five days
     against St. Eustache and Grand Brul, which has ended in the
     total discomfiture of the rebels, and I may add, the putting
     down of the insurrection in both provinces. I little thought
     when I wrote last that I should have had the bullets whizzing
     about my ears again so soon. It has been a sad scene of
     sacrilege, murder, burning, and destroying. All the fights have
     been in the churches, and they are now burnt to the ground and
     strewed with the wasted bodies of the insurgents. War is bad
     enough, but civil war is dreadful. Thank God it is all over.
     The winter has set in; we have been fighting in deep snow, and
     crossing rivers with ice thick enough to bear the artillery; we
     have been always in extremes--at one time our ears and noses
     frost bitten by the extreme cold, at others amidst the flames
     of hundreds of houses._

Resistance ended for the time. Wolfred Nelson was captured. Papineau,
Dr. O'Callaghan, and "General" Brown escaped. In Montreal there were
many arrests including thirty or forty men of later prominence, two of
them later on joint prime ministers, Louis H. Lafontaine (the associate
of Robert Baldwin) and George tienne Cartier (the associate of Sir John
A. Macdonald).

Durham was all for leniency. He was an autocratic liberal, liberal
enough to pardon even rebellion, autocratic enough to exceed his power
in doing so. He made a general amnesty, sentenced to death the man he
couldn't catch, and banished those already caught. This banished Dr.
Wolfred Nelson into freedom. Durham was recalled. Rebellion broke out
again in the autumn of 1838, fed by incursions from Vermont--Colborne
stamped it fiercely down. At one place (Odelltown, November 9, 1838)
fifty rebels were killed. Then came the trials held at Montreal. Twelve
patriots were sentenced to death and hanged in successive groups
(December 21, 1838, two; January 18, 1839, five; February 15, 1839,
five). The last five--by a queer fashion of those rude times when
highwaymen made speeches on the gallows--were given the privilege, or,
shall we say, the "send-off" of a farewell supper, with aftersupper
speeches. The place of execution was an open square in what is the east
end of the city over which now passes the structure of the great Jacques
Cartier Bridge. It has been christened the Patriot's Square (_Place des
Patriotes_). The site of the scaffold is marked by a monument--a huge
upright slab of stone which carries the twelve names of the men
executed, six on one side, six on the other.

A tall stone column in the Cte des Neiges Cemetery also commemorates
the "Patriotes." The historian Kingsford gives a full personal record of
each. Six of them, he says, were sentenced not only for rebellion, but
deservedly for murder. Even so, there are tears left for the others.
Especial sorrow was felt for the young Chevalier de Lorimier who died
last, a letter of farewell to his wife and children against his breast.

We may repeat again the words of Fox that rebels often save their
country.

The more fortunate rebels had fled, or been banished, into safety. Later
on an "Act of Forgetfulness" of 1843, called by the lawyers a "nolle
sequi"--a "don't-follow-it-up"--allowed them to come back. Dr. Wolfred
Nelson came back to practice his profession in Montreal. He was elected
to the Assembly, was twice Mayor of Montreal, a Harbour Commissioner,
and a father of the city. With him came T. S. Brown, no longer a general
but returning to his hardware business like Cincinnatus to the plow. The
return of Papineau, like that of William Lyon Mackenzie, was less
fortunate. They found themselves forgiven and forgotten--out of date as
time moved on to other issues. Dr. O'Callaghan stayed in New York.
Medieval warriors used to enter the cloister; O'Callaghan took to
history, the "Documentary History" of New York.

Such was the Rebellion of 1837-39, a sad chronicle, one stage in our
slow method of groping toward freedom. After it, when the two Canadas
were reunited by the Act of Union of 1840, there was done, on Durham's
suggestion, what could have been done before. Canada received
responsible government with the new Act, under which a colony could
manage its own affairs. The system went round the world and preserved
the British Empire. But in Canada it was connected with rejoining French
and British Canada, and that was a different matter.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] J. R. Green, _The British People_, 1874.

[22] J. B. McMaster, _History of the United States_.

[23] Letter of the Anglican Bishop of Quebec, October 17, 1799.




CHAPTER IX

Montreal

Capital of United Canada

1841-1849-1867

     _Montreal Burns Out Its Parliament. Hard Times. Movement for
     Annexation. Public Works and Civic Celebrations. The Railways.
     The Victoria Bridge. Visit of the Prince of Wales. The American
     Civil War. Confederation._


In the commercial sense Montreal has been the capital of Canada from the
later period of the old French Regime until today. Nor is it likely to
lose this metropolitan pre-eminence although it is quite possible that
Vancouver may presently surpass it in population. But in the political
sense it was the capital of Canada, of the United Province of Canada,
for only the brief years from 1843-49. It disgraced and disqualified
itself by burning down its own capital buildings in a riot and doing its
best to stone to death its Governor General, Lord Elgin. The event had a
peculiar historical bearing: it served as a corroboration of the
popular, democratic opinion that had originated with the Reign of Terror
in Paris, that the government (the political capital) should not be
exposed to the dangers of overthrow by a city mob. Hence the idea of a
dream capital, all embowered in leaves, small and remote with no one
near but shepherds, a notoriously angelic class. The idea wrote itself
over the map of the United States; children and foreigners learn with
surprise that the state capitals of the United States hardly ever seem
where they ought to be; New York is not the capital of New York State,
nor Chicago of Illinois, nor are San Francisco and New Orleans capitals,
nor even, unkindest of all, Philadelphia, the city in which was signed
the Declaration of 1776 that made it, in a sense, the capital of the
world. At the same time the list of state capitals includes such names
as Pierre, Boise, Cheyenne, and Salem. Some people, ignorant people,
would hardly know where they belong. Now at the time when Montreal was
burned this theory and practice were in mid-career, but still on trial.
The sin of Montreal gave it new life. The four last capitals named above
were made so later than 1849.

It is not necessary to explain in this book the details of the changes
in Canada which thus made Montreal its capital. After the Rebellion of
1837-38 Lord Durham's Report recommended the union of Lower and Upper
Canada into one province with a single capital city. He recommended the
adoption of cabinet government, ministers responsible to the elected
majority in Parliament. This was a great step, the turning point in the
unity and pre-eminence of the British Empire. For this Durham's memory
is part of our history. But his other recommendation was not so happy.
This new freedom to vote as a majority was also to be used to outvote
the French from control of the government. It was as simple as a
conjurer's trick, taking a government rabbit out of a French hat. It was
so simple that Durham's unhappy phrase, "their vain hopes of
nationality," gave it all away. The French Canadians never forgave, have
never forgiven, Lord Durham.

In the outcome Durham's plan failed. It was not possible, never has
been, to get a large enough united majority of English to outvote the
French. The converse happened. The only findable majority was one made
up of a bloc of French and a bloc of English, and carrying on a dual
government, with double prime ministers like twin stars, and
legislation in one section, Canada East turned inside out to fit
Canada West. Hence the peculiar double prime ministerships of
Baldwin-Lafontaine (1842-49) and the later transient and unstable
combinations that carried on in the United Province (1849-64) till they
collapsed into a pile of wreckage, out of which was made the wider
Confederation of 1867.

All of this is vital historical matter but its full depiction lies on a
wider canvas. We are concerned here with the burning of the Parliament
Building in Montreal. The new government of the Union was proclaimed at
Montreal on February 10, 1841, by the first Governor General of the
United Province, formerly Mr. Poullett Thompson but now raised to the
peerage as Baron Sydenham of York and Toronto. The name of Montreal was
already in the peerage, and still is, in the title of Baron Amherst of
Montreal, conferred on General Amherst, the conqueror of Montreal, in
1788. His home in Kent was called Montreal. "On this day (of the
proclamation) in Montreal," writes the historian Kingsford, "in the
presence of all the dignitaries of the church and of civil life, of the
Commander of the forces, of officers commanding regiments, and all who
could be collected of the principal citizens, the oath was taken and the
two provinces were established as the Province of Canada."

The first Parliament opened, as a temporary arrangement, at Kingston,
Montreal sending its first two members there, Mr. Benjamin Holmes and
the Hon. George Moffatt, on June 14, 1841. But it was as plain as it was
reasonable that Montreal must be made the capital, Quebec being too
French and too far east, Toronto too British and too far west. The
choice was not finally made till 1843, nor the actual move till a
Parliament House was provided in 1844. But immediately after the union
the Governor and executive were much in Montreal, the Chteau de Ramezay
was Government House, and a sort of sunshine of official importance
broke out over the city, chasing away the retreating clouds of rebellion
and repression.

It was precisely in this burst of sunshine that occurred the famous
visit of Charles Dickens, himself in a burst of recovered sunshine in
having escaped from the liberty of the United States back to the glory
of allegiance.

All the world knows the story of his ill-starred visit to the United
States in 1842, in the first flush of his phenomenal literary success.
The roaring national welcome that he received ended in something not far
from expulsion, on his part a glad escape--Dickens, like Mrs. Traill,
had no eye to see. In what was the great epic of a nation on the march,
of democracy enthroned by civilization claiming the Mississippi Valley,
he saw nothing but chattel slavery, chewing tobacco, swamps, ague, and
vulgarity. He had no eye for the Mississippi; he thought it mud. He
could hear no music in the spring love song of the frogs in its marshes.
Over and above all which, he was furious at what he thought the open
theft of his books for lack of copyright. He came from the "Far West"
into Upper Canada in a passion of loyalty, converted overnight from a
young radical to an old Tory.

Hence to Dickens Montreal and all around it looked beautiful. He came
down from Toronto and entered Montreal, as he himself said, "in grand
style," driven down from Lachine. "Sir Richard Jackson sent his drag
four-in-hand, with two other young fellows who are also his aides, and
in we came in grand style." The titles roll off Dickens' happy pen: "Sir
Richard's drag" . . . "Lord Musgrove wind-bound in his yacht . . . dined
with Sir Charles Bagot . . . invited to play in theatricals with the
officers of the Coldstream Guards" . . . Who wouldn't be delighted with
that, after Sandusky, Ohio?

There followed the famous theatricals (1842) played with huge success in
the old Thtre Royal, to a "paper house" all invited by the Governor.
No wonder that Dickens not only in the warmth of his private letters but
in the cold print of his _American Notes_ is enthusiastic over Montreal
and the country round about. . . .

     _We traveled_, he says, _by a stage coach for nearly four hours
     through a pleasant and well-cultivated country perfectly French
     in every respect; in the appearance of the cottages; the air,
     language, and dress of the peasantry; the sign-boards on the
     shops and taverns; and the Virgin's shrines, and crosses, by
     the wayside. Nearly every common labourer and boy, though he
     had no shoes to his feet, wore round his waist a sash of some
     bright colour; generally red; and the women, who working in the
     fields and gardens, and doing all kinds of husbandry, wore, one
     and all, great flat straw hats with most capacious brims. There
     were Catholic Priests and Sisters of Charity in the village
     streets; and images of the Saviour at the corners of
     cross-roads, and in other public places._

Of the city itself he writes:

     _Montreal is pleasantly situated on the margin of the St.
     Lawrence, and is backed by some bold heights, about which there
     are charming rides and drives. The streets are generally narrow
     and irregular, as in most French towns of any age; but in the
     more modern parts of the city they are wide and airy. They
     display a great variety of very good shops; and both in the
     town and suburbs there are many excellent private dwellings.
     The granite quays are remarkable for their beauty, solidity,
     and extent._

     _There is a very large Catholic cathedral here, recently
     erected, with two tall spires, of which one is yet unfinished.
     In the open space in front of this edifice, stands a solitary,
     grim-looking, square, brick tower, which has a quaint and
     remarkable appearance, and which the wise-acres of the place
     have consequently determined to pull down immediately. The
     Government House is very superior to that at Kingston, and the
     town is full of life and bustle. In one of the suburbs is a
     plank road--not footpath--five or six miles long, and a famous
     road it is too. All the rides in the vicinity were made doubly
     interesting by the bursting out of spring, Which is here so
     rapid, that it is but a day's leap from barren winter to the
     blooming youth of summer._

Dickens leaves also a picture of the arrival of immigrants, contrasting
pleasantly with that of Mrs. Traill.

     _In the spring of the year, vast numbers of emigrants who have
     newly arrived from England or from Ireland pass between Quebec
     and Montreal on their way to the backwoods and new settlements
     of Canada. If it be an entertaining lounge (as I very often
     found it) to take a morning stroll upon the quay at Montreal,
     and see them grouped in hundreds on the public wharfs about
     their chests and boxes, it is matter of deep interest to be
     their fellow-passenger on one of these steamboats, and mingling
     with the concourse, see and hear them unobserved._

     _The vessel in which we returned from Quebec to Montreal was
     crowded with them, and at night they spread their beds between
     decks (those who had beds, at least), and slept so close and
     thick about our cabin door, that the passage to and fro was
     quite blocked up. They were nearly all English--from
     Gloucestershire the greater part--and had had long
     winter-passage out; but it was wonderful to see how clean the
     children had been kept, and how untiring in their love and
     self-denial all the poor parents were._

But such sunshine as there was in the political sense in these opening
forties was to prove too bright to last. It was easy enough for Lord
Durham to recommend responsible government. It was another matter to
know just how to put it into force, especially as between two such
ill-assorted partners as Upper and Lower Canada, one British, one
French, one nearly all Protestant, one nearly all Roman Catholic, one
with seignorial land and one with individual ownership, one demanding
municipal government, people's schools, and secular control, the other
opposing all of them. In such an environment how much was the royal
governor to do and how much not? Can a majority of the elected assembly
have anything they cared to ask or only what is good for them? Is the
Governor General only a rubber stamp, or does he work the handle? It was
hard, in any case, for men hitherto expected to be men of iron to
coagulate all at once into rubber. Sydenham died before the problem had
quite risen. Sir Charles Bagot gave way and died. Lord Metcalfe refused
to give way and died. Canada seemed to kill them as if a spell had come
over the place.

[Illustration: A View of the Water Front During the Intermediate Stage
of the Port of Montreal's Development.]

After Metcalfe the question of responsible government was overshadowed
and lost from sight in the war cloud that rose on the horizon. Boundary
disputes helped to keep active the chronic ill will that separated
Canada and the United States in this era of rebellions, incursions, of
sorrows and angers imported from Ireland, of unrestrained democracy and
untaught monarchy. The Ashburton Treaty no sooner settled the Maine-New
Brunswick dispute (1842) than the much fiercer conflict over Oregon, in
a wide sense, over the control of the Pacific coast, brought war within
sight. The little street in Montreal called Cathcart recalls the
governorship of Lord Cathcart (1845), one of Wellington's veterans sent
out to repel the coming American invasion. Responsible government slept.
The danger past and Cathcart gone, it woke again.

Then came Lord Elgin, son-in-law of Lord Durham, to show what Durham had
meant. Now it was just at this time that the political combination
effected by Robert Baldwin in Canada West and Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine
in Canada East made up an Assembly majority that gave them a
constitutional right to be prime ministers and to bring in any
legislation that they had, as such, any right to bring in. Among other
things, they proposed to carry a bill called the Rebellion Losses Bill
for paying compensation to anyone whose property had been destroyed or
damaged in the rebellion. This meant especially the country property
owners of the Richelieu and Montreal district.

The principle of compensation for damages done during the rebellion to
the property of innocent and loyal citizens had been accepted on all
sides immediately after the troubles. But time did not allow action
before the union. After it the parliament awarded, with general consent,
a certain compensation in what had been Upper Canada. But the claims in
Lower Canada were far greater and more complicated. They hung fire, or
rather boiled over a slow fire under the care of a commission. The
report of the commission indicating 2276 claimants, was followed by the
introduction of Lafontaine's Rebellion Losses Bill proposing to expend
100,000 in compensation.

But the joke, or what we can in a pack of cards the joker, was that in
Lower Canada many of the property holders were themselves rebels who had
only suffered damages because they themselves rebelled and had done
some of the damage. Yet as the Act defined a rebel as a person actually
convicted as a rebel, and as the vast majority had been let off free, a
rebel in actual fact was as likely to get compensation as a man of
peace. One can easily see how the blood of the loyal Tories of Canada
would boil at the thought of taking money out of their now united
treasury to compensate a pack of French traitors who ought to have been
hanged.

That was their side. But other blood boiled also.[24] It was notorious
that Sir John Colborne had burned and destroyed, had at least let others
destroy, beyond all military necessity. Surely the hundreds killed on
the Richelieu and at St. Eustache, the fifty that lay dead around
Odelltown were enough, and most of all those at the latter place who
were shot down--men forced into rebellion, confused, unarmed, kneeling
in the snow, their hands raised in prayer. Surely enough, without the
furious burning of the barns and log cabins of owners who lay already
dead, all debt paid. When we read such a phrase as "Colborne _sternly_
stamped out rebellion" we must pause a moment to get the full meaning of
"sternly."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hence the angers, like evil spirits, that fought around the Rebellion
Losses Bill in the Parliament of Canada. To the angered Tories it seemed
like a fight against enthroned treason. To the "Liberals," the new name
that was coming over the "reformers" of prerebellion days, it appeared
as a glorious struggle for freedom, not as in this issue alone but as
recognized for all time. Lord Elgin took it so.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Parliament Building stood in what is now Youville Square, off McGill
Street. It had been erected as St. Ann's Market but had been remodeled
for its higher purpose. It was a plain but imposing two-story building,
two main floors and a lesser one above, built of limestone, three
hundred and fifty-two feet long and fifty feet broad. At the north end
was the hall of the Legislative Council, at the south that of the
Assembly; the rest of the space was made up of state chambers, offices,
and the library. It had been equipped without stint of money. The
parliament mace alone, eight feet long, cost 600. There were portraits
of Jacques Cartier, of Queen Victoria, George III and George IV, and
lesser dignitaries. To help it burn there were in the library eleven
hundred well-dried records and journals of the British House of Commons.
As a further temptation, gas pipes, easily reached, ran through the
building.

Fierce and angry were the speeches on the debate of the bill. The Tory
leader, Sir Allan MacNab, denounced the French Canadians as "aliens and
rebels," Hume Blake, M.P. for Toronto whose advancing career
foreshadowed the future eminence of his family, speaking with Irish
passion, called MacNab a rebel himself. MacNab in return called Blake a
liar. Both rushed to fight. The gallery roared with shouts and seethed
with hisses. The Sergeant-at-Arms hauled the two angry members into
custody.

The bill duly passed its third reading. Lord Elgin, from what he held
his duty, determined in spite of protests to give the royal assent. To
do this he came from his residence at Monklands to sign the bill on the
afternoon of Wednesday, April 25, 1849. As he left the House of
Parliament "ironical cheers and shouts" (his own words) greeted him, and
his carriage was pelted with missiles.

The town was in a tumult at the news of the assent. Handbills called a
mass meeting that evening in the Champ de Mars. From there a riotous
crowd descended on the House of Parliament, then sitting in evening
session. A storm of sticks and stones broke the windows. The members
fled. The mob invaded Assembly Hall, the very speaker's chair. They
broke the furniture, the gas globes. Then, with the new devildom of the
machine age, they tore out the gas pipes, and in a few moments the
building was a sheet of flame, shaken with explosions. Nothing was saved
except the portrait of the Queen, taken from its unwieldy frame and
carried out by four patriotic men, of whom one was young Sanford
Fleming, one of Canada's later "grand old men." The fire brigade let the
fire alone. The soldiers, called to the spot, fired at the sky.

The city rocked for days with anger. Elgin, venturing in to reach the
Chteau de Ramezay, was stoned out again. Lafontaine's house was burned.
Oddly enough, the roles of the two main political parties were reversed.
The Tories were now the rioters, the Rebels the men of order. Mixed with
both were the impartial rabble willing to riot at any time. When the
storm died down the name of Montreal was as black as the ruin of its
Parliament.

       *       *       *       *       *

As a result of the riots Montreal lost its place as the capital of
Canada. A new arrangement was made whereby the capital alternated
between Toronto and Quebec, three years in each, paradise alternately
lost and regained. This pleased nobody. A new capital was selected
(1858) at By-town, a lumber settlement laid out on the Ottawa by the
engineer Colonel By, and connecting Montreal with a roundabout access to
Lake Ontario by the Rideau Canal. Invading Americans would never find
it. Goldwin Smith called it "the lumber village nearest the North Pole."
It became the capital, as Ottawa, occupied by Parliament in 1865, and
was chosen after Confederation for the dominion capital.

The closing years of the decade of the forties were indeed dark days for
Montreal. There were sporadic riots for over a year after the burning of
the Parliament. Fires swept the ill-protected city, still crowded with
wooden buildings. The fires of 1850 burned out sections of Gabriel (now
Ottawa) Street (June 15), destroyed two hundred buildings including St.
Stephen's (Anglican Church), and destroyed (August 23) one hundred and
fifty houses on Craig and St. Lawrence streets. Still greater fires of
1852 burned twelve hundred houses and left some nine thousand persons
homeless. One of these burned out a great block of the old town (St.
Peter to St. Francis Xavier--St. Sacrement to St. Paul). It was in this
fire that Maisonneuve's house, later used as the first Seminary of St.
Sulpice, was burned to its foundations. With difficulty the Hotel Dieu
and Notre Dame Church were saved. Thirty great buildings were in flames
all at once. The sick were carried out from the hospital by the garrison
soldiers and volunteer helpers.

Nor was the fire all. Pestilence took an even larger toll. The crowding
of immigrant ships, the lack of sanitation bred outbreaks of ship fever.
Many died on shipboard. Hundred, even thousands, arrived stricken with
the disease and of these many never were destined to see anything more
of Montreal than the great sheds hastily erected beside Point St.
Charles to serve as hospitals. The historian, Sandham, says that six
thousand died in 1847 alone. These were immigrants out of Ireland, of
the dreadful days of the potato famine, fleeing from starvation in
Ireland to find death in Canada. Many were buried in a plot of land near
by the hospital sheds. Sandham unconsciously adds a touch of bitter
irony to the story of their fate by saying that "As the city was rapidly
extending in the direction of this spot," the place of burial would
"probably have been lost sight of," except that ten years later workmen
on the Victoria Bridge marked it with a great stone.

Even more terrible than ship fever was the bubonic plague, then called
Asiatic cholera, which now renewed its ravages. Absent since the
epidemics of 1831 and 1834, it reappeared in 1849; in two summer months
one thousand one hundred and eighty-six people died of this loathsome
disease.

We can hardly wonder that Montreal, with riots, racial anger, poverty,
fire, and pestilence, began to seem like a doomed city. A Boston
newspaper correspondent of the period wrote,

     _Montreal wears a dismal aspect; the population during the past
     few years has decreased some thousands and the removal of
     Government caused some four thousand more to leave. The streets
     look deserted . . . every third store seems to want an occupant
     and empty houses groan for tenants. The blackened walls of the
     Parliament House present an unseemly appearance and the fate of
     Sodom and Gomorrah appears to hang over the city. The citizens
     poke about in the dark.[25]_

This, of course, was American journalism of the days of Jefferson Brick
as seen by Dickens. The population was _not_ decreasing; the fate of
Sodom was _not_ approaching, and the citizens were _not_ in the dark,
except when the gas was out of order.

An old adage says: give a dog a bad name and then hang him. It might
have added: he will probably hang himself. So it was with Montreal. The
political turmoil, the lean years, the crowded, unfed immigrants, the
contrast with American material progress, occasioned in these years of
the closing forties a strange discouragement, a lack of faith that
contrasted with the sturdy optimism of early days. The truth was that
the community had now enough to make them want more, were sufficiently
well off to be discontented. All that is needed for discontent is a
window on the world; so with Montreal. It was rising fast in population,
9000 in 1800, 35,000 in 1837. Railways were reaching out but not yet
getting there; opportunity of all sorts opening up but around the
corner; a tomorrow that never seemed to come. Hence the sudden impulse
that seized upon many of the leading people, descendants, some of them,
from the Loyalists, and all stout patriots, the impulse to be done with
it all, to commit hari-kari, to join the United States. This brought the
famous Annexation Manifesto of 1849 that still disfigures our history,
not with the shame of wanting to join the States but for the dullness of
either not thinking of it sooner or never.

The Annexation Manifesto recited the hardships that Canada was
suffering, spoke of possible remedies, protection to industry, renewal
of the bygone British preference, and then proposed "A friendly and
peaceful separation from British connection; a Union upon equal terms
with the Great North American Confederation of Sovereign States." It
sounds staggering; except for the one word "peaceful," it represents the
ideal for which the patriots had been hanged eleven years before. Still
more staggering is the list of the three hundred and twenty-five names
attached, names widely representing the class that was ranked as best in
the Montreal of the day, many families still with us. The names are such
that it is kinder not even to whisper them. Why breathe on a mirror of
reputation or rile the waters of benefaction? The curious many will find
the principal names in Dr. Atherton's monumental and impartial book.

The Annexation Movement came to nothing. History has long since smoothed
the grounds, explained it all away. "The outburst of a movement of
petulance," said Sir John Abbott (Prime Minister, 1891-92), speaking in
1889 to the Canadian Senate. Abbott had himself signed the Manifesto.
Boys will be boys.

The movement in a sense came to nothing; but in another sense it came to
a lot. It stimulated the British government and Lord Elgin to readjust
relations with the States by the famous Reciprocity Treaty of 1854,
after which Canada blossomed like a rose and Montreal was as busy as a
beehive. But in reality the basis was all three. The half-finished
transport, the half-built structures only called for completion. A
railroad gives no return till the trains run. A bridge, even a Victoria
Bridge, connects nothing until a Prince of Wales drives the last silver
rivet at its center. In reality Montreal was having its darkest hour
just before the dawn.

One pauses to gather together the economic factors that contributed to
the forward movement of Montreal that presently ensued. We may take, as
a sort of text, the recital of the following odd circumstance. In 1855
William Dawson, the newly arrived principal of McGill,[26] was
dispatched by the Governors, already proud of him, to spend his vacation
at Toronto, the seat of government and the source of benefaction. The
Grand Trunk Railway still lacked a year of completion. River steamers
were laid off for the winter. Dawson started out in a canoe, the only
way to cross the broken ice and water of the St. Lawrence River. A train
took him to St. Johns, and from there by land, water, train, and sleigh
he went to Albany, Niagara, Hamilton, and Toronto. The journey took five
days. A year later trains ran daily to Toronto and Chicago and, four
years after that, thundered over the Victoria Tubular Bridge bound for
the Eastern Townships, Portland, Boston, and New York.

This development was all based on the rise of the Port of Montreal under
the influence of the steam tug, the river steamer, the ocean sailing
steamer, and the ocean liner. The movement was already started in the
year of depression just described. The Harbour Commissioners were
authorized in 1850 to raise money to deepen the river channel. Commerce
already justified the expense. In that season two hundred and twenty-two
vessels came in from overseas, a total tonnage of forty-six thousand.
Immigrants were arriving in Montreal at the rate of about thirty
thousand a year. Hitherto the immigrants had been almost entirely
settlers in transit going up to the farms and towns of Upper Canada. But
after 1850 a great many stayed in Montreal. The building of the Grand
Trunk Railway, now going on under the control of British contractors,
brought, as it did everywhere, a flock of Irish "Navvies," meaning
originally and as a joke "Navigators," fellows who travel. The Irish
built the first railways in England, in France, and even in India, where
Asiatic labor ate less but loafed more. With these and other Irish and
British settlers came our "Griffintown," the nickname given to the area
west of McGill Street, between the new railway and the new canal. This
wretched area, whose tumbled, shabby houses mock at the wealth of
Montreal, was the first of our industrial "slums," the gift of the
machine age to replace the bush farm of the settler. It was and remained
mainly Irish, a new breaking of the solid French area of Montreal.
Others followed. The railway shops and works and the building of the
great bridge made Point St. Charles. Factory industries began in
Montreal on a real scale after 1850 with the factories rendered possible
by the creation of rail and canal transport side by side. There came the
rapid settlement of the riverbank beyond Point St. Charles, where used
to run, still runs in part, the famous old Lachine Road, along the
waterside. This made Verdun a separate town, now a separate city,
crowded and almost metropolitan now with sixty thousand people, but
still open ground at the time of which we speak. Yet between the
buildings, the huge "plants" that outclass the factory as the factory
once outclassed the shop and that border the Lachine Canal, and the
close-built area of Verdun, and such, beside the river, there still lies
an unoccupied space, along the line of the new aqueduct wide and open
yet so screened on both sides by bush never cleared that the road
through it is lonely to the verge of uncanniness. Montreal Island and
its environs have many of those strangely isolated and lonely spots--the
islands that divide the Lachine Rapids (Heron and Goat Island) and the
north end of Isle Perrot where till a year or so back the express trains
for Toronto and Chicago plunged through two miles of tangled bush,
unchanged since the days of the Iroquois.

The port, we say, fed the industrial development. Tonnage increased each
year; it reached fifty-eight thousand tons in 1851, a great total as
compared with the ten thousand tons twenty years before, not so great as
beside the nine million of 1938-39. Now begin the transatlantic
steamers, ships combining sail and steam, which ran for the next forty
years and which, almost till the end of the century, were the
outstanding feature of the port. First to come was the _Geneva_, a boat
built of iron, seven hundred tons and one hundred and sixty horsepower,
and arriving in 1853. The same year saw the arrival of the _Lady
Eglington_ and the _Sarah Sands_ (twelve hundred tons). With these boats
began steamship mails. They took from two to three weeks to come out
from Liverpool, but with the prevailing westerly winds were two days
better in going home.

The Crimean War broke up traffic for the season of 1855, the steamships
being commandeered as transports, but after it ocean steamers moved
ahead with the formation of the Montreal Ocean Steamship Company, for
which Hugh Allan acted as agent in making a contract for a fortnightly
mail service from Montreal to Liverpool. The service almost at once
(1858) became weekly, and the company after 1860 became the "H. and A.
Allan Co.," whose Allan Line passenger freight and mail became the
outstanding name in the annals of Montreal known all over the world. All
in all the Allan Line covered nearly a century, for it began in the
sailing-ship day when Captain Alexander Allan sailed his brig from
Glasgow to Quebec. The captain and his five sons followed up the trade.
They built and owned ships, some of them clippers trading into Quebec.
Hugh Allan sailed as a boy from the Clyde to enter a ship agent's office
in Montreal that became the scene of his life and achievement. His
brother Andrew joined him. They were first agents, then owners. The
first mail steamers (those named above) had, like Molson's first
_Accommodation_, too little power. The Allans boldly offered to put on
ships with three hundred and fifty horsepower, to make (as they
succeeded in making) the passage out from Liverpool in thirteen days and
back in eleven.

The years that followed are a record of maritime progress like the rush
of steam itself. The Allans saw that the days of wood were over and so
they built in iron. They installed more and more power. Larger and
faster was the word of the day. The _Anglo-Saxon_ made the
Quebec-Liverpool voyage in nine days. There were twenty vessels in the
Allan Fleet in 1861. Success in those days reaped a huge reward when the
freight on wheat was thirty cents a bushel, the days being still unknown
when standardized competition and mechanized transport were to cut it to
four or five cents, or even less, or even the vanishing point, grain
going practically as ballast. If the profits were great so were the
risks. The lighting and buoying of the river, the training of pilots,
all such things were in their infancy. There were terrible disasters on
the route, eight great ships wrecked in eight years (1857-64). Nor were
the losses only on ocean traffic. Appalling disasters happened when
steam was new. The explosion of a boiler on a Montreal-Longueuil ferry
(1856) killed thirty-five people, scalded and injured many others. Even
worse was the tragedy of the river steamer _Montreal_ that caught fire
in the St. Lawrence when carrying five hundred Scottish immigrants bound
from Quebec to Montreal. The boat grounded in an attempt to reach the
shore; flames swept its wooden structures. There was a panic rush that
swamped the boats. The scene of horror that ensued was saved from its
full effect by the bravery of the crew of another steamer which brought
boats alongside of the burning vessel and rescued many of the passengers
and crew. It is not known how many lives were lost. Many had leaped into
the water. It is thought that two hundred and fifty perished. Fifteen
charred bodies, twelve of them children, gathered from the wreck were
brought to Montreal for burial. They lie in two graves in the cemetery
on Mount Royal.

Such was the price of progress, new dangers for old, as later with the
navigation of the air. Yet navigation went on apace. The deepening of
the river showed sixteen and a half feet in 1854, eighteen in 1857. The
government of the province of Canada rook over the dredging of the river
in 1860; by the time it handed it over to the new government of the
Dominion in 1867 the channel was twenty feet deep. In the last year of
the old province (1866) five hundred and sixteen ocean vessels entered
the Port of Montreal, their total tonnage 205,775, an average of nearly
four hundred tons.

With the development of steam transport by water, parallel to it but a
little behind it, went the development of railways. Water routes by lake
and river were so widespread throughout Canada that, but for the
Canadian winter, the railway might have waited as long as it did in New
Zealand for Auckland to be joined to Wellington, or in seagirt Australia
where the railways to a great extent are waiting still. But in Canada
winter held the trump card. Even at that railways came slowly. There was
a lapse of twenty years between the scene of 1836 described in the
previous chapter and when the Champlain and St. Lawrence was opened at
the opening of the Montreal-Toronto (Grand Trunk) in 1856. Railways, as
in the United States, were built in bits and later joined into trunk
lines. The first road was followed by the Atlantic and St. Lawrence,
chartered in 1845, which nibbled its way, Longueuil to Richmond, in
1851. Later, as part of the Grand Trunk (1860), it connected Montreal to
Portland. The Grand Trunk itself was chartered in 1852, building in
sections toward Chicago on the west and Rivire du Loup on the east. It
connected Montreal with Brockville in 1855, with Toronto in 1856. Its
special meaning to the town lay in its extensive yards at Point St.
Charles. It established railway building shops and there constructed as
its masterpiece the Royal Train, including a locomotive with a funnel
shaped exactly _like_ a funnel, which carried the Prince of Wales during
his visit of 1860.

Along this path of alternative stagnation and progress, of difficulty
and achievement, moved Montreal in the days of the province of Canada.

Peculiar features of the life of the city at this stage of its growth
were the recurrent "civic jubilifications," held to mark each happy
milestone of progress. For this the city was now the proper size (35,000
in 1839, 57,000 in 1852, 91,000 in 1861), big enough and not too big,
for public rejoicing by all the people, for everybody to be happy over
everything all at once. Such good fortune belongs only to the past. The
people are too many today. Nothing short of a royal visit or an
armistice can lift them all up together. The opening of a new fire hall
lights up only the firemen; waterworks leave brewers cold and the public
dry; a new wing added to a college fails to enthuse the stock exchange;
a motor show is nothing to the ski club. But in the 1850s everybody was
willing to be glad over everything, or at least to stop work, to drink
its health, and follow in a torchlight procession. Paid amusement no
doubt has also helped to displace these simpler rejoicings.

They had begun even in the bad times of the riots and fires and cholera.
Montreal celebrated the London (Crystal Palace) Exhibition of 1851 by
having a local exhibition of things going to the London Exhibition.
"Immense throngs," we are told, "visited the city during the week in
which it was held." "A regatta on the river . . . A dinner given by the
Mayor and corporation, at which," says the chronicle, "some excellent
speeches were made . . ." Why not, indeed, since the history of
Hochelaga began with Indian oratory? There was a great ball in which
eight hundred "joined in the gay scene" and a torchlight procession
under the management of the fire brigade. The brigade, as just shown,
knew all about torches. The celebration ended with fireworks on the
island wharf. But such an occasion was as nothing to what was done when
good times began to join forces with glad hearts.

The same year witnessed the celebration of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic
Railway mentioned above, with a "grand procession, ball and dinner and
triumphal arches." The decorations were hardly faded when there came the
celebration of the Grand Trunk Portland Railway (in 1853); the dinner
and demonstration for the arrival in port of the _Geneva_ (as above);
the celebration of the laying of Pier No. 1 of Victoria Bridge; the
exhibition for five days (1855) of exhibits going to the Paris
Exhibition, with "an immense number of strangers thronging the city,"
with the Governor General, Sir Edmund Head, as the guest of the city;
grand civic reception to French Commander De Belvge whose French ship
of war was the first at Montreal since the conquest. But all this
rejoicing sounds faint as beside the terrific reception accorded to the
officers and men of the Thirty-ninth Regiment, Crimean veterans arriving
in Montreal at the close of the war. Two special steamers brought them
from Quebec, the guests of Montreal. "The citizens thronged the quays,
parapet walls, the windows and roofs of the stores" . . . "The Montreal
Artillery" . . . "roar of cannon" . . . "Cheer upon cheer" . . .
"Address by the Mayor and corporation" . . . "a great procession" . . .
"Banquet at the city concert hall" (Bonsecours Market Building still
there) . . . all free . . . "One thousand two hundred guests," all the
regiment, the volunteers, Mayor, city council, and a flow of oratory
that would have made Donnaconda seem silent.

"Continued excitement," says the chronicle. Hardly was it over when
there came the opening of the new McGill Buildings (Arts), the old
Burnside Buildings having been burned down with or without the fire
brigade in 1856. Right after that came the opening of the new waterworks
with water thrown a hundred and ten feet high against the Notre Dame
Church (October 10). Still breathless from that, the citizens rallied to
the big celebration, November 12 and 13, 1856, of the opening of the
Grand Trunk (Toronto-Montreal) Railway, which beat them all. Three
thousand sterling was subscribed for "a procession, a banquet, an
excursion and a ball." As the day approached, says the record, "It was
evident that the city was going to be a bumper" (a Victorian word now
almost forgotten, meaning a huge drink) . . . "Immense trains of
cars . . . crowds of strangers . . . the streets like Cheapside . . . a
huge procession . . . a great banquet on the railway ground at Point
St. Charles . . ." "The crowd was immense" . . . "Four thousand
present" . . . "A sea of heads" . . . Speeches by the Governor General and
other Indians, a torchlight procession, and that was only the first
day . . . Next day a military review at Logan's Farm, but why go further?
Incidentally, it may be explained that Logan's Farm was one of the most
easterly and one of the largest of the great farms that lay above the
city as marked on the map of 1856. A part of it is now the Parc
Lafontaine. At this period it was the chosen ground for military
reviews.

From such fabric can we build up the past life of our city as no
document or statistics can show it, and with it, the great change in the
outlook of human life and fortune in the century, almost a century that
separates us from it.

We can realize that when the Prince of Wales arrived in the city in 1860
the city was all ready for him. A main feature of his visit was to be
the official opening of the new Victoria Bridge.

The project and enterprise of a bridge over the St. Lawrence was
initiated by the Hon. John Young, a member of the Hincks cabinet (1854)
and a Harbour Commissioner of Montreal, 1853-76. "Through his
foresight," so his monument of 1908 on the water front bears witness,
"Montreal has become the national port of Canada." A long, hard fight
was needed to carry the idea of throwing a bridge over a mile and a half
of water, with a flood level twenty-five feet above its normal surface,
and a torrent of ice and snow bearing down on it every spring with all
the flood of water gathered from Lake Superior and hurled at it by
Lachine. The thing seemed madness, but in the end it was done.

The Victoria Tubular Bridge, tubular no longer since 1898, was one of
the triumphs of the world's engineering at a time when engineering was
young. It was a first great lesson in that "ice engineering" which has
become, under such men as Howard Barnes of McGill, one of the great
specialized achievements of practical science.

Engineering in 1850 was limited, structural steel in its infancy. It was
not possible to pass across the stream with the huge strides, the
towering height, and vast steel structures of the stupendous Jacques
Cartier Harbour Bridge of 1930, two miles downstream. Nor was it
possible to span the river by a suspension bridge thrown across from
cliff to cliff, as at Niagara, a kite first, with a string, the string
pulling a wire, and then more till the gathering wires swung like
cobwebs in the sky. In this instance there were no cliffs to suspend
from. In any case the distance is too great. Even with present materials
suspension ends, the engineers say, at about seven thousand feet.

So the bridge had to get across the river, pier by pier. The problem was
how to set the piers to resist the ice. It was at first proposed by the
engineers to make the piers of cribs so big, so solid, so close
together, and so heavy and so foursquare that nothing could budge them.
The irresistible force was to meet an immovable object. Local wisdom
knew better. Immovable objects won't do for ice. The bigger the crib,
the harder the shove. Ice, like all the forces of nature, cannot be
conquered; it must be led aside, fooled into doing something else. Such
is the wind, glancing off a windmill, and the water "escaping" as it
throbs through a Niagara turbine, or the radio wave, off into eternal
space forever, but fooled into imitating a human voice in leaving. So
with the ice. Each pier of the bridge on its upstream side thrusts out
against the current a long stone foot, a cutwater, that is ninety-two
feet long at its base with a cutting edge of smooth stone. Against this
the ice may rip and tear, hurling itself sheet upon sheet, piling up
only to fall again, but powerless, once thus divided to exercise its
power of expansion by which it overthrows anything that shuts it in.
Along the abutments of the bridge, two hundred and ninety feet on each
side as first built, and chiefly on the St. Lambert side, the south
side, which catches the full swing of the river, the ice smashes and
piles thirty feet high. Let it pile. There's lots of room in the air.

Such is the Victoria Bridge. As first constructed, it carried above its
piers a great iron tube, or, rather, a series of twenty-five tubes
fitted together to make one. These tubes were made of wrought iron,
boiler plate, one quarter to three quarters of an inch thick. They were
not round but rectangular, sixteen feet wide, and in height they began
at each side of the river at eighteen feet, six inches, each tube
coupled about the last one with a rise of six inches, making the center
twenty-two feet high. Inside the tube ran a single track for a train.
The tube had windows, its sides covered with boards, and over it a
board and tin roof with a footwalk (not for the public) along the
flattened peak. From the summer water level to the bottom side of the
tube the distance was sixty feet. The purpose of the tube was to protect
the track against the accumulating snow and ice of a Canadian winter.
This was an engineering error in over-safety, corrected later. . . . But
the main feature of the engineering plan, the piers against the ice,
succeeded.

Thus was built the Victoria Bridge crossing a mile and a half of water,
and with its abutments 9,184 feet long. Hon. John Young supplied the
driving power. The great railway engineer Robert Stephenson designed the
structure; with him was A. M. Ross. The famous London contractors,
Jackson, Peto, Brassey, and Betts, built it, with James Hodges as
builder in charge. The first stone was turned in 1857. Three thousand
men were working on it in 1858. The first passenger train passed over on
December 17, 1859. The bridge cost $7,000,000. The Grand Trunk Railway
paid the bill and owned the bridge. It remained for the Prince of Wales
to declare it open.

The young Prince Albert Edward, released from the overcontrol and
overeducation of his German father and his everlasting German tutor, was
now having a good time on his own, visiting Canada and the United
States. He was at a time of life, and lived in a time of history, when
it was still fun to be a prince--a poor trade now. Albert Edward was
prepared to attend everything, open anything, shut anything, dedicate
anything, review soldiers all day and pretty girls all evening, pray and
be prayed at, dine for two hours and dance it off in eight. His visit of
1860 was as happy as that of his grandson the Prince of Wales of 1919.

There is no need to recount in detail all that was done by the Prince of
Wales and for the Prince's entertainment on his visit of 1860. As soon
as the merchants learned of the coming visit they decided to build a
Crystal Palace, commenced forthwith on Peel Street in the open fields
above St. Catherine.

[Illustration: Drawings of Montreal Harbour by G. H. Andrews in the
London

_Illustrated News, 1860._]

The Prince spent his first day in Montreal, a prisoner on shipboard in a
deluge of rain. Next day Sir John Rose's house (later the Ogilvie
family's house) was placed at his disposal during his visit. The Prince
began his good works on Saturday, August 25, 1860. He opened the Crystal
Palace; he then opened the Victoria Bridge; on crossing it, received
from the Grand Trunk Railway a gold medal; attended a monster civic
lunch; rode in procession; witnessed fireworks in the harbor in the
evening. On Sunday he attended the new Christ Church Cathedral; gave it
a Bible; listened to a cantata of four hundred voices in which sang,
unknown, Marie Lajeunesse, a girl of fifteen, the later Madame Albani.
That week there followed a great ball in the Crystal Palace, a review on
Logan's Farm, a torchlight procession with the inevitable firemen, a
People's Ball in the Crystal Palace--and the Prince off for Ottawa.

A memento of his visit is the Prince of Wales Terrace on Sherbrooke
Street, then and long afterward the last word in genteel residence, now
leaving much to be said. Another is the rechristening of Victoria
Square, previously Commissioners Square and commonly called the
Haymarket. The stimulus of the visit helped no doubt to create the Art
Association, born in that year.

The Prince's happy visit came just in time, for the sunshine was soon to
be eclipsed. The outbreak of the American Civil War brought in the
autumn of 1861 the unhappy "Trent Affair"--the seizure by a U.S. ship of
two Confederate envoys taken out of a British Royal Mail Steamer. War
seemed certain. There was just time before winter, with steam
navigation, to pour heavy reinforcements into Montreal. The barracks
overflowed. Stores newly built where the Hotel Dieu had stood, and the
old college buildings of the lower town were improvised as soldiers'
quarters. The streets were loud with the bagpipes and the fife and drum
and gay with the scarlet coats and tossing plumes that were the uniform
of the day. The young men of the city drilled in the closing evenings in
companies of volunteers, eager to learn and ready to fight. To the old
people going out with the ebb tide, it seemed as if the tide was turned
back fifty years, to the Montreal of 1812, the soldiers in the streets,
and the Battle of Chteauguay.

Wiser counsels prevailed. Much was owed to Queen Victoria's husband. The
Prince Consort was soon to die. In the full career of his active life an
advancing shadow fell across his path and in that darkening light he saw
more clearly than those in angry quarrel in the sunshine. Much also was
due to Abraham Lincoln, who had left his Springfield home never to see
it again and who had already had the first of those prophetic visions
which made him henceforth like a man who walks alone with God. To such
wisdom do we owe it that England and America were not torn asunder. We
can see now what would have been the meaning of such a disaster.

So the diplomatists, as we now say, "found a formula," that is, a way of
admitting that both sides are right. War was averted. The bagpipes of
the defenders of Canada turned from a pibroch to a Highland reel, the
drum and fife to a polka, and as the winter waxed and waned the Montreal
garrison remembered the girls and were merry. Then came the spring and
the river opened, calling the reinforcements away. The hospitable town
staged a "Crystal Palace public entertainment"--not a banquet over in
one day, but a feed in relays, fifteen hundred soldiers at a time, day
after day till all had eaten. There was "nothing to drink," in the
soldierly sense of drinking, for a new shadow was falling on old-time
gaiety. But in return the soldiers ate a ton and a half of sandwiches, a
ton and a half of cake, two and a half tons of tarts, topped off with
fifty barrels of fruit. Then the bagpipes wailed farewell and the ships
dropped down the river.

Yet a large garrison stayed, from then until Confederation and long
after. For the Civil War brought new dangers. Southern refugees and
Southerners organized to raid Vermont, kept apprehension alive. But in
spite of the anxieties of the Civil War years Montreal was a lively
city. There was lots of money. Southern refugees, British contractors,
garrison officers spent it like water. A lot of it changed hands in the
old St. Lawrence Hall, the fine old hostelry that had now arisen on St.
James Street, still going strong at the turn of the twentieth century,
lingering on as a coffeehouse on Craig Street when built out of
existence on St. James Street, and with still many a regret for its
memory. As elsewhere in the British Empire, "society" favored the South;
the plain people, doing enough hard work to understand chattel slavery,
favored the North.

Later on the issues got mixed when the close of the war brought the
Fenian Raids across the border. They were easily repelled by the
garrison and volunteers of Montreal but remained as a bitter and unhappy
episode of our Canadian history, fortunately no part of the story of
this book.

Yet the Civil War turned aside hard times from Canada. The conflict in
the States, with the open frontier of the reciprocity treaty, brought
markets such as never were. There were bread and work for all now, and
for the adventurous a three-hundred-dollar bounty to be had by stepping
across the line into a blue coat. Five hundred and fifty-two new houses
were built in Montreal in 1862, and in 1863 record building of 736
houses. The next year went beyond that again with 1019 houses, while the
Civil War years are marked also with the building of Trinity Church on
the Place Viger, the Church of Gesu (Bleury Street), the American
Presbyterian and Knox Church on Dorchester. With these evidences of
spiritual faith went also the tangible evidence of temporal welfare
expressed in the building of the Molsons Bank on St. James Street.

The overseas tonnage entering the port in 1866 was 205,775 tons, of
which 69,000 tons represented steam vessels, the latter of course still
carrying sails. The shipping was nearly all, about 96 per cent, British.

One pauses a moment before letting the curtain fall on the Montreal of
the province of Canada henceforth (1867) to rise on the metropolis of
the Dominion. How greatly it has changed in the hundred years since the
conquest. The fortifications are all gone. In their place appear the
masts and yards of the close-packed ships of the harbor. Hardly any of
the large spaces, the open gardens, are left--little but the open space
that once was the Jesuits, the garden of the Chteau de Ramezay, the
garden secluded from sight behind the Sminaire. Large sections, blocks
of the city, have been burned out and rebuilt. Stone stores and shops
and country houses replace cloisters and the churches. The greatest
difference of all perhaps is that what were the "faubourgs" of the old
French town, the "suburbs" of the early English days, are now grown as
to be part of the town itself. Craig Street and St. Lawrence Main and
the side streets off them are all built up; beside them to the west the
open space that became the Haymarket is now Victoria Square.

St. Ann's suburb has turned into Griffintown, an ill-built crowded area,
rendered still more wretched by the great spring floods, which at times,
as notably in 1857 and 1861, laid it under water.

Not the most conspicuous but the most subtle of the changes is that from
romance to finance, from church to counting house, that marks the rise
of commercial Montreal. Maisonneuve still stands guard over the parish
church of Notre Dame, holding the Place d'Armes against the Iroquois,
but the Bank of Montreal watches over them both. The streets of the
Saints are now the addresses of the stockbrokers whose opportunity to
live arose out of the organization of share companies and whose growing
transactions enabled them to organize as an exchange in 1863. Thus as
romance has flown out of the door finance has come in at the window.
With romance has fled also in great measure religion, or at least its
earthly tabernacles. The churches are moved, as they always aspire to
do, upward. The labors of the Montreal Fire Brigade have assisted at the
change; Christ Church, burned in 1856, has gone to St. Catherine Street.
St. Stephen's was burned out in 1850. Still left are the parish church
of Notre Dame and the earliest of all, the Bonsecours Church beside the
river. The Virgin on the roof of the latter still watches over sailors,
but her intercession is supplemented by the hydrographic charts of
Trinity House and the navigation marks of the government of the province
of Canada.

The banks had begun early in this century with the Bank of Montreal, at
first a partnership body which dates its business existence from 1817
and its corporate life from 1822. It was followed by the short-lived
Bank of Canada, incorporated in the same year, and in 1836 by the Bank
of British North America, operating under British charter in all the
provinces. The Molsons dates from 1855; the Merchants from 1861.

Most notable to the casual visitor is the change in the currency from
the old pounds, shillings, and pence to the dollars and cents, a change
necessitated by the growing trade across the border. Here began the
quaint method of reckoning foreign exchange between Montreal and London
which lasted till the Great War. From now on a bank teller had beside
him, hung on a nail, a little table which showed him that 9 was par, at
which resting place a hundred pounds' sterling was worth $4.86-2/3 in
Canadian money. No teller ever knew why 9 was par. The secret was
closely kept. It really meant that if you added 9 per cent to the
old-gold value of the American dollar, viz., $4.40 equal to one
sovereign, then you got the new value of the American dollar after the
coinage alteration of 1834 had taken some of the gold out of it, viz.,
$4.86-2/3 cents equal to one sovereign. The table form ran up and down
the full swing possible for the exchange pendulum with a gold standard
and free shipment. But why the table did not give $4.86-2/3 as par is a
secret carried by the bankers of the 1850s to their graves--and then on.
In 1914 the Great War moved exchange clean out of the table (1 = $6.00)
and it never came back to it.

We know, of course, and need not ask, what they did in Montreal when the
British North America Act was duly passed, and it was known that the
Dominion would be proclaimed on the first of July 1867.

"Early in the month of June the attention of the citizens was called to
a public meeting"--we can guess it--"to be held for the purpose of
considering the most appropriate measure in which to celebrate the
inauguration of the New Dominion."

The reader can easily reconstruct the rest, "city decorated with flags,"
"Sunrise heralded by the roar of cannon," "a grand review of regulars
and volunteers on Logan's Farm" . . . "fireworks" ($1,000 worth) on the
mountain side . . .

And in the echo of the cannon and the reverberation of the speeches,
Montreal passed into the Dominion.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] A. Descelles, _The "Patriotes" of 1837_.

[25] A. Sandham, _Ville Marie_, 1870.

[26] C. Macmillan, _McGill and Its Story, 1821-1921_, 1921.




CHAPTER X

Montreal

Seaport of the New Dominion

     _Montreal in the Wider Life of Canada. Its Increasing
     Commercial Predominance. The Red River Rebellion. Fenian
     Raiders from Vermont. Montreal and Home Rule. Hard Times and
     Public Charities. National Policy, Manufactures, and Industrial
     Montreal. Growth of the Port. Sail and Steam. The Allan Liners.
     The Timber Rafts. The Flood of 1886. The Ice Palaces. End of
     the Century._


As the St. Lawrence River moves toward the sea, the current slackens as
it goes. The river has become so wide and deep that its movement is
hardly felt although its volume is far greater than that of the waters
foaming at Lachine. So it is with the history of Montreal, indeed to
some degree with the history of any city as it grows from early
settlement to metropolitan life. Its history merges more and more into
the wider history of the nation; for Montreal into the wider field of
the growth of the Dominion of Canada. The panorama of events after the
Confederation of 1867--the acquisition of the Northwest, the Red River
Rebellion, the extension of Canada by a Pacific Railway to the Pacific
Ocean, the settlement of the Northwest, the Rebellion of 1885, the rise
of great manufactures, the growth of wealth, the warning episode of war
in South Africa, the era of bounding prosperity that opened the century
and fell into fragments with the first World War--all of this is not
Montreal, but Canada. Yet Montreal shared in each phase of it, gathering
out of it the central metropolitan position which it grew to occupy.

The general effect of the great changes that followed the Confederation
of the Dominion was to shift Montreal to what is somewhat pedantically
called a new "orientation." In its commercial life it expands from a
merely provincial status to take on a continental character. As the
successive additions of new territory and provinces, the Northwest
(1869), the province of Manitoba (1870), British Columbia (1871), and
Prince Edward Island (1873), carry the Dominion from sea to sea,
Montreal is carried with it as the center of finance and commerce for
all. We can realize this change when we reflect on the limited meaning
of the name Canada before 1867. To the Maritime Provinces, to the
Northwest, and to British Columbia, it meant an entirely separate area
from their own, a community of a different aspect with whom they had
little in common and little sympathy. The older people in the Maritimes
thus used the term "Canada" for a full generation after Confederation.

But in proportion as Canada grew to mean a national area with interests
in common Montreal rose to be the chief city of the Dominion, quite
distinct from any of the others. Halifax retained a peculiar aspect in
its imperial character as an outpost of defense, keeping its British
naval establishment till 1903, in other words for a generation after the
inland imperial garrisons had left in 1870 and 1871. Victoria with the
naval Esquimalt alongside of it kept something of the same character. A
little later the ready-made seaport of Vancouver (1885) began its
existence as a Pacific and national port. Quebec, as the sailing ship
and the timber trade passed away, sank more and more into a purely
historic position on the map of Canada, exalted or at least animated by
whatever new life grew from its position as the provincial capital, and
from the fact that it remained a French-speaking city. But from the new
Canada of the plains and the Pacific coast, Quebec was quite unknown,
was little more than a city in a schoolbook. All the inland towns of
necessity carried and still carry a provincial aspect. Even Toronto was
in many ways little more than the endless multiplication of a town.
Ottawa, tamely accepting the social control of the province of Ontario
over its manners and morals, was the most provincial of the lot. It was
merely a place in Ontario where outsiders came.

But Montreal under the influence of Confederation rose to a metropolitan
position all its own, giving it in the general policy of the Dominion an
extraordinary, if not an overgreat, influence. Although technically
Montreal had no other representation at Ottawa than three elected
members of the House of Commons, raised in 1896 to five (now standing at
sixteen for Montreal Island), there soon grew up a very direct and
active connection between Montreal and the government, the Cabinet, of
Canada. It is true that there is nothing of this in the law, written or
unwritten, of the Dominion. For the rest of Canada, the great size of
the country and its varied areas and interests dictate, for its form of
cabinet, a "sectionalism" not known in Great Britain. All the sections,
both the races, both chief religions, and cross combinations of each,
must be fitted into the peculiar mosaic of a Dominion cabinet. The
system has been denounced ever since Mr. Christopher Dunkin's famous
denunciation of Confederation itself, as mere sectionalism, but no other
working system has yet been found. Granted the appointment of all the
members of a Canadian cabinet except one, Mr. Sherlock Holmes could tell
Watson at once that the remaining member must, let us say, come from
Quebec province, from the British part of it called the "Eastern
Townships," must be an Irish Roman Catholic, have a strong sense of
humor, and, if possible, a wooden leg. If Watson demurred to the wooden
leg, Holmes would answer, "Veteran of the Great War, Watson, veteran of
the Great War."

But the representation of Montreal in the Ottawa cabinet contrives
itself without contrivance. The size and wealth of the city naturally
offer a choice of leading men, native sons of the city, such as the
prime minister Sir John Abbott. Moreover, people seldom grow poor in
Canadian politics--with conspicuous and honorable exceptions--and rich
and successful politicians float into the city on the tide of their
success. We may add to this the fact that Montreal contains a large
share of the great industrial leaders and financiers, representing the
tariff interest, the export interest, and the shipping and
transportation interest all the way from Great Britain to Japan and
Australia. Hence the danger is not of representing Montreal too little,
but too much: hence the accusation from various radical and agricultural
quarters of the control of Canada by a clique of Montreal politicians
and Montreal businessmen, the kind now christened "interests" lumped
together under the fatal term "St. James Street."

This idea of Montreal dominance, no matter how true or false,
undoubtedly aggravates the economic dislocation of western from eastern
Canada, which nature itself creates and policy fails to alleviate.
Prejudice replaces reason. Many, perhaps most, western farmers would
prefer to spend, even to waste, any quantity of money on railroads in
the west owned by the government, than on a railway, no matter how
efficient, paying dividends from Montreal to shareholders in St. James
Street, Wall Street, and Lombard Street. This is not adduced as what the
farmers ought to think but what they do think.

Montreal, as said, had its full share of interest and participation,
here more, there less, in the events which made the national history of
Canada in the later period of the outgoing century. Very close was its
interest in the renewed danger of Fenian invasion which appeared in the
opening years of Confederation. The Fenian movement, as it affected
Canada, was organized across the border by Irish Americans and friends
of Ireland who proposed to show their affection for Ireland by taking it
out on Canada--a process quite logical to the Irish mind. Fenianism from
first to last met with no sympathy in Montreal, nor in British North
America at large. Even in Great Britain it was little more than
criminality, or at best the counsel of desperation of men embittered by
long tyranny, by unrequited wrongs, and by the coercion of armed force.
Something may be said for the "Manchester Martyrs" of 1867, nothing at
all for Fenian raiders into Canada. The seal of public condemnation on
Fenianism had already been set in Montreal by the great public funeral
that moved in solemn procession on its downtown streets in honor of
Thomas D'Arcy McGee, first member for Montreal West in the new Canadian
Parliament, a former Irish patriot, assassinated in Ottawa (April 7,
1868) as an act of vengeance against such treachery to Ireland as
serving the Queen in Canada. The photographs taken at the time of the
event show the streets a vast flood of crowded and silent humanity
through which moved the tall black catafalque that bore the dead.

Yet the repulse of the previous border raids of 1866 did not deter the
Fenians from planning a new enterprise for 1870, this time to be based
on a raid into the Eastern Townships which would sever the connections
with Montreal to Portland, Boston, and New York. The invasion was
organized under a self-appointed "General" O'Neil, whose followers
differed from the ordinary rabble of malcontents in that they were
dangerous men in the military sense, many of them trained to arms in the
American Civil War. Information of the approaching raid was received in
advance from the British Legation at Washington. Montreal was at once
filled with indignation at the proposed invasion of Canadian soil and
with military ardor to repel it. The city was turned to a tumult of
excitement and parade, the days of Chteauguay come back again.
Fortunately there were still imperial troops in Montreal, awaiting the
final departure of the garrison. Among these were the regiment (seven
hundred strong) of the Prince Consort's Own Rifles, in which served, as
a new arrival in Montreal (August 1869), the young and popular Prince
Arthur of Connaught, much lionized by society and by the fair sex and
representing royalty at the opening of rinks, schools, and art
exhibitions. Forty-five years later Montreal recalls the Prince, changed
to be the "old Duke," but military and erect as ever, inspecting troops
on the McGill Campus as Governor General during the Great War.[27]

To the Prince's regiment were joined other troops of cavalry and
infantry and a large body of volunteers recruited for the occasion in
Montreal. The assembled forces, Prince and all, moved toward the
frontier. But the Fenians had had enough of it before it began. After a
brief and bloodless clash at Cook's Corners they made off across the
border and Fenianism came to an end in Canada. The decorated veterans of
the raid, as proud of their exploit as Waterloo pensioners, were with us
in Montreal, it seemed, till yesterday.

For Fenianism Montreal had no sympathy but for the Irish cause, in the
better sense, very much, both then and always. It was just at this
moment in history that the underground criminal movement of Fenianism
was altered into the open and aboveboard movement of Home Rule, which
began with the annual academic motions of Mr. Isaac Butt and presently
grew into the organized crusade of Charles Stewart Parnell and his
associates. This, as a constitutional movement, claiming rights similar
to those enjoyed everywhere by British and Americans, drew sympathy from
all over the world. Especially it drew from the Dominion of Canada whose
status it proposed to imitate and to adopt; most of all in Montreal
where a large percentage of the British people were Irish by race, and
practically all the people, French, Scotch, and everything, sympathetic
to the "cause of Ireland" as long as consistent with British sovereignty
and free from methods of criminality and despair. Not so Toronto, which
exhibited always the defects of its own merits, the reverse of its medal
of loyalty, by containing an element more loyal than the Queen, more
Orange than William III, and more Protestant than the Archbishop of
Canterbury.

Hence the pro-Ireland attitude of Montreal in a world (1870-1914) still
so little troubled by wars and tyrants of its own that the disputes of
landlords and tenants in Ulster and Tipperary could echo around the
globe; hence the St. Patrick's Day parades which through two generations
have been a feature of the city life of Montreal. For these each year,
by the courtesy and custom of the town, everyone turns Irishman and
wears green. St. George, St. Andrew, and St. David feast alone; St.
Patrick invites all Montreal, the saint's great church on Dorchester
Street the center of the faith. This custom of annual honor to St.
Patrick is in part a consequence of the peculiar Montreal climate. St.
Patrick's seventeenth of March falls just right to encourage those false
hopes of an early spring which find new life each year--the bright sun,
the streets all adrip and aglisten with a March thaw, the snow partly
gone (in reality shoveled away), the talk of old-timers of having seen
dust blowing in the streets of Montreal on St. Patrick's Day--all this
lends color and character. A day or two later a March blizzard buries
the city in snow again, but St. Patrick has had his day.

Hence one can understand the wide sympathy and support given to the Home
Rule movement in Montreal from its inception to its eclipse in the Great
War. St. Patrick's Society of Montreal, dating from 1834, as an
all-Irish society, with the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society
branching from it in 1856, took Irish Home Rule under its especial
tutelage, telegraphing its congratulations to Mr. Gladstone on the Bill
of 1893 and inviting Irish-American orators to Montreal. The older
generation can still recall such large and enthusiastic Home Rule
meetings as the one held to meet Mr. John Redmond early in this century.
Home Rule has gone. Eire reigns where Erin wept. St. Patrick's Day in
Montreal drifts into the veiled shadow of the future.

Less concerned was Montreal, and French Canada at large, with what was
really a far more momentous episode for the Dominion than the abortive
Fenian raids--the transfer of the Northwest Territory to Canada and the
rising which ensued in Assiniboia, in and around Fort Garry. As far as
French Canada knew or cared about the "Red River" troubles, sympathy was
all with the mtis or French half-breeds who had risen at Fort Garry in
armed protest under Louis Riel against what they understood to be the
loss of their customary rights, their peculiar system of land tenure,
threatened by the new surveys, and the supposed danger to their language
and religion. Ignorance and neglect alone created the trouble. Canada
had no intention of destroying rights and disturbing language and
religion. The Manitoba Act of 1870 presently made this clear. The rising
itself, after a winter of rebel rule, 1869-70, still under the Crown, at
Fort Garry, faded away and dispersed on the approach of an expeditionary
force under Colonel Wolseley and under the promise of amnesty and
redress. But meantime Louis Riel had clouded the issue by his brutal
murder at Fort Garry of Thomas Scott, an Orangeman of Ontario. This deed
threw Ontario, especially its Orange element, into a fury of anger;
hence by reaction it helped to line up the French Canadians on the side
of the rebel mtis, who were, after all, their own kinsmen. With the
collapse of the rebellion the fires of anger died down but left the
ashes ready to fan to flame in Montreal with the Northwest Rebellion of
fifteen years later.

Meantime Montreal was only directly concerned with the Red River
troubles of 1870 to the extent that a battalion of 362 volunteers from
the province of Quebec shared in the expedition. But of these only
seventy-seven were French Canadians. The Imperial Royal Artillery and
Riflemen who served in the expedition left Canada on their return east
in 1871--the last of the garrisons.

       *       *       *       *       *

As the decade of the seventies drew on, hard times fell like a moving
shadow across Canada, and where they fell economic life wilted at the
root. Confederation, it seemed, had failed. The obliteration of American
trade when reciprocity ran out and the Civil War purchases stopped came
like paralysis on the Maritimes. Ships swung idle at their anchors;
grass grew in the streets. The root crops rotted, worthless, in the
field. For the newly created Ontario the collapse of grain prices in
Great Britain spelled ruin to a community dependent on export sale--the
weak limb, then and always, of our Canadian structure. Mortgages fell
like snowflakes, alike on the finished homesteads with brick houses
created by a generation of work and of late enriched by the Crimean War
and on the bush farms, the half-made clearings, with the new frame
houses standing half finished and abandoned, the snow drifting into the
doorways. In French Canada the habitant suffered least, snug in his
self-sufficient holding, as old as Frontenac.

Montreal suffered most. The collapse of outside trade and inside
business left the city stranded, crowded with workless people and
tradeless shops. Its factories were as yet too limited to keep it going.
Railway building had been checked, its first era over. The collapse of
business brought down two banks, the Mechanics and the Jacques Cartier,
in 1875. Population had risen by 1870 to over one hundred thousand but
the increase only meant more people with nothing to do and nowhere to
go. Immigrants still crowded in looking for work among the workless. In
the first year of Confederation thirteen thousand immigrants came to
Canada; in 1871 there were twenty-three thousand; in 1873 fifty
thousand. There was then no dole, no public relief, nor any legal right
to it. The poor were still God's children. There were institutions of
charity and many of them, for after all Montreal was itself a work of
piety, founded as the Mission of Ville Marie. Even the earliest
foundations were still there. There was the Hotel Dieu of 1642,
originally giving aid to all in distress, moved since 1861 from its
original location in the old town to occupy its present site on Pine
Avenue, but limited now to the medical sphere alone. There were still
the Grey Nuns of Madame Youville, though no longer housed in the "Old
Grey Nunnery" on McGill Street that arose out of the General Hospital of
Charron beside the Little River. They occupied then, as now, the Grey
Nunnery on Dorchester Street.

In addition to these earlier institutions was also at the time of which
we speak the Montreal Ladies' Benevolent Society, a Protestant
organization, which had arisen (1841) out of the suffering of the
cholera years and had found that suffering did not end with cholera. Its
care was for aged women and destitute children. There were the Sisters
of Providence (Roman Catholic) founded by Madame Gaulin in Montreal in
1828, a charity that took the form of houses of refuge for the destitute
old age and for orphaned infancy. These houses spread wide, in Montreal
at first, then over North America. With them were the Asile de Montral,
an institution that arose also out of a cholera year, 1832, its work
being the shelter of Roman Catholic children left orphans. Of similar
origin and work was the St. Patrick's Orphanage, a product of the Irish
immigration. It had built St. Bridget's Refuge on Lagauchetire Street,
where Lord Dufferin came as a visitor in 1873. Its present home is on
St. Catherine Road, Outremont. The Harvey Institute (Protestant), first
offering a shelter to those ill of ship fever (1847), undertook
presently general relief and education of the children of the poor. At
this time it was just moving (1875) from a humble house on St. Antoine
Street to better premises on Mountain Street. Later on (1908) it moved
out to the purer atmosphere of Westmount. An offshoot of the Institute,
the Protestant Infants' Home, had just been founded in 1870.

These good works were supplemented by the Protestant House of Industry
that arose out of a private bequest of houses and buildings on St. Mary
Street in 1808 and was even longer in its cradle than McGill University,
and perhaps for the same reason, since it did not get into organization
until 1863. The St. Vincent de Paul Society had begun work in Montreal
as early as 1848.

It is to be noted that the best-known and the most widespread of our
present institutions only began after the destitution and suffering of
the period here discussed. Indeed they largely arose out of it, for it
was this new industrial poverty, the outcome of machine industry itself,
this failure of bread and work for all in the very heart of nature's
bounty, that first quickened the public realization that poverty was not
a crime, that self-help is helpless for those idle in the market place,
and that it is not enough to assign to the poor as their portion the
kingdom of heaven. They can't wait. The earlier Victorian creed, bred in
the complacency of British commercial success, began to seem hard and
brutal--the creed that assigned poverty to the workhouse, left low wages
to the survival of the fittest, and left the workless man to sleep on a
bench, the child to die in the slums. Tears of pity that arose from
earlier springs, from older soils, began to fall anew on the stones of
this new pavement.

For look how limited in its scope in the Montreal of the 1870s and in
other cities was the public relief of distress. Here were homes for the
orphan children of the fatherless with no thought of keeping the father
alive. Here were shelters where destitute men might sleep, but none
where they might wake; public soup kitchens like those that appeared in
Montreal in 1873, where a free meal would stand off starvation, for a
day, with no further thought of tomorrow. And as the final stage in
life's cavalcade of poverty, homes where indigent old age might ponder
as it faded out on what had made it so.

It was this sense of insufficiency which presently brought to Montreal,
to the world, the wider work of the Salvation Army, of the Charity
Organization Society, the Victorian Nurses, and such other institutions
and efforts. They stand halfway between the old grudging charity, that
gave with a sob and spoiled the gift with a reprimand, and the new
legislative code that began a generation later to take over all social
relief of poverty, illness, and idleness as a function of the state
itself. Such things (belonging to the Australasia of 1890 and the Great
Britain of 1910) were still a long way from the thought of Montreal of
1875. Further on still from all of them is the new world dawning, or
dying as it dawns; we cannot yet tell which.

The oncoming of the hard times had brought down the government (of Sir
John A. Macdonald and Sir George tienne Cartier) in 1873. Its fall is
commonly associated with the Pacific Scandal that arose out of Sir John
A. Macdonald accepting money gifts for the party purse from one of the
rival companies bidding for the Pacific Railway charter. The offending
company belonged in Montreal, and its wickedness dropped another blot on
the map of St. James Street. But it is a little hard for elementary
students to see the difference between this subscription to party funds
and those later gifts that ranked as patriotism itself and earned
knighthoods, except that they were larger. But the inquiry does not
concern us here. In any case the government was falling. The
impossibility of fulfilling its pledges in hard times made its fall
inevitable. The Pacific Scandal was just the last push given to Humpty
Dumpty. In place of Sir John ruled Alexander Mackenzie (1873-79).

The new Liberal Government adopted as its policy of what to do the grand
old Liberal policy of doing nothing. This was to be combined with rigid
economy, absolute honesty, and unflagging industry. All these things
proved out of date. Industry must flag if want of opportunity flags it,
and mere honesty and economy by themselves, with nothing else, are as
useful as half a pair of scissors. The government dragged on. They knew
that things would come right in the end: all things do; death sees to
it. They waited for the hard times to blow over; they did, but they blew
the government over first.

The change to the vigorous National (Tariff) Policy of 1878, the
creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company,[28] the opening of the
West, the Manitoba Boom, the revival of the European market--these
things quickened the life of Montreal and cleared the sky as does the
autumn wind off the Laurentians.

There is no doubt that Sir John A. Macdonald's policy of tariff
protection in industry (1879), since maintained by all Canadian
administrations, however sinful in the eyes of the Cobdenites and
whatever the burden it placed on the farmer, served as a great stimulus
to the manufacturing cities and especially to Montreal. It is true that
Montreal had made a certain start in manufacture without it, indeed even
before the moderate protection granted by the old province of Canada in
1859. Sugar refining had been established as far back as 1854. The
American Civil War stimulated all and every kind of manufacturing
possible at the day. But the plants did not yet exist for metal work,
iron, and steel on any large scale, nor for any great extension of the
rudimentary textile industry. The cotton industry began in a small mill
in Hochelaga in 1874, but after the adoption of National Policy it grew
with every year, a number of mills joining into an amalgamated company.

The manufacture of bridgework and structural steel at Montreal begins
with the opening of the twentieth century. The opening of the Canadian
Pacific brought the Angus railway shops. At the same time the
manufacture of tobacco was expanded into a leading industry. With the
next decade appeared the manufacture of electrical apparatus. The
manufacture of railway cars, rolling stocks, steam engines, leather,
cement, and a large variety of minor goods converted the Montreal of the
closing century from a purely maritime aspect to its later appearance as
a great manufacturing center attached to a seaport. There is no need in
the present record to recapitulate other than in general terms the facts
and figures expressed with greater feeling and detail in the statistics
of the Dominion government.

Indeed a new town arose as an addition to the old one. What had been the
flatlands and meadows and broken, straggling woods, along the valley of
the Little River, the ground which had offered the natural terrain for
the Lachine Canal, now with each succeeding decade reared its clumsy
factories and shabby plants, its lifting cranes and iron runways,
obliterating and disfiguring nature but offering a new beauty to the eye
of the shareholder. Nor were they presently without a beauty, or at
least an imposing majesty of their own, such as Brangwyn has loved to
convey--red-litten windows all aglow at night, long streamers of lurid
smoke and flame pouring into the darkness, or even in the daylight, the
beating of the hammer, the whistles of the boats in the canal, and the
peculiar attraction that goes with things in a straight line, the
rectilinear canal, the power wires straight as perspective itself, the
long rows of casks piled high and all of a piece, acres of boxes neat as
a garden--the new symmetry of arrangement which necessity imposes on
engineering, converting man's latest efforts back to nature's oldest
forms. Such is the new Montreal that sprang up in these later decades of
the nineteenth century between the city and Lachine, duplicated
presently by the downstream manufacturers below the original port.

Thus strangely has changed the character of Montreal--a mission, a fort
of the fur trade in the wilderness, a French colonial military town, a
British port of trade, a Canadian metropolis of shipping and manufacture
with arts and letters on the hill behind it.

Most notable and visible, of course, was the development, the progress,
of the harbor and Port of Montreal. It is true that the port and its
facilities and equipment as now existing are the product of the present
century. But under the first generations of operations by the Dominion
after 1867 it moved a long way forward from the "granite quays" of
Charles Dickens' visit, and even from the day when the Prince of Wales
opened the Victoria Bridge.

The port and with it the care of the ship channel and the navigation
guides of the river below and above it now passed under the care and
enjoyed the aid of the government of the Dominion of Canada. It remained
under the administration of a body of Harbour Commissioners appointed by
the government, an arrangement which lasted until 1935, when the control
of the Montreal Harbour, along with those of other Canadian seaports,
was given over to a centralized body at Ottawa. To the Commissioners was
added, some years later, a Harbour Corporation (1894) in which were
vested the port area, docks, and properties.

At the time of Confederation the ship channel down the river had been
dredged from its original eleven feet in the shallow stretches to a
depth of twenty feet; constant dredging guaranteed a deeper and deeper
channel, rendered necessary by the increasing draft of the steamships of
the period. By 1882 the depth was twenty-five feet; by 1887 it was
twenty-seven and one half. The docks themselves were as constantly
improved as the channel. The wharfage of Montreal in 1870 already
covered three miles (it is now ten). Most of these were low-level
wharves that have disappeared today in favor of the high-level piers of
the present harbor, a change that began just at the end of the century.
The Victoria Pier stands in the harbor plan of 1877 the same as today.

The greatest evidence of the progress of the port is the increase of its
tonnage from the 205,000 tons of 1866 to the 1,000,000 tons of 1892 and
its reach beyond 1,500,000 at the close of the century. (It stood in
1938 at 9,000,000 tons.) Progressive changes came over the character of
the shipping with the change from sail to steam, from smaller ships to
large. The tonnage of 205,000 in 1866 represented 516 overseas ships,
an average of about 400 tons. The 735 ships that totaled 1,036,000 in
1892 show an average of 1400 tons, and the 868 overseas ships totaling
1,584,000 in 1898 give an average of over 1800 tons.

For years after Confederation sail predominated over steam along the
water front in the ocean shipping at Montreal, as distinguished from the
steamers of the trade of the upper river and the Great Lakes. Thomas S.
Brown, the retired "rebel" general of 1837, mentioned earlier, speaks in
his old-age memoirs of the crowd of sail in the harbor of 1872. There
were "20 ships, 22 barques, 3 brigs, 4 brigantines and schooners," in
all forty-nine vessels under sail. Sailors will recognize the types as
corresponding to the old pictures of the harbor; the brig two-masted and
square-rigged; the brigantine with a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast;
the barque, a three-master with a fore-and-aft on the mizzen. But what
the pictures, seemingly authentic, show as "old-time schooners" at
anchor in the lower harbor do not correspond to the true fore-and-aft
schooner of the New England coast, having three masts with only the
mizzenmast rigged fore and aft. But the point is one of interest only to
sailors, mostly dead. The ocean ships under sail, however, greatly
exceeded in the Port of Montreal of the seventies the ships under steam.
The sailing vessels named above are set against twenty-one ocean
steamers.

But indeed, in a sense, all the ocean vessels in and out of Montreal,
with steam or without, were still sailing vessels and remained so till
the end of the century. For those were the days of the old-time
passenger liners, such as those of the famous Allan Line, driven
principally by steam, but carrying also in a fair breeze a great press
of sail on three tall masts that retained all the old-time glory of the
sea. Such good old ships, the _Sarmatian_, the _Sardinian_, the
_Polynesian_ (otherwise the _Rolling Polly_ and later the unrolling
_Laurentian_), and the last and latest queen of the river under sail,
the _Parisian_, back and forward on the Liverpool voyage, carry a wealth
of memory as a chronicle of the times. Their outcoming voyages filled
with the new settlers from Britain, the "quality" dining in the saloon,
the quantity feeding in the steerage, are a part of our British history.
Some people think that all the fast duchesses and windless empresses
ever built cannot remake the romance of the St. Lawrence voyage as it
was.

[Illustration: The _Sarmatian_, Which Carried the Writer of This Book in
1876 as a Child of Six on His Way to Canada. The Picture from the Allan
Line Records Is Supplied by the Courtesy of the Canadian Pacific Railway
Company.]

For in those old days of the Allan Line the Atlantic voyage, Liverpool
to Montreal, in the seventies and the eighties had a far different, far
deeper meaning than what the voyage had come to signify fifty years
later. The Atlantic service, even in the years just before the Great
War, had become an Atlantic ferry--fast, efficient, luxurious for those
who could pay for luxuries, comfortable for all. Most of the people
traveling had crossed the ocean before, many of them several times. All
expected to cross the ocean again. There was nothing left of the
farewells to England of the departing emigrant, no falling tears as the
green shores of Ireland, soft with rain and dotted with the sunlight on
the yellow gorse, faded out of sight.

In the days of which we speak it was far otherwise. Most of the
outcoming people on the Allan liner had never crossed before, hardly
expected to cross again, were saying "good-by" in a sense lost in our
present world of radio and aerial flight. The writer of this book can
recall such a voyage, of 1876, coming out as a child of six, in the
Allan liner _Sarmatian_ (built in 1871), a grand ship with a tower of
canvas on its square yards--a ship, the real thing, its masts reaching
upward in a network of ropes and rigging, men calling from aloft, a
great brass notice on the mizzenmast: "Do not speak to the Man at the
Wheel"--and the speechless and unspeakable helmsman there in sight, his
hands on the wheel, his eye on the compass and the clouds. The
Liverpool-Montreal boats of those days lay at anchor in the Mersey.
There was no floating dock. The people came on board in a tender, and
when all was ready the word was given and the anchor hauled up from a
capstan by the crew, with the passengers and even the children tailed on
to the capstan ropes. All sang--it was the custom of the line,

    "_Cheer, boys, cheer, no more of idle sorrow,
    Courage, true hearts, will bear us on our way_"--

a song that ended with the assertion that the "_Star of the Empire
glitters in the West_." As beside such a ship, clearing the Irish
Channel in a steady breeze under a cloud of sail, the sun on the canvas,
the wind in the rigging, a great liner of today is just a floating
apartment house to play cards in.

Thus went out the British people, singing, into exile, with hope ahead
and behind them a memory of home that time could not obliterate, nor
adversity tarnish, nor even fortune lull into forgetfulness. It is
strange that we do not learn that the greatest British asset is the
British people, the chief import of the Dominion, more and ever more of
them; empty-handed, it doesn't matter; empty hands made Canada.

To be exact, the _Sarmatian_ was a vessel of four thousand tons, with a
single screw and large single funnel and three masts. Her lines
resembled the beauty of a clipper ship, with the clean run of a single
deck, the boats swung on davits at the side, with nothing of those
superstructures which later on rose on the decks of the liners when
masts and sails disappeared. She was square-rigged but carried also as
the lowest course of sail on each mast a large fore-and-aft sail, the
"cro' jack" of nautical parlance, used either in place of the mainsail
or in addition to it. The mizzenmast carried no square yards. She had no
bowsprit but carried headsails before the foremast and thus could
present, if need be, a great press of canvas to a favoring wind. Under
steam she easily made fourteen knots. "The _Sarmatian_," said the London
_Graphic_ of 1878, "is one of the finest passenger vessels in the
world." She had served as a troopship in the Ashanti War of 1873-74,
carrying the Black Watch to West Africa. In 1878 she had the honor of
carrying the Marquis of Lorne (the Governor General) and the Princess
Louise to Canada. She was in and out of the Port of Montreal till the
opening of the present century.

       *       *       *       *       *

As tonnage increased, it was found that mast, sails, and rigging were
just dead weight, nor likely to be of any use once the Gulf of St.
Lawrence was passed. As steam power increased with the larger-sized
boats it was plain that sails were not worth-while. Each new queen of
the river surpassed the last in size and luxury but with less and less
sail. The _Parisian_ of 1881, reconstructed in 1897, the last word of
the day as a "floating palace," practically abandoned her sails. The
later boats, of the opening years of this century, such as the
_Tunisian_ and the much larger _Victorian_ and the _Virginian_, carried
no sail at all. The masts shrunk to derricks or returned, as ghosts, to
carry wireless.

If we shed tears over the departed glory of the sailing steamer, we may
spare a few also for its contemporary, vanished also, the St. Lawrence
timber raft. This, too, arriving in sections down the Lachine Rapids and
remade at leisure above or below the harbor, was a familiar feature of
the Port of Montreal for two generations and more.

Nor was there ever a more unique feature of Montreal Harbour and the St.
Lawrence above it than the bygone timber rafts that played so
picturesque a part in our Canadian commerce of last century. They are
all gone now. The last of the rafts came down the river and over the
Lachine Rapids to Montreal in 1911. The movement of lumber and pulpwood
is still a vast trade; but sawn lumber and pulp sticks travel much like
other freight or cargo. Anyone who ever saw a raft of square timber a
quarter of a mile long floating down the St. Lawrence was looking at one
of the strangest sights in the history of navigation.

The basis of the industry was the vast forests of red and white pine
found all over the St. Lawrence watershed. Pine not only floats but
floats so buoyantly that it can help to support the hardwoods, elm, oak,
etc., which float either not at all or with difficulty. The ultimate
market was in England, where square timber was the raw material of all
the carpentry and building trade. With this went to the same market the
beautiful straight sticks of pine of special length and a quality that
were used for the masts of sailing ships and specially culled and
selected for the Royal Navy. The seaport of the trade was Quebec, where
a fleet of timber ships gathered every year. These were an odd
assemblage. Any old ship would do to carry square timber; leak as it
would, it couldn't sink. Hence we are told that the harbor of Quebec,
when sail was on the decline the world over, "was filled with the
queerest collection of shipping, old barques and brigantines, ships
'swifted' with chains passed round their hulls to hold them together,
full-rigged ships that perhaps had once been East Indiamen, even the
occasional old man-of-war, much degraded and disguised, turned into a
sort of cart-horse of the sea."

Montreal had only the lesser share in this glory. It was only a midway
point of the trade where the rafts, after coming down the Lachine Rapids
in sections, were reassembled for their final journey to Quebec. Indeed
Montreal helped in the end to kill the trade when the lumber ship, after
about 1880, filled with sawn lumber that came to Montreal by rail,
replaced the timber ship of Quebec. Nor did Montreal have any share in
the square-timber trade that came from the Ottawa and passed down behind
Montreal Island by the Rivire des Prairies and the Mille Isles. The
Ottawa system was different. Small "cribs" of lumber passed the rapids
in specially constructed chutes, the last in 1908.

For both the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence the trade came to an end when
British lumber merchants were at last persuaded to buy their lumber
already cut. Squaring timber in the bush wasted one third of it. The
British buyer would take no stick unless sound to the heart. Hence many
trees were felled and left unused. Vast quantities of what are now
slabs, edgings, battens, strips, and moldings, went up in flames in the
Canadian forests. So the timber raft ultimately went the way of such
picturesque, non-economic things as the stagecoach, and the sedan chair.

But the timber raft while it lasted was curious and unique. And it
lasted a long time. It had its infant origins in the old French Regime,
was boosted by the Napoleonic Wars, reached its height between 1850 and
1880, declined and died in 1911 a painless death in the arms of newer
industries.

The timber industry was evidently well established at the time of
Charles Dickens' visit to Canada in 1842 for he writes of seeing a huge
timber raft on his steamer trip from Toronto to Montreal. "Going on deck
after breakfast," he writes, "I was amazed to see floating down with the
stream, a most gigantic raft, with some thirty or forty wooden houses
upon it, and at least as many flag-masts, so that it looked like a
nautical street. I saw many of these rafts afterwards, but never one so
large. All the timber, or 'lumber,' as it is called in America, which is
brought down the St. Lawrence, is floated down in this manner."

Indeed the origins of the industry go a long way back before Dickens'
time. French settlers cut and floated pine logs, for masts or lumber, to
any near-by market. It was a help-to-live industry like the pulpwood of
the back-north settler of today. After the conquest the British turned
this into a regular trade and then, about 1800, into a sea-borne trade
(masts and square timber). Napoleon, when his decrees shut the Baltic,
made himself the godfather of the Canadian timber trade. The steam tug
arrived in time to be its wet nurse. The preferential duties till 1843
acted as its guardian. After that the raft was grown up and floated on
its own, a quarter of a mile long, did we say?--let us make it
half--down Lake St. Louis in the mists of the morning.

The lumber--chiefly pine with elm and oak--was first cut round the
shores of Lake Ontario and gathered behind booms in river mouths and
bays. As the pine was cleared the cutting moved further back; the lumber
shanty crawled north away from civilization like the movement of the
American frontier toward the West. At first Lake Ontario had the whole
trade; the logs were unable to negotiate Niagara.[29] The Welland Canal
opened Lake Erie, and then on and on--that is, backward and
backward--moved the timber trade. The logs gathered in Lake Ontario were
at first floated as rafts; the lake proved too big, too rough. Hence as
the trade was organized they were sent in timber schooners to the foot
of the lake among the islands near Kingston. Here special timber firms
who had no necessary connection with cutting the lumber or shipping it
beyond Quebec made it up into rafts and ran it down.

A St. Lawrence raft was built in six or eight sections called "drams."
To make a dram they built first a frame of hewn timbers (6"  7"
square), a parallelogram, an oblong floating in the water, the logs just
over forty feet long end to end and pinned together. The oblong was
about 60 feet wide and was connected crosswise with "traverses"
(crossties about four inches in diameter). When the frame was set
floating logs were pushed under it (by men standing on them), the logs
all being set side by side to fill the frame. They were bound to the
traverse not with chains or ropes but with "withes," sapling trees
pounded, as it were, into shredded cable and with a wonderful power of
yielding to strain without breaking. The logs thus pushed under were the
first tier. They had to be pine to make the upper tiers float. Above
them, laid crosswise, was a second tier and, if the raft was all pine, a
third tier lengthwise; if there was oak in it the third tier was perhaps
not filled up, or only in part.

A completed pine dram averaged 600 pieces, or 25,000 cubic feet, or
300,000 board feet of lumber. A raft of eight drams would mean 2,400,000
board feet.

When the raft was complete a cabin was built on the leading dram, the
foreman's cabin with two bunks, a table, a stove, to serve the office
for supplies, etc.; on the dram behind this was a bigger cabin with
bunks for the men (about eight bunks). The whole regular crew was eight
or ten with extra men taken on for each big rapid and dropped off at the
foot of it.

Poles were set up to act as masts for big square sails. A mass of "kit"
also was carried along and brought back upriver from Quebec
again--anchors, windlass, cables, pike poles, cant hooks, oars,
crowbars, lanterns--an endless list. A raft carried a big boat (fifteen
men) and a smaller one.

When all the drams were pinned together the raft was ready to start. Mr.
D. D. Calvin, whose family were connected with the trade for
generations, has given us a picture of a raft "leaving port" that has
much of the charm of an old-time sea story. "Given a fine summer day--in
retrospect a raft inevitably left on a fine afternoon--it will be
understood that the last hours of preparation were a delight to
youngsters. The ordered confusion of getting all the gear aboard, the
half-guessed secrets of the boxes and bags of grub, the characteristic
scents of clean pine timber in the sun, of the raw wood of the cabins,
of the fresh straw of the mattresses, combine to make a delightful
memory, in which the sounds are the shouts in French, the signal gong
in the towing steamer's engine room and the wash from her paddle wheels
as she backed to stop along side the raft."[30]

The description is that of the closing days, of a towing steamer hauling
the raft all the way. Such a journey took the raft from Kingston to
Montreal, barring heavy bad winds or other delays, in three days. But in
early days there was no motive power but the sails and the current. It
took weeks to get to Quebec. The river current on a still day would give
a "speed" of three miles an hour, the broad flood of Lake St. Francis or
Lake St. Louis scarcely any. From the earliest days to the last
passengers took trips on the St. Lawrence rafts for the sheer
strangeness of it, to loaf and read and dream. Many of us even now might
dream of such a passage, floating on a windless summer day on Lake St.
Francis, reading, let us say, Egyptian history.

But when the rapids came, the loaf and the dream were suspended. The
first rapids came below Prescott. The rafts went down the Galop Rapids
and the Rapide Plat (Morrisburg) all in one piece, heaving and lifting
and quivering to the swells. But just above the Long Sault (Aultsville)
the raft was stopped; a special crew of about fifty men came on board;
the raft was disjointed into its six drams, and away they floated in the
fast water, faster and faster, the crew strung out in a row across each
end, with every man at a long oar, ready to row _sideways_--a sight to
make the Royal Navy laugh. But they could do it. As the dram splashed
and heaved, pounding even a rapid white, they could just swing the raft
enough to make the difference between stranding and going clear, till
down she floated into the quiet water below. Off got the special crew,
on went the raft, past Cornwall and down Lake St. Francis with a new
crew for the Coteau Rapids, then on down Lake St. Louis. They came to
the final descent in the maelstrom of Lachine. The raft was stopped well
above, broken into drams, and away they went down the foam, too late now
for salvation if anything went wrong. They took it all. Canoes used to
take to the sides of the rapids. Steamers pick the channels; but the
timber-raft drams took the whole rapid. At the foot of it the drams
floated into the La Prairie basin, to be remade there, or go through
Montreal Harbour and be remade below. From Montreal to Quebec the raft
went in peace.

Anyone who has looked at a picture of the Montreal Harbour of earlier
days, anywhere from 1830 to 1880, will notice that the artist has put
into it what seems to be the tragic spectacle of a few unhappy survivors
on a small but very heavy raft, the kind people die on in the Indian
Ocean, with some kind of canvas or wood shelter rudely erected on it and
their few poor belongings lying beside them. What makes the picture all
the more harrowing is the apparent utter disregard of their distress on
the part of the officers and crew (for there must be such) on board the
huge frigates and various other craft in the harbor. What we are looking
at here is the artist's symbolic imagination of a timber raft.

Photography came to the world just in time.

But in justice to the artist of such drawings we have to say that he may
be trying to depict a "firewood" raft such as used to be brought down to
Montreal Harbour by farmers from Chteauguay and such places immediately
upstream. These, however, were not square timber, but logs waiting to be
cut up into cordwood, commonly sold at $2.00 a cord. They used to be
anchored alongside the shore. Unhappily such pictures seem to depict
something which is neither the one thing nor the other and is wrong
either way.

Midway in this period came to the Port of Montreal the record flood of
1886 which helped its progress along, as a swift kick accelerates
movement. The flood, that is to say, helped to initiate the subsequent
bold and comprehensive effort that led presently to what seems the final
conquest of the St. Lawrence.

The rise and fall of water in a tidal harbor is a thing that can be
measured, predicted, and circumvented from day to day, from tide to
tide. But the spring flood of a great river, a Mississippi or a St.
Lawrence, which carries down the waters liberated from the winter's ice,
is another matter. It no sooner makes a record than it breaks it with a
new one. Flooding waters had always been a feature and a factor in the
development of Montreal, the more so because of the ill-adjusted nature
of the riverbank. It no sooner rises to an all-the-year dry altitude
(Notre Dame Street) than it falls off again (to Craig Street) far below
the spring level and sideways to what was once the sunken bed of the
Little River. Floodtime has been part of its history. Champlain with his
peculiar prophetic vision tried out the prospect of flood by setting up
a sample piece of wall in the plan of his Place Royale to see what the
river would do. He was not there the following season to see what it
did, but we can guess. Near this spot was Maisonneuve's first cemetery,
grimly desecrated each spring by the river. All the land in that area
(now at the foot of McGill Street and along the Harbour Front) has been
raised since. In the Old Regime the town moved up to high ground, its
skirts withdrawn from the water. But the spring flood washed round it
and below it. When the British town spread later on into Griffintown on
lower ground the waters followed it.

It is quite impossible for steamship visitors to Montreal, looking down
from the heights of the deck and the dock on the river far below, to
realize the extent to which the spring flood of the St. Lawrence, just
before navigation begins, can lift the water of the river. When they
see, inside the railway tracks that run along the docks, the sturdy
revetment wall of solid stone they can hardly realize that this wall,
rising above docks, tracks, and all, is intended to keep out the St.
Lawrence.

Yet the river flood takes us back to the earliest history and down to
the latest.

The unhappy settlement of Griffintown, as said, built on lowland for the
working class, who must take what they can get, was subject to annual
high water that in seasons turned to submergence under a flood. The
flood of 1857 saw the lower stones of the houses flooded, the people
coming and going as best they could in boats.

       *       *       *       *       *

The spring flood of 1861 was long remembered. The river, with appalling
suddenness, invaded the city in the evening of Sunday, April 14; so fast
it rose that it poured into the churches of the lower town. St.
Stephens in Dalhousie Street and the Methodist Church, Ottawa Street,
extinguished all lights and left the congregations marooned in the dark
with six feet of water over the pews. Boats rescued some. Others
"roosted" all night. Bitter cold set in, and in the days following there
came a fierce blizzard. Traffic was impossible. The new Grand Trunk
Railway was all flooded out as far as Lachine. One quarter of Montreal
was under water. Boats carried the people from the islands that had been
the wharves and buildings on the water front and landed them up on St.
Paul Street. Other boats carried them to Beaver Hall Hill to get to the
upper suburbs. Such was the ferocity of the river, nature's protest
against man's contrivance.

Then came the great flood of 1886, destined to hold the record, a
steady-rising inundation that put the water five feet deep over the
feeble wooden wall, the revetment wall of the river slope. It filled all
Craig Street with an inland lake, reaching high up on Beaver Hall Hill.
It lasted a week.

But times had changed in the twenty-five years since the Methodist
ministers waded in four feet of water in the dark to bring help to their
roosting congregations. The ingenuity of commerce here stepped in to
replace prayer by a five-cent ferry from St. James Street to Beaver Hall
Hill.

But it was felt that the river had gone too far. The aid of Ottawa was
invoked; a heavier and higher revetment held back the river until later,
but not till the new century was there built (1901) the present
all-stone wall, braced wide and squat, gated like a fortress, and thus
far the last word against the St. Lawrence.

       *       *       *       *       *

An odd departure of the Port of Montreal, which proved, however, a blind
alley, was the attempt to facilitate transriver traffic by running
trains over the ice.

An attempt to use the Montreal ice was also made in a quite different
way, to make of it not a railway track but a palace. Here begins with
the year 1883 the first building of the Ice Palace of Montreal, for
which the city acquired such a name, and which ended from the fear that
the name was the wrong one.

Montreal, of course, had always had its winter sports. From the old
French days had come snowshoeing, in its real purpose a means of
locomotion, and heavy and tiresome at that, but a thing which can in
proper company and for lack of anything better pass as a sport. Skating
similarly had always been a necessary feature of winter life beside
Canadian rivers and lakes and lent itself naturally to winter amusement.
Curling, with its proper accompaniments, had been imported early from
Scotland. As a consequence there had been in Montreal various kinds of
winter celebrations long before the Ice Palace of 1883; indeed, it had
become the custom to hold a yearly winter carnival as a regular event,
with lesser and children's carnivals at odd intervals.

The Ice Palace was a new departure as proposing to let in outsiders on
the Montreal winter. This was a delicate point and on this the Ice
Palace was in the long run shipwrecked, or melted. There has always been
a great misunderstanding and a great sensitiveness about the climate of
Canada in general and of Montreal in particular. The truth about the
climate of Montreal is that it is not a cold climate in any brutal
sense. The winter has its "spells" of cold, lasting three or four days
or even longer, with the thermometer well below zero at night and
struggling to get above it by day. But each spell is succeeded by a sort
of meteorological repentance, bright sun on pure snow, blue skies with
just a fleck of cloud, and a kiss of soft wind on the check to heighten
beauty and encourage audacity; a climate when it is delightful to be out
of doors and glorious to come in again.

There is indeed no comparison as between Montreal and really cold places
such as will be found in the Far West. These are inland places on
exposed prairies, many miles further to the north than Montreal. Those
of us who love Canada and admire the West maintain in this matter a
conspiracy of silence. But we know--and say it to one another and in
whispers--that such places are not really fit to live in. It has been
truthfully said that on the day of a blizzard in--let's leave the name
unsaid--a man walking with his back to the wind has no difficulty in
knowing which side of him is which.

But only recently have Montreal people thrown off all misunderstanding
and false shame about the climate. In the past the very praise they gave
it was apologetic, as if to explain that it wouldn't really hurt
anybody. Here before us lies a little booklet of 1883 to advertise the
great Winter Carnival and the Ice Palace that began its life that year.
How ancient it looks already, this little booklet _Over the Snow_, with
its faint type, its mild advertisements, its moderation! How little they
knew how to shout in 1883. "We cannot," says the little book, "put up
samples of our dry, cold, clear and healthy winter . . . but when on the
spot you can see what absurd opinions have been held of our climate."
There are four pages of this, including a statement that the London
_Times_ is mistaken in saying that our thermometers in winter have to be
brought into the houses at night to be thawed. The author almost gets
hysterical about it, stating that the Montreal snow is "like feathers"
and that he can roll in it and come out dry "almost any day in winter."

This attitude of Montreal toward its winter, midway between apology and
praise and at best something like the defense of an old friend gone
wrong, is well illustrated by the history of the Ice Palace. This famous
structure first appeared in 1883. The palace, like those that followed
it in successive years, was built on Dominion Square, our in front of
the New Windsor Hotel. In aspect it was made to look, and was officially
declared to look, like a medieval castle, with a tall central tower and
corner turrets, with battlements and crenelated walls. It measured one
hundred and sixty-five feet in length and sixty-five feet in depth; its
central tower stood one hundred feet high. Each block of its ice was
forty-two by twenty-four inches and weighed five hundred pounds; the
whole Palace contained forty thousand cubic feet of ice and fifty men at
a time worked to build it. The last item of information about the
Palace, given out to stagger the public, was that it cost no less than
$3900. This item has lost its direct power to stagger but gets it in
reverse gear. It now means that you can have, or could have, a
first-rate ice palace for less than $4000. People who, in the mad
winters before the depression, spent as much as that, and ten times as
much, for a single party at the "coming out" of a daughter might think
of having one now "come out" of an ice palace as a snow princess.

[Illustration: Winter Sports in Montreal in 1884, with a Picture of One
of the Ice Palaces.

_Culver Service_]

The Ice Palace was the scene of terrific doings, "_ftes de nuit_" with
thousands of snowshoers in line, all with torches, with fireworks, with
a "bombardment" of rockets and an assault and defense, and after that
the rounds of "scotch" well deserved after such a fete. Of all this
nothing is left today except the last item. A single girl and a pair of
skis supplies the rest of the fete. Our grandfathers went a long way to
get a little.

For the Ice Palace fell on evil times. Business decided that it was "a
bad ad," that it looked too much like winter, and cut it out, just as
business decided that the beautiful big elm trees in Phillip Square
looked too much like summer and cut them down, as bad for business.
Those of us not in business often wonder why it can't just be natural.

Later attempts were made to revive the Palace. One in particular will be
recalled when it was put on Fletcher's Field, just under the mountain.
But somehow it wouldn't work. Perhaps the mountain overshadowed it; at
any rate it looked small. It was no use telling us that it measured this
or that. It couldn't have. Then the thaw and the rain came all wrong and
the Ice Palace began to drip like a wet hen. They made a brutal attempt
to freeze it with ice water from hoses, but it didn't work; cracks
opened in it; the sun came through; it began to tilt over, and when
somebody said it looked just like the Middle Ages that ended it. They
let it thaw.

A beautiful monument stands in Dominion Square to commemorate the South
African War which rounded out the century for Montreal as for the
Empire. The huge stone block graven with the Dutch names of British
victories surmounted by a spirited figure-group of trooper and charger
is admirable as sculptured art. Montreal specially connects with the war
through the name of Baron Strathcona, at that time in the intervals of
his London service as High Commissioner, a resident of Montreal in a
beautiful stone house on Dorchester Street, which frequently served,
through his generosity, as Government House for the visits of the
Governor General, like the Hotel de Vaudreuil in the old French days. At
Strathcona's cost was raised and equipped the famous troop of
Strathcona's Horse. Of the value of the gift and of the war itself time
alone can judge. South Africa must be united; it cannot now, it could
not then, exist in security and prosperity as two antagonized
communities of Boer and Briton. Bur whether it would have been better
united in the long run with the South African War or without is a
question which history has not yet answered, and may be answering now.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Ob. 1941.

[28] J. Murray Gibbon, _Steel of Empire_.

[29] A. M. Lower, _The Trade in Square Timber_, 1933.

[30] D. D. Calvin, _In a Quiet Corner_, 1941.




CHAPTER XI

Montreal in the Twentieth Century

     _Montreal Moves Uphill. The Electrical Age Spreads the Town.
     The Tunnel. The Search for Clean Government. Growth of Finance
     and Fortune. The Plutocrats of Plutoria. Annexation and the
     Lion's Den. Westmount in the Woods. The Great War and Its
     Aftermath._


Rip van Winkle fell asleep, but, after all, when he woke up again he
reappeared in his own village. Not so, if he'd fallen asleep in
Montreal. Let us say that he fell asleep in what he understood, fifty
years ago, to be Montreal and to be the premises of the well-known house
of Henry Morgan and Company. When he woke up he would find himself still
in the arms of Henry Morgan and Company, bigger arms than ever, but
apparently no longer in Montreal, but transported somewhere away uphill,
among leaves and lanes, clear away to the country, to a pleasant road
called St. Catherine's. Near by he would find, as he walked about, other
familiar names and would realize that Montreal had moved uphill--had
moved or was on the move. A few old Rips like himself still lingered on
in the old town below, leaning over empty counters and fumbling at
empty tills. The old place was gone, the grand old shopping district of
Great St. James Street, once gay with bright dresses and loud with the
sleigh bells of society on the shop.

The change which Rip observed, and which probably killed him, was well
under way as a feature of the opening twentieth century, the removal of
the shopping district uptown. St. James Street, too great for shops, now
shelters only banks, brokers, finance, shipping and communications, and
the metropolitan press. Such little shops as remain are tucked in
edgeways, as neat and bright as ever, selling cigars to the brokers,
neckties to bankers, expensive silverware and diamonds to anyone whose
stocks have suddenly risen, and umbrellas for those out of luck. You
couldn't buy a corset, let alone a pair of them, within half a mile.

The foresight of Henry Morgan and Company, the pioneer explorers of St.
Catherine Street, was fittingly rewarded by the success and celebrity of
their colossal store. Their example was widely followed in the whole
orbit of retail and domestic trade. A few firms, even department stores,
lacked faith to look upward and died a lingering death below. A famous
fish firm moved halfway up and couldn't bear to go further from the
water. An enterprising Scottish house, too well-known to name, moved too
far: the town hasn't caught it yet; being Scottish, they're waiting for
it.

This move of Montreal uptown came along with, indeed arose out of, the
new electric age. Fast urban transport spreads a city out; telephones
put the suburbs within talking distance; lighted streets and comfortable
streetcars invite movement abroad, and on the heels of all that the
motorcar puts anybody anywhere. People are forgetting now the
limitations of earlier days. Consider this. On the slope we now call
Westmount, an occupant of any of the few but pleasant homes there
situated sixty years ago, if sudden illness came to his house at night,
must needs go out to the stable (every house had a stable), hitch up a
horse, and drive to Montreal at full speed (eight miles an hour) to
fetch a doctor. Such an expedition attended the coming into the world
of some of the present elderly barristers and businessmen of today whose
people moved out into Westmount in its St. Antoine days. On this scene
broke the telephone in 1880 with four hundred subscribers. As elsewhere,
and as with the telegraph before it, the telephone suffered from its
first reception as an amusing toy. It was, as we now see it, slow in
coming into its own. The Montreal streetcar had gone tinkling along the
streets ever since the "Montreal Passenger Railway Company" of 1861 put
their horsecar on Notre Dame Street. With its extension to the upper
part of the city began the long agonies of the streetcar horse, hauling
a cluster of human beings clinging like bees to the rush-hour car up a
cruel slope, exactly equal to the utmost power of the animal. Then came
electric cars in 1893, and the streetcar horse found its first rest in
death.

These new facilities, and the rapid suburban trains now put on by the
railways, made it possible for Montreal to spread out, to get rid of the
congestion of its close-packed streets, its solid rows of houses; a
still greater opportunity came with the boring of the tunnel under the
mountain, a work undertaken by the phenomenal but ill-starred Canadian
Northern Railway that was spreading at this time like a web all over
Canada, built up of odd bits and odd benefits. At least it had
enterprise. It needed a direct route from Ottawa to Montreal. Mount
Royal was in the way. So the railway dived clean under it. The making of
the tunnel through the solid core of rock that is the remaining base of
a volcano was a marvelous piece of engineering work. The tunnel was
begun from both ends at once, on Dorchester Street and behind the
mountain, and duly met in the middle with absolute precision.

The opening of the tunnel meant that any Montrealer who liked could now
live in the pleasant open country behind the mountain and be whirled
into town through the tunnel in ten minutes. Convenient car or bus lines
could connect, fan shape, with the suburban tunnel station. Wise people
saw at once that this meant a wholesale migration to the back of the
mountain. Hence came into being the new suburban town of Mount Royal.
But the wise people were wrong. Montreal wouldn't move. It still clings
to its tenements and its rows and its clustering nests of piled-up
apartments.

The reason is simple. It's the cold. One has only to look at the wide
expansion of Toronto, a city smaller in population, under the influence
of the electric age. Toronto now reaches so far that where it ends it is
called Aurora, or something else.

For we must remember that there is all the difference in the world
between waiting for a suburban bus on a summer night in California, or
even Toronto, and waiting for a suburban bus on a winter night in
Montreal.

The scene is California. The night is soft and still, the air heavy with
the scent of the peonies, their drooping heads fallen asleep upon their
stems. Around us and about us, as we stand, the leaves of the magnolia
stir faintly in the night air. Above us the velvet sky is soft with a
myriad of stars, and from somewhere in the distance--so still is the
night--we can hear the murmur of the sea. On such a night Young Love
stands hand in hand together, waiting for the bus, talking of the stars
and whether people love one another there also and hoping the bus will
never come . . . Even Middle Age stands silent in something that feels
almost like religious contemplation but which is really digestion.

Now change the scene to Montreal, in the heart of a winter night, with a
blizzard blowing. "A rough night," the Joneses said as they put us out
of their suburban apartment after the game of bridge, as you put a cat
out in the snow. A rough night, indeed! As we stand on the corner,
waiting, the blizzard drives the hard-frozen snow against our faces . . .
it blurs the electric light . . . we can hardly see the few scattered
houses around us . . . nor the few frozen people huddled for shelter.
The sidewalks are drifting fast with snow that piles in ridges and
wedges, and all the sky is one great smother of gray. "Is that damn bus
never coming?"--and at the burst of profanity nature rebukes us by
lashing the snow in our faces . . . Even Young Love stands speechless in
the lee of a lamppost, its temperature down to what science calls
"absolute zero." "Didn't they say one every twenty minutes?" "Ah, here
it comes!" The headlights show, blurred but powerful, through the
driving snow . . . the bus crunches to the sidewalk. "In we get"--"What!
This one going east?" Going and gone . . . Jones may keep his suburban
rock garden and his asparagus bed. We don't care if he grew more lettuce
than he could eat: let him eat less. We are going to some place, 25 
50, out of the cold.

       *       *       *       *       *

We turn back again for a moment to the uptown movement which has utterly
transformed Upper Montreal--St. Catherine Street West and its side
streets--within easy living memory. When the move began the street was
hardly to be called a street at all, a pleasant country road bordered
with houses. It had nothing of the aristocracy and grandeur of
Sherbrooke Street, just above it and parallel to it. The houses were
modest buildings of two stories and an attic, with a little bit of
garden in front or a big bit of garden behind. The side streets were
built up to a good extent with stone houses in rows, but with much open
space of gardens and orchards. Ten years later St. Catherine was still a
street of houses but with many stores jostled in among them and square
buildings going up on the best corners. Ten years after that it was a
street of continuous shops but with many of the houses still showing,
plastered over with false fronts, revamped, the lower stories gutted
into bigger floor space. On the chief corner where Windsor Street, in
crossing, changes its name to Peel, in true Montreal fashion, there
stood a church. Presently the church was refaced, boarded, and bricked
into a department store but with plenty of church showing. Then the
church gave place to a real building, and later on the whole wide block
was demolished and shoveled up to make room for the vast modern building
that now stands there, the Dominion Square Building, perhaps the most
symmetrically beautiful of the commercial buildings of Montreal.

This last, of course, was after the Great War. For it was not till then
that building on a scale proportionate for the opportunity began. Within
a few years along stretch of the street was crowded with tall buildings,
department stores, business buildings, and the side streets rapidly
invaded with all sorts of mongrel halfway transformations of dignified
old stone houses into undignified "cafs," "night clubs," and the
mushroom growth which precedes the real reconstruction of a modern city
quarter.

Sojourners in the Mount Royal Hotel, one of these vast new structures,
might be interested to know that not so long ago the hotel was chiefly
garden and orchard, then a large high school and playground. The streets
around were residential, quiet and filled with trees. Hard by there
lived a Montreal poet, John Logan, whose friends still treasure his
memory, and who wrote a poem on the singing of the birds that sang to
wake him in the early morning. It began:

    I have no garden, but a quiet street,
    Meeting another makes a cool retreat . . .

The hotel stands on one of the quiet streets where the birds sang. Other
birds sing there now, and even earlier in the morning.

The pity is that the rebuilding has been all wrong from the start and
condemns the great shopping street of St. Catherine to the narrow width
and hopeless congestion that has been the fate of New York. It is too
late to alter now; it was so easy then. They had only to slice all the
houses on one side of the street into two halves and throw away one
half. It seems that the only wide streets ever laid out are in towns
that never grow.

This new age of expansion threw upon the city a larger and larger need
for public works and a greater and greater opportunity for public theft.
Hence the period witnessed, as culminating in the year 1910, the
greatest and most resolute struggle for clean government that had yet
marked the history of Montreal. This struggle for clean government had
been going on ever since the city had been a city; but so had the
struggle for dirty government. The struggle for clean government took
the form of trying to find some method of election, of tenure of office,
of area of representation, which would mean honest administration. The
struggle for dirty government took the form of providing increasing
temptations which would mean dishonest administration. It was like
Milton's battles in the sky: at times the citizens looked up and
watched it; mostly they didn't. The final result after a hundred and ten
years is to leave the city of Montreal burdened with so huge a debt at
so high an interest that in many areas the annual taxes for property eat
up its entire rental value.

It will be recalled that under the original incorporation of 1832,
proclaimed in force June 5, 1833, the city government was based on a
universal vote of men over twenty-one (there were no women then)
resident in the city twelve months and possessing real estate. These
elected two councilors from each of eight wards, the original wards
being East, West, St. Joseph, St. Ann, St. Lawrence, St. Louis, and St.
Mary. These sixteen men chose one of themselves as Mayor. The Mayor was
to receive a salary of four hundred dollars, the councilors nothing. It
looks as simple and honest as early Massachusetts. The Council sat
modestly in a rented house (of Madame de Beaujeu) on Notre Dame Street.
When we add that the Mayor and Council selected as the figures on the
coat of arms of the city a beaver, a rose, a shamrock, and a thistle
(meaning something for everybody), and their motto, _Concordia salus_,
the thing seems complete. The corporation took over the old local
administrative duties of the justice of the peace; the act gave it power
to buy and sell property and to borrow money. That was the thorn in the
rose.

This government was authorized to last till May 1, 1836. They let it
lapse, unwept, and went back to justices of the peace. Then came Lord
Durham, horrified at the lack of municipal liberty. His report started a
clean government movement that created, by Act of the Province of
Canada, a new city government under Mayor and councilors, with six
aldermen, to keep their eye on the councilors, chosen from the Council.
This time they had only six wards. In 1845 they tried five wards. In
1851 they found it didn't do to let the Council choose the Mayor, so the
people elected him. In 1874 the distinction of aldermen and councilors
was abolished. All were elected as councilors.

Under this city government Montreal staggered along as best it could
until 1909. It was never satisfactory. In the earlier years the English
element "ran" the city Council. But English-speaking people, honest and
dishonest alike, are not keen about the emoluments and casual profits
of small office. They want something bigger. Hence the men elected
presently brought the Council into disrepute. "To be quite frank,"
writes a local chronicler, "there was a long period during which the
English-speaking people seemed to think that almost anybody was good
enough to make an alderman."[31]

On the other hand, the French thought that the job of alderman was good
enough for almost anybody, and so, says the same authority, "they had
the good sense to elect their ablest men." It is indeed characteristic
of the French, both here and in what was France, that they are far more
keen on securing the certain tenure and the assured living of a
government office than the English ever are. One may count it in a sense
to their credit. Life, in its sordid sense of livelihood, being thus
assured, they may turn to the real things of life--the garden, the
library, the picture gallery, the game of chess, or the diversion of
love. Not so the English; they want to take risks, go after big things,
put in years of sustained effort up the hill of life to gain the
eminence, the wealth, the wide horizon of the hilltop. Often they gain
it, to find it empty and windswept.

Such in miniature was the course of our city government. The bulk of the
English people, those not interested in franchises and contracts, lost
interest in the city government. They have never regained it, except in
a sort of feverish make-believe as in 1909 and in 1939, when people tell
them that the city government is rotten and the fault is with the
citizens.

Hence the French element took over the city government and have held a
majority control ever since. The annexation of outlying French-speaking
suburbs, such as Hochelaga in 1883, St. Henri and St. Cungonde in 1905,
and the steady refusal of British Westmount to join Montreal (which
surrounds it) helped to maintain French dominance.

Meanwhile, after 1890, the electric age had put a new face, or at least
a much bigger face, on the city government. Huge sums had to be spent on
lighting and tramways and telephones, on repaving streets and remaking
sewers, and that, too, in connection with technical engineering
services of light and power on which the intelligent citizen could have
no proper judgment at all, and which the honest alderman couldn't
understand and which crooked aldermen didn't need to.

The result was a new cry for clean government, a movement in 1898 to
recast the whole city charter. A commission was appointed to prepare the
legislation to submit to the Provincial Government. There was much
genuine enthusiasm, much repentance for past sins. Here was prominent
the work of young Mr. Herbert Ames, a rising businessman who both
practiced and preached the doctrine of civic interest in civic affairs,
lecturing and writing on the government of Montreal. He began here the
career that later carried him to well-deserved eminence at Ottawa and
Geneva.[32]

The new statute called for a longer term--two years; for a Mayor
possessing $10,000 worth of real estate in the city; for a Mayor's
salary up to $4000; for aldermen with property worth $20000 and
salaries, called an indemnity, of $600. A salary means pay for what you
do; an indemnity means compensation for what you don't. It is felt in
civic circles to be the more complimentary word.

The new act contained various gadgets for "special committees" and
"special meetings" on casting votes--everybody to watch everybody like
cats and rats. But all to no avail. Within ten years it had all gone to
pieces. The new broom swept as dirty as the old one. "Towards its
close," writes Dr. Atherton, too kindly a critic to convey an untrue
accusation, "corruption and inefficiency were rampant under the monopoly
of a few who became stigmatized in the mouths of the citizens as the
'twenty-three.'" The indifferent citizen was as indifferent as ever,
bankers as willing as ever to lend at high interest, contractors as
willing as ever to pave anything, light anything, or tear down anything.
In those days it seems that, after all, the city must be good for it.
There had as yet been no war, no depression, no repudiation of Western
debts, no shadow of Mr. Aberhart lengthening out in the sunset to shadow
the East. Hence the rope was woven for the neck of the property holder
of today, who at times perhaps looks enviously at repudiated debts, the
severed ropes of Western communities.

Montreal had thus got into the position of little Jim of the nursery
rhyme, who never washed:

    _His friends were much hurt to see so much dirt,
      And often they made him quite clean,
    But all was in vain; he got dirty again
      And never looked fit to be seen._

Meantime the year 1908-09 witnessed a great civic revival as earnest as
an old-time camp meeting. All classes in Montreal, except the criminal
class, had become utterly disgusted and seriously alarmed at the
flagrant dishonesty of the alderman. A "Citizens Association" began
agitation for reform in 1908. Powerful influence obtained from the
province the appointment of a Royal Commission (which means a
nonpolitical body) under Justice Cannon, which made its report on
December 12, 1909. It declared that since 1892 the administration of
Montreal had been "saturated with corruption"; that "the majority of the
aldermen have administered the committees and Council in such a manner
as to favour the private interests of the relatives and friends, to whom
contracts and positions were distributed to the detriment of the general
interests of the city and of the tax payers"; that "25% of the annual
revenue of $5,000,000 had been spent in bribes and malversations of all
kinds," and of the balance "the greater part in works of which the
permanence has very often been ephemeral."[33]

The storm of anger drove twenty-two of the twenty-three aldermen out of
office. The eager approval of all the best citizens accompanied Judge
Cannon's recommendation to the Provincial Government in the advocating
of scrapping the whole system as it existed and setting up a "commission
government."

This, it will be remembered, was democracy's latest remedy for its own
ailments in the early part of the twentieth century. The prevailing
method of election of councils too numerous for individual
responsibility, bribable one by one, with too little power for honest
control and plenty for stealing, had led all over North America to a
desire for something else. What was really wanted was a new heart, or
rather an old one renewed: the fault was not in the form but in the
spirit. A crooked alderman is no worse than a crooked commissioner.

But they asked for commission government--a government of strong men
with large power, longer terms, and great responsibility, men too well
off, or at least too well paid, to need to steal--government, in a word,
on a business basis of efficiency.

Much was made of the experience of the city of Galveston, flooded out
for its sins by the angered Gulf of Mexico and reborn under a commission
of businessmen. This was a part of the apotheosis of the "businessman,"
as the man who knows everything and can do everything, which lasted till
he fell like Humpty Dumpty from the wall of Wall Street in 1929. "Oh
yeah!" said the world.

But the current ran strong in Montreal. A plebiscite endorsed the
request for commission government. Hence a new city government was
created by a provincial statute of 1910, in which the Council
surrendered its financial powers to a Board of Control.

There is no doubt that the institution of government by a Board of
Control marked a real determination "to be good," a real intention on
the part of the citizens to keep their eyes on the city government, a
genuine rebirth of public spirit. "This government," wrote a local
authority at the time, "is now on trial." Then came the Great War and
put all else in the shadow. The best men had better things to do than
keeping their eyes on aldermen. And so somehow government by commission
in Montreal, a new broom that swept very clean at first, was presently
discarded again and a statute of 1921 restored aldermanic government.
This time the city Council consisted of a Mayor and thirty-five aldermen
of whom five were selected by the whole body to act as an Executive
Commission. This arrangement merely added the new problem of too great a
division of authority. Things were soon as bad as ever. "City
administration in the dark thirties," says a current witness, "called
desperately for action."[34] Hence another wave of clean government
enthusiasm led to the adoption of an entirely new system in 1940. This
time reliance was placed on the patriotic citizen, not a professional
politician, serving without pay for service's sake. Under this system
Montreal is administered by a Council composed of a Mayor and
ninety-nine councilors. The Mayor is elected by a general vote of the
ratepayers. Of the councilors, sixty-six are elected, six from each of
eleven divisions of the city; of each six, three are elected by property
holders, three by all the voters. The other thirty-three are appointed
by various business and educational bodies, such as the Board of Trade,
the Chamber of Commerce, McGill University, the University of Montreal.

But the system has already worn thin. Unrequited service is easy to
enlist but hard to keep at drill; and at times it is hard to distinguish
between patriotic citizens and busybodies. A new provincial statute will
set up something else.

The truth is that the theory of government by commission is a fallacy,
or at best a half-truth. It is no good without the proper spirit in
those who operate it. A crook with a long term of office is just as
crooked as a crook with a short and is crooked longer. A crooked man
with large responsibility can steal more than a crook with less. A
crooked rich man is not as good as an honest poor one. Plebiscites of
all the citizens are admirable if the citizens know what they are
plebisciting about; but in technological questions of power and light
and transport how can they?

There is a deeper trouble still, an unsolved problem for Montreal and
other cities. There is no doubt that municipal government is the dead
end, the blind alley of democracy. In early days, in little towns, it
could enlist the same devoted interest and unselfish service as can
national government in a decent nation. In national politics, the
function of government involves the real issues, life-and-death issues,
of a nation and not just the dollars and cents spent in making a city
sewer. A quite different set of motives enter in. Some, perhaps many
politicians, in the national sphere, steal or get rich by happy
accident. But others don't; for them there is in public life a
tremendous temptation to be honest, not only honest but ostentatiously
honest, conspicuously poor. One thinks of the conspicuous poverty of
Daniel Webster, living in majestic debt; of our own Joe Howe of Nova
Scotia whose friends had to pay his fare across the Atlantic; of such
men as Sir John Macdonald, of Laurier, of Fielding, who "never had a
cent." Incidentally, the politician who "never has a cent" seems to have
just about everything else in the world except a cent, but that's
another matter.

There is no remedy for these things in Montreal or elsewhere that can be
marked out with a rule and compass, framed in the four corners of a
statute, or even achieved by the threat of the penitentiary. Civic
interest won't do. In the complicated technique of city services today,
full civic interest would leave no time for anything else. You will find
in Montreal, no doubt elsewhere, many doctors, lawyers, professors, and
professional men, leading citizens, who in thirty years have taken no
interest in the City Hall except to swear at it. Quite rightly. Their
work lies elsewhere. All they can do is to ask some honest men of
special knowledge whether a light, heat, and power, or a tramways
contract is fair and honest and vote accordingly. There is, in short, no
remedy but in righteousness, no virtue in democracy of any sort unless
it carries with it the spirit of righteousness. All government comes to
that.

The position of dominance of Montreal in the economic life of the
Dominion during this era was accentuated by the fact that it was not
only a great shipping and manufacturing center, but also had become the
center of finance. It was at once Liverpool and Lombard Street,
Pittsburgh and Wall Street. This had come about as the natural and
deserved result of the institution in the old days of Lower Canada of
the sound banking system based on Scottish tradition that came with the
foundation of the Bank of Montreal. The banking system set up in the
province of Canada developed into the system of chartered banks with
branches organized under the Dominion of Canada and a conspicuous
success. The branch system naturally meant centralized finance as the
head offices of banks in the chief cities, such as the Bank of Montreal
and the Molsons Bank in Montreal, added to metropolitan dominance but
made for security and mutual support.

With banking had arisen the Montreal Stock Exchange. Even before
Confederation shares in the Bank of Montreal and the other banks of the
period, together with shares in the new railway companies, etc., were
traded back and forth and offered by newspaper advertisement. This led
to the formation of a (unincorporated) group of traders, first
associated as the Board of Brokers in 1863.[35] The traders met daily,
at first in a private office, then in a rented room in the old Board of
Trade Building. They were incorporated by a provincial act as the
Montreal Stock Exchange in 1874. At that time they were dealing in
sixty-three different issues, including the shares of twenty-one banks,
in nine government and municipal issues, in the stock of four railways,
ten industrial stocks, and minor securities. It is notable that in those
days mining shares only represented three issues out of a total
sixty-three. There was a daily average turnover of eight hundred shares.

Business grew rapidly. In 1901 sales ran to seven thousand a day. There
were forty-five members: the value of a seat had risen from $2500 in
1876 to $12,000. The exchange in 1904 built its own building on St.
Franois Xavier Street on land that changed hands for the first time
since the Sulpicians received their fief in 1663. When the Great War
broke out membership in the exchange had reached seventy-five and the
turnover ran to ten thousand.

The fortunes of the stock exchange after that point belong rather to
technical monetary history than to the present work. Its eclipse during
the Great War was followed by a spectacular revival in the decade of the
1920s. The press of extramural trading led to the formation of the
Montreal Curb Exchange in 1926. The activities of the two culminated in
the trading mania of 1929 when in a single day (October 29) the combined
turnover reached 730,195 shares. The price of seats had risen with the
volume of business; it stood at $27,000 in 1921 and increased about ten
times to its high mark of $225,000 in 1929. Then followed the slump, the
spasmodic recoveries and falls, and then the new eclipse of the present
war. Trading, though under the Foreign Exchange Control and a multitude
of regulations, is not suspended by law, but merely by fact. The Stock
Exchange sits in the ashes. Later, like the phoenix, it will rise from
there: indeed, many of its younger adherents and offspring are in the
air already.

There was once upon a time, namely about thirty years ago, a McGill
professor who was called away to another chair and who shook the dust of
Montreal off his cap and gown with the bitter denunciation, "an
oppressive and plutocratic atmosphere." There was something in it. The
accumulation and concentration of wealth in Montreal had been made all
the more evident and conspicuous by the fact that most of the superrich
lived in one and the same residential quarter. It was an area of
unsurpassed beauty, undisturbed, from the very nature of its situation,
by the noise of traffic or by the passage of the passer-by. This is the
district that we recall as lying just at the foot of the mountain,
unoccupied under the French Regime and comprising in early British days
the beautiful farms and the stone manor houses of the McGills, the
McTavishes, and such that reached all the way from what is now
Fletcher's Field to the Cte des Neiges Road, covering all the river
face of the mountain slope.

For this area McGill University presently formed one boundary. The rest
was laid out into spacious side streets running up the hill from
Sherbrooke Street till they could run no further. Each street was thus
blind with that happy blindness that spells peace. Nature aided man. The
elms that grow so easily on Montreal Island, thus left in secluded
growth, fashioned each street to a Gothic cathedral. Here in generous
grounds arose the mansions of the rich. Where nature's utmost effort
ended art took up the task with lawns and shrubberies and flower beds
gay from the earliest glowing of the crocus till the last drooping
beauty of the aster. Great glass conservatories turned even winter into
a vision of tropical beauty. Nor did art stop here: for the private
picture galleries collected in Montreal and housed in this happy area
became known throughout the world. Every social group acquires its
particular habits and hobbies. People in villages keep bees; people at
the seaside collect shells. The superrich in the Montreal of forty years
ago collected pictures. It is the easiest and simplest of all collecting
hobbies: the price tells you exactly what you are getting; you have only
to look on the back of the picture to appreciate it.

These circumstances gave to society in Montreal, in the pre-war days
that are never likely to come again, the peculiar, the distinctive
complexion described by the professor. We are speaking here of society
at what is called its top end, not at its bottom end, the base of the
pyramid, the long rows of tawdry houses and the tumbled slums of
Griffintown, among people who wouldn't know a Correggio from a Colorado
Claro. The rich in Montreal had too much. They got in the way. They
annexed the art of the painter and they stole the history of the
professor; for a man who buys a whole room full of early Canadiana, with
signatures of Montcalm and Wolfe, must surely know more history than one
who merely talks about them; and the man who can buy Japanese mezzotints
must have a finer sense of art than the man who wishes he had the money
to spend on something else. The rich annexed these things, it is true,
rather as patrons than as partners. It is true, also, that the love of
art in some of its rich patrons was very genuine, and genuine in
proportion as it talked least. It is true also that many of the
superrich men who "made Montreal" as heads of banks and railways and
captains of industry were very fine men, and that some of them asked
nothing better than to enjoy their own society undisturbed, paying out
generously right and left to colleges, churches, and charities with
never a thought of interference. Those of us who remember the era can
think of one such, richest of all perhaps, whose simple evenings were
spent alone, reading the evening newspaper under a droplight, smokeless,
for he knew too much about it, drinkless for he didn't care for it, and
speechless for he seldom had much to say, except "yes" for another
million.

Yet the fact remains that the rich in Montreal enjoyed a prestige in
that era that not even the rich deserve.

In any case the "oppressive and plutocratic society" is all gone now.
The war swept over it and set up newer and better values in soldiers and
patriots. Then came the depression and cast down the mighty from their
seats, mingled the old rich with the new poor, and left the fairyland of
this Plutoria under the elms, a wreckage of mortgages, a placard of
"sales," with many of its mansions empty and others gone and vanished
under "demolition." There are many rich in Montreal now, but not
gathered and focused as they were.

"They say," says Omar Khayym, "the lion and the leopard keep their
court where Jansed gloried and drank deep." Call the lion and the
leopard the income-tax inspector and the property-tax assessor, and
Persepolis has nothing on Montreal.

Montreal shared in the movement for expansion and the annexation of
outside municipalities which came as a general tendency all over the
United States and Canada in connection with the electrical age. The
development of rapid transport and the introduction of the motorcar
brought with them the "commuter" of the new suburban district.

The cities all expected larger population, one and one making three, and
an expanded retail market. The movement ran apace, even more so in the
"advanced" province of Ontario than in conservative Quebec. Cities
annexed towns, towns annexed villages, and villages annexed the back
street. No one foresaw the future. Repentance, for the smaller areas
absorbed, came later. It then appeared that annexation meant taxes.
Country properties that had known no higher burden than those imposed in
a township rate and a school-section school tax now rose to the full
honor of participation, at high rates, in urban facilities that reached
them only in name. But there was no way out. The footsteps of annexation
led into the metropolitan lion's den. None out.

Montreal shared in this. As between the beginning of the movement, with
the annexation of Hochelaga (down the river from the main port) in 1883,
until the outbreak of the Great War it annexed twenty-seven
municipalities, a total area of 22,000 acres and a population at the
time of union of 124,000. Inside what may be called the city itself
there was the annexation of St. Henri with 21,000 and St. Cungonde with
11,000 in 1905. The annexation of St. Louis brought in 35,000 in 1910.
The same year saw the rich prize of Notre Dame de Grace, its population
only 4000 but a favored district, clean and bright as the morning, with
nothing to live down, like Verdun, nothing to unmake like Griffintown,
destined for obvious growth. Just at the back of the mountain Montreal
took over in its sleep the little village of Cte des Neiges, hitherto
only explored by snowshoe clubs and a point of pilgrimage to Lumkin's
Tavern. The city reached out across the island, picking up the old
settlement of St. Laurent on the way and reached the back river with
Bordeaux and Sault au Recollet as part of the city of Montreal. Nor did
the process stop with the war. Maisonneuve and other towns came in. But
the process slackened and then halted. Not all the municipalities wanted
to come in, and after the exposure in 1909 of the corruption of city
government in Montreal the shadow of the twenty-three aldermen fell cold
on the threatened areas. Hence it is that the topography of Montreal
shows a number of municipalities not forming part of it but included in
its borders and entirely surrounded by it--what they call "enclaves" in
European diplomacy. Here belong the town of Mount Royal, the tunnel town
mentioned above, the city of Verdun (with sixty thousand people), the
cities of Outremont and Westmount, and the greatest of these is
Westmount.

Just to the west of Mount Royal, to the left of it as you see it from
downtown, is a smaller mountain, separated from it by the miniature
mountain pass called the Cte des Neiges Road. The slope of the West
Mountain, the Little Mountain, is the site of Westmount, which descends
its sides till it meets Montreal at the bottom of the slope, just below
the Canadian Pacific Railway. Montreal thus entirely surrounds
Westmount.

Westmount has a place all its own in the make-up of Greater Montreal.
Its history is, in a sense, older than that of Montreal. Excavation
shows that the site of Westmount was an ancient Indian burial ground,
so old that the remains are not recognizable, from the method of burial,
as those of Hurons but are those of antecedent dwellers, possibly the
Flatheads of the Lower Mississippi Valley. But there is a gap in the
history of Westmount as between the Flathead and its present population.
It had no share in the sorrows and the glory of New France and
practically none in British Montreal till yesterday. On the country
road, the Cte St. Antoine, that runs on a westward slant out of
Montreal, rising as it goes, certain of the fur traders of the Beaver
Hall days--Holliwell and Clarke and others--built substantial country
houses. Other Montrealers--the Honorable John Young was one--bought
near-by farms and set up country seats. The locality was originally part
of the Parish of St. Henri. But it was sufficiently settled to be
incorporated in 1874 as the village of St. Antoine. Then in 1890 the
village, still in deep seclusion but with a population of 1850, became
the town of Cte St. Antoine. Then the age of expansion reached out for
it. The main thoroughfare of Sherbrooke Street was extended to meet the
Cte St. Antoine. The electric cars found it in 1894 and electrified it
into rapid settlement and into the farseeing town-planning that has made
it the charming place it is; neither urban nor rural, neither straight
nor crooked, embowered in trees, shopless (except for the lower area,
too far gone to save) and saloonless, too rich for the poor but too poor
for the superrich, and throughout clean and beautiful.

As such it needed no saint to look after it. It took to the plain title
of the town of Westmount in 1895. Its population passed ten thousand
with the outgoing century and the year 1908 saw it made the city of
Westmount. Since then it has lived and flourished, multiplying its good
works in its schools (the "Westmount High" is second to nothing in
Canada), in its public parks, playgrounds, and conservatories, its
public library, its Victoria Hall, and the sheltering arm of its public
welfare. The population of the city is at present twenty-five thousand;
it is 88 per cent English speaking, over 70 per cent of British origin.
It is small enough for civic pride and devoted civic service in office;
too young to steal, too wise to be led into the lion's den of
Montreal--except to get a drink. For Westmount doesn't tolerate
intemperance. It voted heavily for prohibition. It has no licenses, no
bars, no "bogus night clubs." You can get anything you want in
Westmount, except a drink: if you sink to that you must go down into
Montreal. There is no doubt on all sides that Westmount, thus included
in Montreal, is an oasis of something in something else: people differ
only on the question of what in what. On the other hand, Toronto
visitors pay the high compliment to Westmount of saying that it is just
like a piece of Toronto.

At least Westmount is clean and honest in its government. To realize
that, you need only open the annual report that the Secretary-Treasurer
lays at the feet of the Mayor and aldermen of Westmount every
thirty-first of December, a report in print as neat and symmetrical as a
Westmount garden, bound in an orange cover fit for Belfast. There you
may see it all, every figure, nothing concealed, money from taxes so
much, from licenses so much--not liquor licenses, of course, but
licenses for dogs, bicycles, bakers, knife grinders, and musicians--all
the revenue and expenditure set down in a plain, understandable way, and
every addition correct.

In the days before the Great War, the days of the great fortunes and of
the great snobbishness that went with what the McGill professor,
mentioned above, called the "oppressive and plutocratic atmosphere" that
surrounded the richer class in Montreal, in those days the idea of
Westmount carried something of a touch of second rate, something that
could almost be pushed to the comic point of a standard joke. The old
burlesque companies on circuit always carried as part of their stock in
trade the name of a "dud" suburb to go with each theater town, Chelsea
for Boston, Parkdale for Toronto, and so on. Westmount was saved from
this by the existence of Verdun with an asylum in it. But even at that
it seemed to lack class. Those days are long gone by. Westmount grew
beautiful as Montreal grew shabby. The Prince of Wales Terrace is a
dingy place beside the Upper Boulevard, and Westmount ladies get their
hair dressed and their beauty renewed on Sherbrooke Street, Montreal.
The millionaires' houses are being demolished, rushing in piles of brick
and dust down the contractors' chutes. The Westmount houses climb
higher and higher to the sky.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is no part of the present work to discuss the story of the Great War
as it affected Montreal. Such a chronicle belongs elsewhere. But in a
sense Montreal was perhaps more profoundly affected by the reaction of
the Great War and of the collapse and depression which followed it than
any city in Canada. The war brought a great shift of personal and social
values. The leaders of finance, explaining in their clubs that the war
would only last six months because big business wouldn't allow it to go
further, soon gave place, disregarded, to other leaders and other
thoughts: to the volunteers drilling on the McGill campus, men who are
the generals of today humbly learning to form fours; Professor Auckland
Geddes as the man of the hour, the man who knew and had known; with him
the little old Duke, the Governor General, back on a soldier's job, up
and down the campus beside Auckland Geddes, which in front, which
behind, no one knew; the departure of the overseas regiments of 1915
marching to the ships, their women clinging in their ranks, then later,
as wisdom intervened, the port closed as now, troopships that moved
silently down the river in the early morning, with never a farewell
except from hands that waved good-by from the windows of factories where
work never stopped. All this needs no recital. It is back again.

After the war followed the brief aftermath of high prices, the momentum
of the war machine mistaken for the new impetus of peace. Then followed
the collapse of prices that struck down agriculture, nature taking a
hand in with dust thrown in the western farmer's eyes; with this the
wreck of factory industry, with nothing to make and no one to buy; and
as the consequence, not the cause, the reflection, not the light, the
mirror, not the picture, the collapse of the Montreal Stock Exchange
values that demolished, part of it forever, the world that was. It is
claimed by some people that the financial dominance enjoyed in Canada by
Montreal may not survive. Finance was struggling back to life as best it
could between the depression and the present war, but certain large and
new interests had sprung up, notably the northern mining interest, which
Montreal was either slow in seizing or unfortunate in not getting. It is
said, or at least whispered, that Toronto now seriously threatens the
financial priority so long held by Montreal. Yet for this no one need
worry. When peace comes and with it, under a wise extravagance instead
of a foolish parsimony, the new development of Canada begins on a scale
never before known, there will be plenty of finance and money for both
cities. After all, there are two classes that we have always with us,
the poor and the rich.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Henry Dalby, _Montreal Herald_, 1913.

[32] (Sir) H. B. Ames, _The City Below the Hill_, 1897.

[33] _Report of the Cannon Commission_, 1909.

[34] J. I. Cooper, _Montreal_, 1942.

[35] Carl Bergithon, _The Stock Exchange_, 1941.




CHAPTER XII

The Port of Montreal

     _The Magic of the Sea. Geographical Advantages of Montreal.
     Twentieth-Century Improvement of the Ports. The Jacques Cartier
     Bridge. The Barrier of the Ice. The Shipping List. Many
     Cargoes. River Steamers and Lake Freighters. The St. Lawrence Seaway._


For all people of British and kindred descent there is an abiding
attraction in a seaport. The shipping that comes and goes connects the
harbor with the seven seas and the faraway peoples of the outer world.
The poet who wrote a hundred years ago of "the mystery and beauty of the
ships and the magic of the sea" found words to express the common
thought of all the people whose national heritage has been the sea.

Montreal has a rare and picturesque scenic beauty; mountain and river
and its far horizon give it an unsurpassed interest for the eye. It
carries all the romantic charm of its varied history. But for many
people its most appealing aspect is that of a great port, one of the
greatest in the world and in many senses unique among all the ports of
the globe.

Many a simple dweller in the city whose life and livelihood are quite
unconnected with the operations of the harbor, who perhaps rarely visits
it, unconsciously feels it a part of himself, bringing him a touch of
maritime life, a whiff of the open sea. Such people follow in their
morning newspaper the annual fortunes of the harbor as a part of their
own existence. They live in an unending sea story. They feel a new
awakening each year at the news that the Gulf is all clear below
Anticosti, news of heavy northwest winds at Fame Point, no ice in sight
from the Seven Islands, and light breezes to dead calm reported off
Rimouski. There is a charm in the names of these queer places, strung
into a thousand miles along river and gulf, with no other meaning or
history than points of navigation, places for range lights, fog bells
and weather reports, ending at the Strait of Belle Isle where the last
ice goes out to let in the first ship. Such people feel a personal pride
in the annual spring victory of the great icebreakers pounding against
the ice jams below Lake St. Peter and follow the award of the harbor's
annual gold-headed cane for the first ocean ship in port as inland
people follow the ball games of their league.

Such a reader in the heyday of the summertime, with dog days of heat and
tourists, finds his delight each day in looking down the long and varied
shipping list that covers a page or more of print, the calendar of the
great liners ready months ahead and arrivals and departures from all
over the world. Then comes the autumn and with it the rush of the grain
ships that warns of the annual passing of navigation, the winter sleep
of the port. The great passenger liners drop out in wary prudence, while
the grain carriers fight on to the last, fed by the lake boats from a
thousand miles up, making their last trip out of Fort William in
blinding snowstorms and bitter cold. Presently the last is gone, the
buoys and marks removed; Fame Point is silent; the river steamers are
packed tight in their harbors, fast asleep until spring--and the ice
rules again. If it were not for the barrier of ice Montreal might easily
be the greatest port in all the world. But the "if" is as large as the
St. Lawrence and the Gulf below, both of which are utterly
unconquerable.

But for the ice! For consider what an extraordinary geographical
position is occupied by the Port of Montreal. It is the farthest inland
seaport of any importance in all the world, one thousand miles from the
sea. Yet by the good fortune of geography it is closer to Liverpool than
any seaport in the United States. Montreal shows a distance from
Liverpool of 2760 miles, Portland 2783, Boston 2861, New York 3043, and
Philadelphia 3179. Yet conversely, apart from the Hudson Bay route,
Montreal is the nearest ocean port to Central Canada and to the Middle
West of the States. The great technical development of the Port of
Montreal, in relation to engineering facilities for unloading, loading,
and storage of freight, its extent of berths and wharfage and its
ability to meet the great expansion of the passenger trade, did not, as
already said, take place until the present century. The change came
because it had to. The increasing size of modern steamships involved not
only deeper and deeper dredging but facilities for mechanical loading,
fueling, and repair. The reference is here not to the increasing size of
freak ships, such as the _Great Eastern_, or record ships, blue-ribbon
ships needed for national prestige, but the increasing size of what is
called the "economical" ship, giving the maximum returns for a minimum
of proportional cost. The increase of economical size comes from
increased efficiency in building, new methods of carrying and using
fuel, and the increasing opportunity to secure large cargoes without
delay. Such economical ships of first-class commerce runs now represent
a tonnage that runs up to twenty thousand tons. A port unable to gather
freight rapidly enough, load and unload fast enough, and offer water
deep enough to float these ships could not survive as a world port.
Montreal has never been concerned with "big ships" in the world's top
class. The top ocean tonnage before the present war was represented by
the _Queen Elizabeth_ (85,000 registered tons), the _Normandie_
(82,435), a group of a dozen ships of more than 35,000 tons. These ships
fill a large place in the world's eye, a small place in the world's
trade. Montreal's 20,000-ton Duchesses represent the main fleet of the
world's commerce.

The _Empress of Britain_, whose tragic fate was a disastrous episode of
the present war, was the largest boat ever on the St. Lawrence (42,000
tons), but only ran as far as the port of Quebec. The ocean cargo
tonnage entering the Port of Montreal in the years just before the war
ran to an average of about 5,000,000, the cargo tonnage outward about
4,000,000.

The ship channels of the St. Lawrence cover a distance of 210 statute
miles from Montreal to South Traverse which is fifty miles below Quebec.
Between Montreal and Quebec the channel offers a minimum draft of thirty
feet at autumn low water; in the lower part of it high tide makes a lift
of five feet more.

For over three years now the harbor of Montreal has been secluded and
surrounded by all the grim secrecy and mystery of wartime. No one may
enter its precincts except upon his lawful occasions. Sentries guard the
approaches. There are no reports or arrivals or departures of ships, no
sailing dates. Silent vessels slip away to unknown ports.

Even such general and vague statistics of shipping, incoming and
outgoing tonnage, etc., as are made public are only given in a
retrospect that makes them harmless. Information of any sort is
forbidden, its disseminator liable to be called to account. Nor would
any detailed account of shipping and of operations in the harbor serve
any good purpose just now although it might aid a bad one. The war has
so entirely altered the nature of the import and export trade that
present figures would be meaningless as an account of the national life
of the port. For that reason it is better to drop back a few years and
view the Port of Montreal at the high point of development it had
reached toward the closing years of the 1930s.

The present century has witnessed an extraordinary progress in this
development of the Port of Montreal. As the first of the harbor
improvements to be noted is the building in 1901 of the present heavy
stone revetment wall, already spoken of, designed to hold back
floodwater. At the same time the old Common and Commissioners streets
were further widened: these originally represented, it will be
remembered, the open space between the old fortification wall and the
foreshore of the river. Now began, with the construction of Elevator No.
1, the building of the great grain elevators that are the most obvious
feature of Montreal Harbour. Their towering height, the shapeless size,
with no proportion to the site or scene they occupy, make them, to the
eye of art, a blot upon the landscape, a disfigurement of nature's work.
But they have a beauty all their own to a milling company. In any case
they mean so much to the life and industry of Canada, to the life line
of imperial safety, that the eye that looks on them becomes trained to a
new adjustment. The four now standing on the harbor front represent a
capacity of 15,260,000 bushels.

Any prejudice against the appearance of the elevators is greatly
lessened for anyone who has enjoyed the privilege of seeing the inside
detail of their operations. One is lost in admiration at the ingenuity
of contrivance which they represent. The movement of the grain along the
carriers, its downpour through the chutes, its passage out along the
aerial carriers running above the dock sheds to carry it to any needed
point--these things represent the last word in the mechanical economic
carriage of grain.

The building of the great modern piers or docks that now line the harbor
front began at the same period, with the Alexandra and King Edward
piers, and Elevator No. 1. What was left of the little Islet Normandin
(Market Island), the original shelter that made such a natural harbor as
there was beside Champlain's Place Royale and Maisonneuve's Ville Marie,
was now shoveled away (1903). The island is gone. The ocean liners pass
over it. The addition of more railway tracks, a total present length of
nearly sixty miles, new sheds, and the building of the Hochelaga
high-level wharf, 575 feet long, marked a continuous progress. The
harbor was itself extended by Act of Parliament in 1909, from its old
boundary just below St. Marys current, and declared to occupy sixteen
miles on each side of the river. Its boundary upstream is a line
crossing the St. Lawrence 3760 feet above the Victoria Bridge, and its
lower boundary is placed at Bout de l'Isle eight and three quarter miles
below Longue Pointe Church. The original little harbor had no natural
advantages, other than that it was better than anything else available,
being just a casual shelter for a few odd vessels. But on the new scale
Montreal Harbour has the outstanding natural advantage that it can
expand to any extent. Nature placed obstacles upstream, none down. The
harbor can go on forever. Whether Montreal stands in the wrong place and
whether Maisonneuve should have put it below St. Marys current at the
start, is a matter it is now too late to discuss. But for the movement
of freight for the erection of plants, works, docks, the lower
downstream the easier. The mountain is just in the way.

All these things were done through and by the Harbour Commissioners
whose efficiency had been greatly increased by reducing their number to
three and multiplying their actual power and responsibility. Montreal
owes much to their energy and foresight and in particular to the devoted
service of the Chairman, the late George Washington Stephens. It came
with a shock of surprise, or worse, to many people, when the Harbour
Commissioners lost their posts because the government in power at Ottawa
changed in 1911 from the long and fortunate Liberal regime of Sir
Wilfred Laurier (1895-1911) to a Conservative administration. It was
thought proper to invite the Harbour Commissioners to resign. There was
no exact precedent to follow, and so the office was treated as what is
called a "political" one. Under British practice a political
officer--there are only a hundred or so in the army of officials--is in
charge of general policy in the relations between the department and the
government. He is not a departmental worker nor a departmental expert.
The First Lord of the Admiralty never goes to sea and wouldn't know the
lea-scuppers from the main chains. These people resign as a body on a
change of government. Quite different are "permanent" officers trained
to work in the department as a lifework. These never resign. The storms
of politics, mostly summer lightning, go over their heads. They go on
working.

One may judge to which class should have been assigned the Montreal
Harbour Commissioners, especially the chairman, who had taken their work
as their life and their cause, hoping some day to stand in stone on the
Harbour Front beside the Honorable John Young whose statue they set up
in 1908. It was not to be. Out they went. This is not to say that the
men who followed them in office did not do excellent service.
Improvement and expansion went right on. Nor did they terminate when the
commission itself was abolished in 1935 in favor of the present
centralized system by which all the chief Canadian seaports are under
the single control of a National Harbors Board at Ottawa. Each port has
its local port master and staff. The change occasioned surprise in
outside circles at Montreal, with a certain sense of being degraded in
rank. But it was taken on the high authority of Sir Alexander Gibb,
whose aid had been solicited for a National Port Survey of the Dominion
(1931).

The further deepening of the channel continued till it reached its
present thirty-five feet maximum. Elevator No. 3 dates from 1910. The
floating dry dock, one of the notable facilities of the harbor, dates
from 1912. The Great War brought special labors and for the time checked
capital development. But further improvement and construction were
carried on more vigorously than ever after the war. The substitution of
electric engines for steam (1919) proved a mistake and was abandoned but
the construction of the cold storage plant (1919), the purchase of
(grain) Elevator B (Windmill Point) from the Canadian National Railway
(1923) and the construction in the same year of Elevator No. 3
(Maisonneuve) are marks of the active progress made.

The first of the 20,000-ton Duchess vessels arrived in port in 1928. The
close of this epoch saw Montreal by the middle of the 1930s, four
hundred years after Jacques Cartier first landed on the island, as the
second greatest seaport in North America in the value of its imports and
its exports. By the present time the completed wharfage of the port
covers ten miles. Its average export of grain before the war was
146,000,000 bushels a year. Ships could load at the rate of 1,000,000
bushels a day.

But the most striking of all the changes, though with nothing to do with
the harbor as such, was the construction and completion of the vast
Harbour Bridge that now spans the river clear over the top of all the
shipping, just at St. Marys current. In order to get the necessary
height (162 feet above high water) to clear the highest masts or
superstructures of ships coming to Montreal, the bridge had to start far
back from the bank of the river (at Lafontaine Street), rising above the
houses and over the streets. The monument of the "Patriotes," executed
in 1838, in the Place des Patriotes is almost directly under it. It
lifts across the river to piers beside le Ronde and St. Helens Island
in one vast cantilever span of structural steel. From there it runs
along a succession of deck trusses on stone piers across the shallow
water to the South Shore between St. Lambert and Longueuil. It has a
total length of two and one eighth miles. It was officially opened as
the Harbour Bridge on May 24, 1930. But the fatal arrival in 1935 of the
four hundredth anniversary of Jacques Cartier's discovery proved too
much for Montreal. The bridge was rechristened the Jacques Cartier
Bridge.

The bridge is not a railway bridge but only for vehicles and
pedestrians. It has a roadway of thirty-seven feet to carry four lines
of vehicles, room for a tramway on each side of the road, and outside
all a sidewalk five feet wide on each side of the bridge. The bridge
came as a consequence of the hopeless crowding and congestion of the
Victoria Bridge after the advent of the motorcar. This latter bridge had
been remodeled in 1898, the tube structure removed, and a new deck
constructed for trains and vehicles on the original piers. It proved
hopelessly inadequate. A further relief for transriver traffic was given
by the Honor Mercier Bridge at the west end of the island from Ville
LaSalle (near Lachine) to Caughnewaga.

No feature of progress has meant more to the Port of Montreal than the
unremitting fight against the ice which has successfully lengthened the
season of navigation. The port is now open for seven and a half months
each year, a gain of nearly a month on the conditions existing half a
century ago.

But in spite of all that has been done the closing in of winter is
inexorable. More than that: we have to accept as a permanent condition
of the activity of the Port of Montreal the fact that we have now
reached the limits imposed by nature on the lengthening of navigation.
Two myths, always present in the popular mind, prevent the acceptance of
this unwelcome truth. One is that the increasing mildness of the
Montreal winter will render it more and more easy to keep the river
open. The other is that the further progress of ice breaking and the
treatment of ice with thermit explosives and similar methods may enable
the channel to be kept open no matter what the winter is like.

Each of these popular ideas is an utter fallacy which it is important to
explode. Let us take first the climate of Montreal, and put it down on
paper with the pen point of impartial truth. We have already spoken of
it in certain regards. Let us follow now the round of the seasons. The
climate of Montreal is for many of us the best in all the world. Beside
it London is dark and California garish, Winnipeg cold, New Orleans hot,
Philadelphia neutral, and New York impossible. But we don't call it a
mild climate. In Montreal the approach of winter is gradual, its
departure rapid. September is clear and cool with blue skies and nearly
always snowless. October is sharp but still bright, and bright with the
glorious autumn color of the Canadian trees, with now and then a driving
flurry of snow, a mimic snowstorm, and later, as if in repentance, the
still and mellow Indian summer. November is, as it is everywhere,
November--with wind and rain and mud, snowfalls of wet snow that at
times bring the permanent winter snow to the city by the last week of
the month. The temperature of November averages 33.4; the lowest record
in forty years is zero, the highest 68 above. December sees winter, the
real winter always threatening and never quite there, Christmas always
risking to be "green" and vindicating itself with a Christmas snowstorm,
the temperature averaging 19.8 above zero. January opens, at least by
tradition, with a January thaw, the streets all aslop with wet snow that
is turning to slush; then after this piece of fooling it turns to real
cold with but little break or letup till February is over; by real cold
we mean an average of 13, with spells below zero, snow that keeps
falling and lying in the streets, and, where not shoveled away, great
piles of it accumulating beside the sidewalks. In March the temperature
falls but the winter stays.[36] Montrealers, as already said, debate
each year the prospect of "dust on St. Patrick's Day," but few have seen
it since St. Patrick. April, we pretend, is spring, with average
temperature of 41 degrees, but winter keeps coming back, with
snowstorms, with ragged snow on the mountainsides, the port still frozen
up but with news of the icebreakers bringing relief from below Sorel.
Gradually, with a new annual surprise, the icebreakers reach the port,
the port opens, a deep-sea captain gets a gold-headed cane, and first
thing we know it is Maytime, all tulips and willow buds and soft airs,
and after one week, no longer spring--midsummer.


CLIMATE OF MONTREAL--FORTY-YEAR AVERAGE

           _Average Temperature_     _Record High_     _Record Low_
    Jan.         13.3                    53               -27
    Feb.         13.9                    47               -27
    Mar.         25.8                    68               -15
    Apr.         41.6                    83                 2
    May          55.3                    89                23
    June         64.7                    92                38
    July         69.6                    95                46
    Aug.         66.5                    96                43
    Sept.        58.4                    90                32
    Oct.         46.6                    80                22
    Nov.         33.4                    68                 0
    Dec.         19.8                    59               -25

One observes the contrast between the height of the summer navigation
season and the depth of the winter that seals it. On a summer night
Montreal seems all leaves and lights, and people out of doors at all
hours, with long-drawn steam whistles from the boats in the Lachine
Canal soft on the night. But compare a February night, in the cold heart
of winter, twenty below zero, with a blizzard raging over the city in
conflict with the great rotary snow plows, electric lights dimmed and
blurred by the snow, and nothing moving in the street.

Such is winter in Montreal. Consider then the condition of winter
navigation above and below it. The maritime harbors of Canada on the
Atlantic do not freeze up, but the Strait of Belle Isle, Cabot Strait,
the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the river below the Island of Orleans are
so blocked with moving ice, ice floes, and the solid ice along shore
that there is no question of winter navigation beyond the smashing of a
ferry passage from Quebec to Levis. When Cartier spoke of six feet of
ice around his winter-bound ships in the Ste. Croix (beside Quebec) he
spoke what is known to be true. The river freezes solid above Quebec as
does Lake St. Peter, and not only freezes solid but tends from the
movement of the current below the ice to pile huge ice jams far thicker
than the average two feet of ice. Above Montreal the St. Lawrence
freezes solid, and with it the connecting water sections all the way to
Lake Superior, except where the fiercer current of the rapids breaks a
way open to the surface. The Great Lakes do not freeze but their harbors
do. Navigation comes to a full stop.

Montreal is thus blocked on both sides.

Nor are the winters getting milder. That ancient myth goes back to the
earliest-known Canadian history. They were said to be growing milder in
Frontenac's time. Peter Kalm, the Swedish traveler mentioned previously
in this book, was told in 1749 by an ancient habitant that the winters
when he was young were much more severe. But the thermometer will have
nothing of it. It shows no general change over the whole period of
definite record, now at least a century. The winters of 1933 and 1934
were, for many parts of eastern Canada, the coldest ever recorded.

So much for the fallacy of milder winters. Now take the fallacy of the
conquest of the ice. In some senses, and very important ones, ice
engineers have overcome the problem of the ice, more by the achievement
of Howard Barnes of McGill University than by that of any other one man.
People seldom realize what a triumph of engineering they are witnessing
when they drive past a great Canadian power house and power dam thrown
across a river a quarter of a mile wide, operating in midwinter at
twenty degrees below zero, with two feet of solid ice above and the
broken water of the tailrace below, smoking into the frozen air. This
was not possible till the engineers learned how to deal with "frazil
ice," which means not honest, solid ice two feet in the chunk, but the
dirty, mean stuff all half afloat in little broken bits like smashed-up
rock candy. This stuff used to clog the flues and the turbines.

If anyone interested wishes to see a queer memento of this let him drive
out along the Lower Lachine Road till he reaches, near to Lachine
itself, the remains of what was the first attempt to supply electric
light to Montreal. A queer old building, squat and low and long, runs
straight out into the water to catch hold of a natural strip of rock
which rises above the river. With the help of a little damming this
enabled them to cut off a little section of the Lachine Rapids--a very
little bit was enough--in order to turn it into light. It worked
provokingly well in summer in the long daylight. It wouldn't work in
winter, and the engineers used to sit in their electric-light building,
trying to figure out by lamplight what was the matter with electricity.
That day is passed. That problem is solved. We can generate electric
power all over the Arctic regions from the great reserve of water power,
to send out light and heat to less favored areas, to carry human life
and industry to the farthest north. This triumph of engineering probably
means more to the future of Canada than any other mechanical invention.

Thus much for power; not so for navigation. There the ice must have its
way. Any idea that the Port of Montreal can be kept open all winter is
just a dream. It is a fancy that has often been encouraged, especially
during the days of rapid advances made with icebreakers and the
impressive results of the use of the chemical mixture called "thermit."
Thermit is a mixture of aluminum in fine grains with an oxide of a
chemically weaker metal, usually iron. On being heated by a priming, as
of magnesium powder, the aluminum combines violently with the oxygen of
the oxide, generating great heat and setting the other metal free in the
molten state. It does not explode but splatters the molten metal while
burning. To the innocent eye it seems to be burning up the ice. Hence
hope improved on success and rumor outstripped achievement. Newspapers
at times report inventions, or suggestions, for keeping open the river
channel all winter by installing warm electric wires along the ice.
Another good way would be to pour hot tea on it.

It is evident then that, generally speaking, the ice conditions in the
Gulf and in the Cabot Strait govern the length of the season at
Montreal. On this point Mr. J. G. Macphail, the Director of Transport,
writes: "It is to be observed that in 47 of the 55 years of the table
(of annual first arrivals of ships at Montreal) the first arrival from
sea was generally much later than the date of channel-opening from
Quebec to Montreal. In only eight of these years did the first arrival
from sea come within two days of the date of open channel.

"Last departures for sea are governed by conditions in the river itself
and in the Gulf. This is due to the desire of ship owners to profit by
every possible day and is made possible by the use of the Department's
icebreakers both in the river and, in some cases, in the Gulf."

One may perhaps quote further, since the point is one of illimitable
importance to Montreal and of direct bearing on the seaway problem, the
dictum given by Sir Alexander Gibb in his National Ports Survey, a
report of 1931-32:

     "In dealing with the Ship Canal, it is opportune to refer to
     the question of winter navigation, which from time to time
     receives a certain amount of publicity. The introduction of
     icebreakers has extended the season of Montreal by sixteen
     days; it previously averaged 7 months and is now 7 months.
     Theoretically, the earliest and latest dates yet recorded are
     respectively March 29 in 1921 and, until the present 1931-32
     abnormal conditions, January 6 in 1929. For all practical
     purposes, however, the season may be said to open in the third
     week in April and to close in the first week in December. This
     is much as can be certainly secured by the present methods; the
     expense is considerable but the results have been very
     valuable. To go beyond this would require a revolutionary
     change in method and even if the object could be secured, which
     is exceedingly doubtful, there would be no justification for
     the expenditure necessary to maintain navigation through the
     whole winter.

     "Apart, however, from the technical and financial
     considerations that would face the Government, the excessive
     cost to shipping of hull and cargo insurance, the difficulties
     of navigation and the risk of serious delays would be
     insuperable obstacles to the commercial use of the St. Lawrence
     in the winter. Unless and until entirely new methods are
     devised, it is, I think, idle to bring the idea of winter
     navigation into calculations regarding the St. Lawrence route;
     and I think the reputation of the route is only likely to be
     tarnished by efforts to extend unnaturally the season of
     navigation."

Icebreakers indeed can do wonders. They originated from the Arctic
whaling ships specially strengthened at the bow to be able to charge
against the ice. The first recognized icebreaker, designed for that
purpose only, was put on by Russia (1870) to keep open the Port of
Cronstadt. After that they were much used in the Russian and Swedish
ports. The earlier icebreakers such as the _Lady Grey_ and the
_Montcalm_, which were put on the St. Lawrence early in this century,
were built spoon-shaped in the bow, and relied chiefly on lifting
themselves on the ice, like a seal, and breaking it with their weight.
More recent types resort also to cutting a passage through the ice with
a propeller at the bow as well as at the stern. The great Russian
icebreaker the _Baikal_ works on keeping open a channel across Lake
Baikal, a body of water over four hundred miles long, the lower part of
which lies right across the path of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The
channel kept open is fifty-two miles long through ice extending all the
way and three feet thick.

It would be possible to keep the St. Lawrence channel open if we had
icebreakers enough, working hard enough. But the cost of operation
would be one of all proportion to any benefit received by the Port of
Montreal; especially as the benefit derived from the earlier spring
opening of the river, as far as ocean steamers are concerned, would be
nothing at all, not one red cent, red or frozen. The point is that the
Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Cabot Strait leading out of it could not be
kept open. The Gulf does not freeze over as a solid mass, but the winter
makes it an area of drifting ice floes with all shore lines and straits
blocked with heavy ice. Commercial navigation is impossible. It is the
opening of the Gulf which regulates now the opening of navigation up to
Montreal. In old days the river was open for only a little over five
months. The Gulf opened first and closed last. Ships waited for the
river. Hence the prospects of early navigation in the season of today
depend on the reports constantly sent in from the Gulf by aviation and
telegraphed upriver to the Department of Transport at Ottawa from an
Atlantic station, which is not to be named in wartime, but which is a
city of over 60,000 inhabitants with a university in it and called after
the head of the Board of Trade under George the Second.

Such reports, carrying the same old charm of the sea in its newest form,
run in such a tone and tune as this:

     FLIGHT NUMBER TWO STOP 1658 HOURS STOP PROCEEDED DIRECT TO
     NORTH PT P.E.I. THENCE TO GASP TO HEATH PT ANTICOSTI TO CAPE
     GEORGE NFLD TO CAPE RAY TO 46.00 N 59.00 W TO SCATARI ISLAND
     AND ALONG COAST TO HALIFAX LANDED 1552 HOURS STOP ICE SIGHTED
     EN ROUTE STOP NORTHUMBERLAND STRAIT FROM CAPE TORMENTINE
     EASTWARD TO HILLSBOROUGH BAY OPEN WATER THEN CLOSE PACKED ICE
     AS FAR AS CAN BE SEEN STOP FROM CAPE TORMENTINE WESTWARD
     THROUGH STRAIT TO WEST PT P.E.I. CLOSE PACKED ON SOUTH SIDE AND
     EXTENDING NORTHWARD TO A LINE FROM MIRAMICHI BAY TO NORTH PT
     P.E.I. STOP WESTWARD OF A LINE FROM NORTH PT P.E.I. TO SOUTH PT
     ANTICOSTI OPEN WATER WITH EXCEPTION SMALL STRING TEN MILES EAST
     OF BIRTH PT STOP NORTH SIDE BAY CHALEUR OPEN WATER AS FAR AS
     CAN BE SEEN

Mr. Alexander Ferguson, the Port Manager of the Harbour of Montreal,
makes the following interesting analysis of the situation from 1871 to
1940:

     It is found that during the past seventy years the period of
     time the harbour is open to ocean navigation has definitely
     increased. This fact is clearly shown by the following
     averages:

     70-year average--1871 to 1940, inclusive--218 days.
     60   "     "   --1881 to 1940, inclusive--222 days.
     50   "     "   --1891 to 1940, inclusive--223 days.
     40   "     "   --1901 to 1940, inclusive--226 days.
     30   "     "   --1911 to 1940, inclusive--228 days.
     20   "     "   --1921 to 1940, inclusive--231 days.
     10   "     "   --1931 to 1940, inclusive--234 days.

     Analyzing the earlier years still further, we find that during
     the ten years from 1871 to 1880, the harbour was open an
     average of only 207 days. Comparing this with the average of
     234 days for the last ten years indicates that we can now
     reasonably expect some twenty-seven more days' navigation than
     we could sixty-five to seventy years ago.

We have spoken of the typical Montreal citizen who sits and reads the
summer sailing list of the port as people in Kentucky read about horse
races. A marvelous sailing list indeed it is. The effect is created not
so much by the impressive schedule of sailing dates of the great
passenger liners, extending for weeks ahead, as by the announced voyages
of steamers that seem to be striking out for ports all over the seven
seas. Here are ships from Montreal to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and as many
dams as there are in Holland; ships from Montreal to the Baltic; ships
direct from Montreal to South Africa, and of late years Montreal to West
Africa; ships from Montreal to the Mediterranean and to Greece; and in
the contrary direction ships of the New Zealand Shipping Company from
Montreal to New Zealand via Cape Horn. Strangest of all are the
sailings, not regular but intermittent, and presaging all kinds of
things for the future are the sailings and the announced arrivals of
ships between Vancouver and Montreal via the Panama Canal, or ships in
port at Montreal on a voyage from Toronto and even Fort William to
Vancouver. The strangest-seeming cargo route, for those who take an
interest in such things, used to be that of the Booth Line out of
Liverpool for Iquitos, Peru, not via the Pacific Ocean but up the
Amazon, clear through Brazil and out again, to a seaport that ought to
be, by school geography, on the top of the Andes. But the voyage from
Fort William to Vancouver, in apparent defiance of the Rocky Mountains,
is at least a close second.

Most of these boats are merely cargo boats, not tramps, but vessels
running on a schedule. A few like the New Zealand boats carry
passengers. Indeed, there has always been from the Port of Montreal a
sort of specialty of steamers taking a few passengers only--up to a
dozen--boats not in a hurry, not precise as to their day of sailing,
boats without music or hired amusement, but for those who know enough to
secure a passage in them, offering a type of old-time comfort, of
undisturbed quiet, lost in the crowded tumult of a fashionable liner.
The "economics" of such passenger boats is interesting. After all, a
vessel must float. It can't be all full of dead-weight cargo; you must
have some air in it or it will sink. So you may as well put some
passengers in the air, as you have to have it anyway; not too many or
they'll need too much air. In any case, after you pass such and such a
number, maritime law on the St. Lawrence, as elsewhere, runs into a new
set of regulations, necessary for a crowded ship's company, negligible
for a tableful, questions of carrying a doctor, nurses, children's
playrooms, sale of liquor, and such. The ships we speak of avoid this
higher scale of cost. The passengers, apart from a little bit of table
and bedroom service, partly covered by tips, carried thus to fill up the
air, are "velvet" to the ship and the voyage velvet to the passenger.

There is no doubt that the psychology of ocean travel, before the
catastrophe of the depression, had got hopelessly mixed up with luxury,
hurry, and ostentation. The revolt against it takes various forms. One
is the revolt of the wholesome-minded young people, students and such,
caring nothing for social forms and too sensible to waste money when
they can use it better, who deliberately "go third," and in going it
have lifted up third till it threatens "first." The other is the revolt,
or the reversion, of older people to the ship of the past, sailing its
leisurely way with the old-time uncertainty of the sea. Added to both
the revolts is the supertravel of the air, out-luxifying luxury, and
making the twenty-five knots of the ocean liner look like twenty-five
cents. If luxury travels by air, if love travels third, and peace
travels slow--how then will float the floating palace? As between such
tendencies there might be reason to suppose that the luxury liner may
not be the "success" type of ship in a restored world. The Port of
Montreal might reflect on this awhile.

But to appreciate in the concrete the varied character of the ocean
shipping entering the Port of Montreal, one should turn to the pages of
Mr. Lawrence Tombs's masterly technical study of the port. Mr. Tombs
presents a very vivid picture of the varied cargo trade out of Montreal
by giving some "specimen export cargoes" of outgoing ships of the period
just following the Great War (season 1925). Here is the steamship _Grey
County_, May 8, Montreal to the Havre, carrying _54,000 bushels of
wheat; 455 pieces of timber; 2 cases of cotton goods; 1 case sundries; 3
bales woolens; 2 cases silks; 21 packages; 1800 bundles hides; 192 rolls
paper; 4968 packages implements; 1289 billets copper; 268 cakes copper;
12 cases dry goods; 50 cases catsup; 14 barrels of graphite; 14 boxes
engines; 600 bags of asbestos; 1220 bales wood pulp; 1 case canoes; 37
boxes mica; 1118 bags w. shanks; 2 boxes of books_--a cargo which looks
like something for everybody in the Havre, with even canoes and books to
read.

Yet here on the same morning is the _Bretta_ outward bound for Cardiff
and Bristol, with _59,600 bags of sugar_--just that. Going down the
river the same day is the _Canadian Victor_, also bound for Cardiff but
carrying _175,000 bushels of wheat_; _28,000 bushels of oats_; _and a
list of items at long as that of the Grey County_ with not single one,
except "wheat," the same.

With these ships goes the steamship _New Aster_, off for Limerick;
_178,000 bushels of wheat_--nothing else.

Next day there follows the _Manchester Regiment_ bound for Manchester.
She is carrying as the main item of her cargo _727 head of cattle_. This
means to those who know the St. Lawrence that the cattle trade has been
opened again after its long cessation. In the old days of steam and sail
discussed in an earlier chapter the cattle trade out of Montreal was one
of the outstanding features of the port. Canadian cattle were taken over
thin--"store cattle," they called them--and fattened up for the British
butcher after their arrival. Even some of the passenger steamers, the
old _Laurentian_ and such, carried cattle, and the cattle boat played a
peculiar part in offering a free ocean trip to young men willing to help
look after the animals. The British apprehension of "foot and mouth
disease" being brought over by Canadian cattle--a very acute
apprehension since there was none of the disease in Canada--led to the
prohibition after 1893 of this trade in store cattle. This kept the
British market for the British stock farmer. The cattle boats
disappeared from the river. When the embargo was lifted in 1923 it was
necessary to secure new boats of a suitable type. A ship of eight
thousand tons with permanent fittings for the cattle pens will carry at
least five hundred cattle, needing the care of about twenty cattlemen.
But tariff changes and other causes have rendered the cattle trade of
later days varying and uncertain.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the cattle on the _Manchester Regiment_ are only the main item of a
manifest that carries thirty-eight others. Apart from 646 bags of cattle
feed, the 2309 bales of hay, and the 101 bales of straw which constitute
the cattle's own board and lodging, the ship carries _1250 sacks of
flour_, _16,977 pieces of pine_, _1941 boxes of cheese_, _776 barrels of
apples_, _60,600 maple blocks_, and so on, endlessly. Some of the items,
like the wheat, the flour, the cheese, the apples, the 9350 boxes of
lard, are agricultural products of the farm and grist mill, others
represent agriculture plus the factory--_346 boxes of canned beef_,
_2000 cases of evaporated milk_, etc., others purely manufactures, as
_67 boxes of auto tires and 21 reels of cable_, _40 boxes of steel
nails_, etc.; others were things purely of the mind and imagination as
the four cases of advertising matter.

This _Manchester Regiment_, by the way, is a typical ocean cargo boat of
large size as contrasted with the typical large-size lake carrier. With
a total length of 471 feet, 6 inches she has a beam of 57 feet, 9 inches
with a speed of 14 knots. If loaded with wheat only she could carry
397,787 bushels on a draft of 30 feet, 2 inches. A Canadian lake
freighter of the largest class carries 500,000 bushels with a draft of
only 18 feet, 6 inches. But her superficial measurement would show a
length of 633 feet and a beam of 70 feet.

On the next day the _Doonholm_ sails for New Zealand and Australia with
a manifest list that covers half a page of print and makes the others
look simple. It is notable that the items are all manufactured goods.
The largest single item is that of 4685 packages of agricultural
implements. On the other hand the _Aldermin_ sails next day for
Rotterdam carrying nothing but wheat, rye, and oats. The "opposite
number" of the _Aldermin_, the import vessel in the other direction,
would be one of the famous "gin ships," carrying gin to Montreal from
Holland (and nothing else). The green and red cases of DeKuyper
breathed, or seemed to breathe, a soft atmosphere over the port. Their
arrival was always specially announced in the Montreal press, half
jocosely, half joyously.

Among this unending variety of exports and imports one can, however,
form a good idea of what are the principal items of the ocean trade of
Montreal and of their relative importance from the tables published each
year by the Dominion Department of Marine and Fisheries. They are for
calendar years, not fiscal, and therefore the year 1938 is the last one
that is undisturbed by war conditions.

The statistics here presented must be taken with a word of caution, or a
grain of salt, or with any of the things that statistics are usually
taken with. It is evident that some of the commodities in question are
loaded off, and then loaded on, to vessels in port and hence counted
twice, or twice less the amount of the commodity consumed in Montreal.
Others come by rail, or are made in Montreal, and thus count only once.
Note the cases of cement, sugar, etc.


PORT OF MONTREAL

Principal Commodities in Water-borne Cargoes Landed from and Loaded to
Vessels of Montreal, 1938

_Commodity_                                  _Total, 1938, Tons_
Grain                                                  5,002,755
Coal, bituminous                                       2,114,141
Petroleum, crude                                       2,624,206
Coal, anthracite                                       1,681,826
Petroleum products (except gasoline)                     673,564
Gasoline                                               1,018,593
Sugar                                                    355,588
Flour                                                    234,120
Wood pulp                                                378,520
Base bullion, matte, pig and ingot (nonferrous metals)   209,767
Cement                                                   107,692
Canned goods (except meats)                              103,130
Lumber, timber, box, crate, and cooperage material       134,248
Iron and steel (bar, sheet, structural, pipe)             96,939
Automobiles, auto trucks, and auto parts                  82,005
Molasses                                                  52,138
Dressed meats                                             74,485
Ores and concentrates (except iron)                       31,855
Sulphur                                                   35,173
Newsprint                                                 49,056
Mill products (except flour)                             121,514
                                                      __________
           Totals (21 Commodities)                    15,181,315
                                                      __________
    Grand Totals, All Commodities                     16,193,805

Montreal stands in most intimate relation to the export of grain (mainly
wheat) and its equivalent, flour, and hence to the production of western
wheat, and hence to the economic life of the Northwest. Wheat is no
longer the main product nor the mainstay of Canada. Gold alone runs it
close, and in the gross value of the product it is rivaled by pulp and
paper, by the packing industries, and far exceeded by textiles as a
total class. In many recent years the tourist trade has run ahead of it
in dollars and cents. Indeed the whole product of agriculture only
represents about a quarter of Canadian production today. But
agriculture builds a nation. Tourist trade sells it. Tourist trade is
indeed the worst of national economies, mere economic serfdom that tends
to turn a nation into hotelkeepers selling scenery with waiters serving
supper to people on vacation, whose work is to make iron and steel and
such things in real industries.

Wheat and its equivalent, flour, is the chief grain export as the crop
of rye, oats, and barley is largely used for animal feed and for
distilling. Canada consumes about twenty per cent of its wheat at home;
its people eat about four bushels each; the rest is fed to poultry, etc.
A hen will eat (gladly) a bushel a year.

Since the opening of the Panama Canal Montreal loses all the wheat
export that goes out by Vancouver and the Panama Canal, an unexpected
commercial phenomenon. This meant 38,000,000 bushels in the total export
crop of 146,000,000 bushels in 1938-39. Only a small part, what is
called diplomatically a "token," goes out by the Hudson Bay Route,
916,913 bushels in 1938. The season is not only short but even shorter
than it looks, opening before export is ready. In any case the Churchill
route is handicapped by the fact that there is no market for shipping.
Everything must be done by previous charter. Moreover, delay means
imprisonment for winter, perhaps on a rising market. Montreal has
nothing to fear from Churchill, but much from Vancouver-Panama. Nor does
the West any longer worry over Churchill. The route is now unimportant
politically. The railway was built as the prairie farmer's safety valve.
Panama supplies a better: it takes all the British Columbia wheat,
practically all the Alberta export, and a fringe of the Saskatchewan.

The bulk of the export wheat moves to Fort William, thence by water down
the lakes to the Lake Huron ports and Port Colborne on Lake Erie, the
head of the Welland Canal. But at Lake Erie the moving stream is tapped
by exports via Buffalo to American ports, chiefly New York, where the
advantage of a continual and competitive market for shipping offers a
great advantage. Cut rates at New York at times have turned wheat into
ship's ballast at Montreal. In 1938-39 (July 31-July 31), 30,000,000
bushels of Canadian export wheat went out by that route.

Navigation ends at Montreal only to begin again. The river and lake
navigation extends, in its first stretch, 369 miles to reach Lake Erie
at Port Colborne, the head of the Welland Canal; 237 miles more to the
head of Lake Erie at Toledo; 389 miles more, past Detroit and up Lake
Huron to Sault Ste. Marie, and from there 273 miles to Fort William, a
total transit to the Canadian head of Lake Superior of 1168 miles. The
full distance to the head of the lake at Duluth is 1245 miles. The
distance from Montreal to the tail of Lake Michigan at Chicago is 1200
miles. In this vast area of inland navigation there moved in 1938
through Canadian canals about 20,000,000 tons of shipping.

More than that. From Chicago navigation connects, not yet in great
volume, with the whole inland water system of the Mississippi, the
Missouri, and the Ohio, reaching thus to the Gulf of Mexico. This system
once held all the national importance of a main system of communication,
all the peculiar splendor and romance that went with the Mississippi
passenger steamboats of the days of Mark Twain. The railroad humbled all
its pride, into lifeless levees, with grass among the cobblestones, a
few dingy scows, and a few dilapidated excursion steamers, calling "Ho!
for Barnes's Point," to people who could drive there in fifteen minutes
in their motorcars.

All this has changed. Water-borne traffic is coming back to its own. The
world of today moves dead-weight cargoes, heavy as lead, heedless of
time, careless of wind and weather, and influenced only by the
inconceivable cheapness of transit by water. The new bride of the waters
is the cement barge, moving as majestically as the water funeral in
Tennyson's poem.

It was this development of water-borne inland traffic which led to the
wide popular demand for the creation of a seaway from the St. Lawrence
to the Great Lakes, by which is meant a deepening of existing canals so
as to allow the passage of ocean vessels. By this the shipping on the
inland waters and the shipping on the ocean routes would be amalgamated
into one great system of water transport, and the sea would, as it were,
wash the shores of Toronto Bay and the Lake Front at Chicago. The great
inland cities, from Chicago, Duluth, and Fort William all the way down
to Kingston and Oswego, would become ocean ports enjoying that outlook
on the seven seas now possessed by Montreal and Quebec alone. The
project has in it all the appeal that goes with those vast achievements
of man over nature which revolutionize the globe we live on--the digging
of the Suez Canal, the far greater achievement of Panama, the vast
schemes of irrigation dams that turn a desert to a garden, Assuam and
Boulder and Grand Coulee, and the projects still unrealized for flooding
the low-level part of the Sahara Desert to bring rain to the rest of it
and turn it again to what it was thousands of years ago.

None of these projects has a more generous appeal, a nobler outlook than
the project of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Agitated and discussed for
years, the plan was at last definitely accepted and the Seaway Pact
signed by the President of the United States and the Dominion Government
in 1941, accompanied by a parallel pact as between Ontario and Ottawa.
It calls for the completion of the seaway by 1948. Delayed by the
opening of war, it appears probable that construction may be undertaken
as a work contributing itself to victory.

Many of us cannot help but endorse the plan of the seaway for the sake
of this very grandeur of outline. On general principles it seems as if
opening up a water connection from the heart of North America out to the
open sea must be of benefit to mankind at large. Nor would it seem to
involve any greater cost in human labor, the ultimate cost of all
production, than to set to work the idle millions fed free in bad times
by the rest of us. But these generous and general speculations must not
blind us to the serious aspects to be considered in regard to the seaway
as a "business proposition."

One point of discussion, however, hitherto in the front line of
argument, has unexpectedly vanished, and may now be mentioned first,
only to be dismissed. A serious objection to the ship canal was its
creation of needless power to the detriment of existing power
enterprises. This objection was hitherto very generally regarded as
sound, though not of necessity final as other advantages might offset
it. The conclusion of the Brookings Institution in its admirable study
of the project in 1929 ran: "Our analysis indicates that, although the
development of the St. Lawrence hydroelectric energy will in the course
of time doubtless be economically profitable, its exploitation at
present would be premature." The hand of war has wiped the objection
away as easily as a child's writing off a slate. It appears now in this
hour of stress that we have not too much power but too little. We must
develop more. When peace comes we shall need it even more for it is
already seen that the only way to prevent peace from precipitating
disaster by dislocation of employment is to turn war industry into peace
industry at the same tempo with work for all as easy and as lucrative as
now. For us in Canada this means work spent in the development and
settlement of our still empty country. For that we can harness all the
power in the Great Lakes watershed and find it still insufficient.

All opponents of the seaway project stress the evidence that is given by
experts as to the essential difference between lake vessels and ocean
vessels. This, of course, leaves out of count the vessels of war, a
negligible quantity on the lakes in peacetime, prohibited by treaty and
existing only in indirect form. It leaves out of count all the sailing
yachts, sailing dinghies and "motor-boats" (not motor-driven cargo
boats) of all sizes and forms, the whole apparatus of sport on the
water; fun is fun anywhere but fun fourteen feet deep is deep enough
anyway. The reference, of course, is to the vessels of commerce, not
those of war and sport.

In the case of passenger vessels the distinction between an ocean liner
and a river steamer would be obvious even to the eye of an Idaho
miner--without coming up to look. The river steamer has developed lines
of artistic beauty far more attractive to the untrained eye of the land
than are the mixed superstructures, the humps, gaps, and derricks of
most ocean steamers. The ocean boat never recaptures its lines till it
reaches the superior tonnage of a duchess. But to the nautical eye the
river steamer is all wrong; it carries its center of buoyancy too far up
in its chest. It is liable to "turn turtle," as did even the ocean
ships in the period when the designers first struggled with the problem
of carrying heavy guns on the upper decks of iron ships; as witness the
loss of H.M.S. _Captain_ in 1870; or when designers went too far in
carrying weight of superstructure--the probable cause of the mysterious
loss of the _Waratah_ in 1909--vanished with all hands. But the river
steamer in the ocean would not only be liable to upset but certain to,
in upsetting weather. It could only cross the ocean if the ocean stayed
quiet enough. But for its own line of work, it can carry more passengers
in less space for less cost than is possible for an ocean vessel.

Discussion centers around the cargo boats. "The lake freighters," writes
the naval architect, Herbert C. Sadler, "are the last word in a type of
vessel especially developed to do the business of carrying bulk
commodities, such as iron ore, coal, etc., in the most economical way
between the lake ports. Their business is on the lakes, not on the
ocean. To alter the design to allow them to go to sea would be
suicidal."

Ocean boats are essentially stronger and deeper. Stress is laid on
stability in navigation, but for the lake boat on rapidity and
mechanical cheapness in loading and unloading. An average of ten modern
Upper Lake freighters shows a length of 535 feet to a beam of 58 feet
and a draft of 27, along with 303 horsepower. The corresponding ocean
freighter has a length of 427 feet to a beam of 55 and a draft of 32
with a horsepower of 533. The lake freighter's hatches are in a
continuous series on 24-foot centers, the ocean boat quite diversified.
The lake boat is loaded and unloaded by gear on the dock, the ocean boat
by gear on the deck.

The highly specialized appearance of the lake freighter in its extreme
form leaps, as the French say, to the eye. Here is the great wheat
carrier _Gleneagles_, 582 feet long but throughout nearly its whole
length presenting nothing but a flat deck, all battened down, not even a
chair to sit on; the only superstructures are the tiers of little deck
houses four stories high, away up in the bow, and a group of others
rising behind the funnel away at the stern. The boat has a beam of sixty
feet, a molded depth of thirty-two feet, and a draft of twenty-one. But
thus fashioned for one purpose the _Gleneagles_ can carry 445,000
bushels of wheat.

Yet a part of this argument is not so sound as the other part. Granted
the difference in gear and hatches, it may be that these differences are
a consequence, not a cause. They may exist because the Welland Canal has
a depth of twenty-five feet and not of thirty-six; and other boats may
owe something of their shape to the limitations of the fourteen feet of
Lachine and the canal system of the St. Lawrence above it.

One limit, however, is permanent. It is not possible to deepen the ship
canal below Montreal to a depth to accommodate the world's great ships.
Digging a canal is one thing; digging and blasting rock for two hundred
miles is another. Some of the world's ships never will, never can, come
up the seaway. How many are shut out? Here we may take the evidence
presented in the Brookings Institution Report of 1929, very generally
regarded as perhaps the best and most unbiased summary of the economic
side of the case. It has to be admitted that the report makes out a bad
case. We must remember that a twenty-seven-foot channel doesn't float a
twenty-seven-foot draft ship. It can't scrape the bottom. You must give
it, in salt water which floats it best, two and a half feet under the
bottom, and in fresh water, three feet.

The tables cited in the report endeavor to show what proportion of
existing ocean shipping could enter a seaway according to the depth of
channel offered. Thus a twenty-five-foot St. Lawrence Great Lakes
channel would only permit the passage of ships with an ocean draft of
twenty-two feet, six inches. But if you take the cargo ships in the U.S.
foreign trade as illustrating the traffic that the seaway would be
supposed to bring up the river, you find that 88 per cent of them are
of deeper draft than twenty-two feet, six inches. These figures are
those of 1926, but as ships tend to grow bigger rather than smaller they
apply as well, or better, today. Hence it is argued that a
twenty-five-foot canal "would exclude all important ocean shipping." A
twenty-seven-foot channel as favored by the Canadian section of the
Joint Board of Engineers (1926) would admit ships with an ocean draft of
twenty-four feet, six inches. Even this, the report argues, would
greatly restrict the availability of the seaway. Of the passenger cargo
ships now in the U.S. foreign trade, this would admit only 37 of the
total 277. Of cargo ships it would admit only 1504 out of a total 3103.
Even of the tonnage operating (at the time of the report) on a regular
schedule out of Montreal and Quebec, in all 82 steamers of which 59 were
British, only 13 per cent could go on up the seaway with a
twenty-seven-foot channel. Similarly a twenty-seven-foot channel would
exclude 60 per cent of the tramp grain ships that come to Montreal from
using the seaway above and 81 per cent of the cargo vessels and the
tankers engaged in the intercoastal trade. The report argues that a
channel depth of thirty-three feet is the minimum that could serve the
supposed purpose of the seaway. Even that would exclude--a quite obvious
fact--the great luxury liners.

       *       *       *       *       *

The opinion of what are called Montreal "interests" are strongly against
the seaway. By "interests" we mean people affected in dollars and cents
by the project, either directly as shipping men or indirectly as
shareholders. Naturally, since "interests" are as human as the rest of
us, they cannot help seeing the project from their own point of
view--through the bottom of an empty pocket. The Port of Montreal, they
say, and indirectly much of the city, lives on the transshipment of
cargo, ocean to lakes, lakes to ocean. The seaway, if successful and in
proportion to its success, would substitute passage-through for
transshipment. It would do to Montreal what Montreal did to Quebec.
Hence the bigger the success made in Toronto and Duluth, the less in
Montreal. If, on the other hand, the seaway failed, it would leave a
vast burden of taxes for no tangible benefit.

Thus having been as thoroughly damned as the rapids themselves, as badly
scraggled as the Jackdaw of Rheims, it is pleasant to know that the
seaway plan is to go right ahead. As agreed in the Pacts of 1941 it
calls for a twenty-seven-foot channel through the St. Lawrence and the
lakes and the connecting waters. The heaviest work to be done will be in
the international section of the St. Lawrence between Lake St. Francis
and Lake Ontario. Here the proposal involves great physical changes; the
heavy dam needed to get the twenty-seven feet of depth will flood out
many islands and half islands in the river all the way from Cornwall to
Cardinal (about 40 miles), drown out a long stretch of the existing
highway, and even of the track of the Canadian National Railway.

       *       *       *       *       *

A unique part of the plan, a queer example of the romance of
engineering, will be the arresting of some of the rivers that now flow
north to James Bay and recalling them to the St. Lawrence watershed, to
guarantee a sufficient head of water. This indeed is already being done
by the diversion of Long Lac, which hitherto drained into the Albany
River, into Lake Superior and the diversion of the Ogoki, a tributary of
the Albany into Lake Nipigon and thus to the St. Lawrence watershed. The
estimate of cost made by the Joint Board of Engineers (1926) was
$427,000,000. In the light of the war finance of the hour this seems a
mere bubble.

The truth is that arguments against the seaway never reached home, as
compared with the vast and obvious general truth of the physical utility
of water connection halfway across the continent. It has been seen that
the power objection has vanished into mist. The rest will go also. We
must look at the long run, not the short. The life of a ship is little
more than a generation. In forty years a new set of ships will sail the
seas anyway. The existence of the seaway will alter all conditions. It
may place such a premium on ships of a twenty-two-foot draft as to alter
the world's shipbuilding. It may be that even with transshipment at
Montreal a new era would open for larger vessels out of the great inland
cities with other and more varied cargoes than grain and ore and such
single dead weight. Even the passenger trade will have its surprises.
Large liners may move on lazily past Montreal all the way to Chicago,
with a new set of passengers taking a lake cruise with the music and
luxury of the supership. Compare the cruises "New York to Montreal" via
ocean liner which no one foresaw. And finally the construction and
extension of the seaway may afford exactly the kind of postwar activity
needed for the out-of-work millions of veterans and ex-munition makers.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] R. O. Campney, special article, _Canada Year Book_, 1940.




CHAPTER XIII

French and English

     _How French Is Montreal? First and Second Impressions.
     Statistics of Racial Origin. The French Language in Montreal.
     As Good French as the English Is Good English--Old French and
     New. Extent of Bilingualism. Separation of the Races. Division
     of Education, Family, and Social Life. The Two Universities.
     French and English Street Names._


An apology, or at least an explanation, is needed for the use of
"English" at the head of this chapter. This generalized use of "English"
and "England" has become a matter of great sensitiveness. Time was when
world-famous books could be written under such titles as The _Expansion
of England_, _The English Constitution_, _England in Egypt_, and the
_Government of England_, with no outcry from Wales or protest from the
Isle of Man. A poet could write that the "_sands of the desert are
sodden red . . . and England far and honour a name_," without being
asked the distance from Glasgow or Dublin. The words "England" and
"America" are both used in senses quite wrong, and exactly right.

The trouble was that the United States never had an adjective; hence
"American" and therefore "America." The mother country didn't have a
single name; all the various terms meant too much or too little. "Great
Britain" left out Ireland. "Britain" left out the "British Empire." The
British Empire took in India, and the "United Kingdom" is a law term.
"Britain" was, till very recently, a poetic term. Forty years ago a
person would no more think of taking a trip to Britain than he would to
Caledonia or Erin. Only poets went there. Nor has "Britain" any fully
competent adjective, since "British" won't translate and is especially
unsuitable for Montreal as the French cannot say "les Britanniques" and
must say "les Anglais."

The usage in Montreal has always been for English people to say "the
French and the English." French people used also to say "les Canadiens"
to mean themselves, but seldom now, and the English never. "British" is
used only for the special distinction of British race as opposed to
English speech.

Montreal is overwhelmingly a French city by racial origin as compared
with British and by a heavy majority even when we include among the
"English" (English speaking), the Europeans, other than French, the
Jews, the four or five thousand Asiatics and the handful--if one
thousand makes a handful--of Negroes. The latest classified census
returns show the city as 64 per cent French, 22 per cent British, 5 per
cent Jewish, and 9 per cent something else.

This great predominance of the French is entirely contrary to the first
general impression of casual visitors and tourists. These visitors see
only certain parts and certain aspects of Montreal--the railway
stations, the steamship docks, the big hotels, the main shopping
district, and, perhaps, McGill University. They can form no idea of how
French the city really is. It seems an English-speaking city, except
that a lot of the people speak a rather queer but not unattractive
English. The true racial aspect of the population is concealed from
casual visitors partly because they do not go into the specially French
parts of the town, and also because the section of the population that
is neither French nor British, which includes the large element brought
by the European migration of this century, learns to speak English
rather than French. To this is added the fact that the great bulk of the
French are bilingual to a certain extent and use English in the current
intercourse of shops and streets. The last classified census returns
show that of the total French population of the province of Quebec, 71
per cent of the French speak French only; and even on the Island of
Montreal 38 per cent of the French people speak French only. But this is
partly because the island includes a large semirural area, and all
French children under five are classified as not speaking any other
language, which is just like statistics. These "children under five"
represent one tenth of the whole population, or the equal of one third
of the class in question. Count them out altogether and the 38 per cent
changes to about 25.

On the other hand, many British people live and die in Montreal and make
no attempt to learn to talk French, getting no further with it than the
bilingual call of the streetcar conductor giving them a choice of _Guy!_
and _Ghee! Prinsse rthur_ and _Prinsse Arthr_.

We have also to realize that, as far as present vision can go, the
French language in Montreal, as in French Canada, is there to stay. The
mass of the people speak it as their mother tongue; it has behind it all
that goes with a system of public education, covering eleven years of
school, the four years of college, the law school, the graduate school,
the medical clinic, and the laboratory of science, with French as the
medium of instruction throughout. Add to this the French metropolitan
press of Montreal with daily and weekly editions comparable to those of
any great American city. To this is added the unending outpour of French
that comes from the private radio stations speaking French and the
government (C.B.C.--"Radio-Canada"), which is compelled to be bilingual
at the peril of its life. By these combined good offices the Montreal
taxi driver may hear as he drives the appealing accents of a _chanson
d'amour_. This bilingualism, we say, is at the peril of the political
life of Radio-Canada, because the French are intensely jealous of their
language, insist on its use in street signs, traffic directions, and
other wastes of paint. People in Montreal keep off the grass in two
languages and are directed on their way by such signs, imbecile at first
sight, as "Pont Victoria Bridge," "Parc LaFontaine Park," "School Zone
cole," and so on. Insistence goes further and puts French needlessly on
our paper dollars with a "CINQ" that looks like "One"--and acts like it;
insists on it for railway stations and timetables where much of it is an
amalgam of English and wears a suspicious look. A train in Montreal is
marked up as _due_ in English and _d_ in French, a thing unknown in
France. But this distorted language is mostly forced by the exigencies
of translation, not, as will be shown later, by the "badness" of French
in Montreal.

But the main factor in the retention of French in Montreal is its
rootage in the history of the country and its embodiment in the sacred
offices of the church. "When a people lose their liberty," says Alphonse
Daudet, "as long as they keep their language it is as if they held the
key to their prison." For the French in Canada the doors of what was
once their prison have long since been thrown wide open. But they keep
the key.

A rough-and-ready, very rough and not quite ready, division of the area
of Montreal shows the French on what is called the east side--east of
St. Lawrence Main Street--and the English on the west side. The division
came about as follows. As the old French town was more and more taken
over by shops, business houses, and public institutions, the families
moved out into the suburbs. The richer ones began building houses even
beyond these original "faubourgs," up the slope toward the mountain--the
old Torrance House, Simon McTavish's famous house (afterward haunted),
and similar suburban manors. The English (in this case many of them
Scottish), growing rich and controlling capital, bought up the beautiful
farms that stretched away from the crown of Beaver Hall Hill to the very
foot of the mountain--the McGill farm, the McTavish farm, and others,
some once French, as seen in the City Map of 1836. The central and best
part of this became the English residential district of the richer class
already described. From this district English settlement spread west,
taking the second best when the first was gone. The French, moving from
the old town, of necessity, went further east, along Sherbrooke and up
the beautiful road that became St. Denis, and so, eastward and
northward, out over Logan's Farm and down the river endlessly.

Yet this general division was broken by many exceptions. The French area
was the first to extend to encircle the mountain so that, on its
rearward side, Outremont and the Cte des Neiges village are French. Yet
when settlement was further extended by the tunnel, Mount Royal was
occupied by the English. The French also originally spread in St. Ann's
suburb beside what had been the river, St. Pierre, but the influx of
Irish into Griffintown made an "enclave," or whatever is Irish for it,
among the French. Verdun and the factory area, as already seen, became
mainly English-speaking but with many French intermixed. On the French
side, the east side, the factory districts that grew up and the Canadian
Pacific (Angus) Railway shops drove a wedge of English-speaking workers
into what had been an entirely French area.

These general tendencies are illustrated statistically by the map of the
municipal wards of Montreal and the areas of municipalities surrounded
by Montreal, viz., the cities of Verdun, Westmount, Outremont, and the
town of Mount Royal.

The question naturally arises as to what extent this large predominance
of French people implies the use of the French language. There is very
much misunderstanding in regard to the French spoken in Montreal. It
happens once in every while that some English visitor, meaning no harm,
refers to it as a "patois." The effect is like throwing a brick into a
beehive. There is no point of their nationality on which the French
Canadians are so touchy as on their language. Proud and confident of
their quite imperfect English, they are sensitive to a degree about
their practically perfect French.[37] All the more so as many people,
both in Great Britain and the United States, suppose that what is spoken
in Montreal is not really French.

The point is one that will stand some explanation. The written French of
the books and of the journalism of Montreal, and of the speech of
educated French Canadians in Montreal, is just as much French, just as
much and just as little, as the speech of the English people is English.
We are speaking here, of course, not of Frenchmen who have come out from
France, or English people just out from England, but of people born and
raised in this country or brought to it in such early childhood as fully
to take on its accent. On these terms English Canadians, however well
educated, going over to England are never mistaken for English, nor are
Irish from Dublin, nor Australians from under the Equator. Which speech
is best and which worst, and which worse still, there is no need to
discuss. Certainly the English of darkest Ontario sinks low; "current"
is pronounced "curnt," and an orange becomes an "ornge." On the other
hand, there are circles in England where a railway becomes a "wailway,"
from which the 4.04 train leaves at "faw faw."

Such superiority in general as the English language of the "old
country"--England, Scotland, and Ireland all three--has over the English
spoken in Canada comes from the greater attention paid to voice and its
cultivation in the schools. Reading aloud is almost disregarded in
public education in Canada, a result of the curse of standardizing
matriculation, which omits it because it "doesn't count." The result is
well-known to anybody who ever asks a McGill student to read aloud from
a book to his fellow students in the class and then lets him sit down
and allows a public-school boy from England to do it. The poor old
school tie has been at least good for the throat.

But this is mere rivalry of language. For the unlucky French Canadian
there is no rivalry, nothing but (linguistically) master and servant. He
is measured against Paris and there is no appeal. He has had to tolerate
as best he could that peculiar arrogance of the old world toward the
culture of the new, which, until yesterday, the new world had to bear.
Such values are all shifting now and are sliding the same way--Spanish
courtesy, German culture, Italian honor, and French generalship--in the
wreckage that was Europe. Presently the French Canadian would perhaps
rather not be mistaken for a Frenchman.

[Illustration: _Percentage of French Population in Montreal (by Wards)
and by Enclosed Municipalities_]

The speech of the French-Canadian habitant and the speech of the
Montreal French working class is a different matter. It is not
intelligible to English people who have learned French elsewhere and not
mixed with French-Canadian working people. French people from France
understand it easily enough, just as any of us understand the English of
Somerset and very nearly understand the English of Yorkshire.

So much for comprehension. As to the words used, there are in both the
spoken and printed French of Montreal, innumerable English words, some
taken over without change and some with shifts of spelling or oddities
of pronunciation. But so there are, though not so many, in the French
spoken in Paris. Most English people know very little of the French
language, little more than lies within the circle of an Ollendorff, or
other "grammar," and a few trips across the Channel. Yet they have an
easy and arrogant assumption that they know French. When such people
come to Montreal and see in the newspapers and hear in speech this
peculiar vocabulary of English words they think how different it is from
the purity of Paris. They find themselves invited to _lunch_ (_longsh_),
even to _luncher_, to take a _biftek_ in a _bar_ with a _songwidge_, to
attend a _mitting_ where they meet _un gentleman_ or _une flirt_, _un
jocky_ or _un dandy_, and so on endlessly--not realizing that all these
terms are Parisian French. So, too, a long list of words dealing with
railways and transportation, where England led France--_railway_,
_express_, _tramway_--and so on, just as the English language bows to
the _cuisine_ of France and talks of a _souffl  pt_, a _filet
mignon_, etc. The list of these words is not only endless but includes
many words hidden under a new spelling such as _boulingrin_ and
_rosbif_. Others have a shift of pronunciation, very droll to English
ears, such as the sporting term _outsider_, pronounced in French with
the accent changed and turned into _oot-see-dre_. Naturally in
Montreal, and in all French Canada, there appears also a long list of
locally accepted English words, names of companies, localities,
organizations, etc. Not one could he bothered talking of the Y.M.C.A. to
call it anything else; or to translate "_le McGill Cricket Club_," or to
call the C.P.R. _le Say-Pay-Air_. There are a lot of words that arise
from the workingmen of both races being under one boss: _boss_ itself,
and _job_, and _foreman_, _freight_, and _switch_, _shed_, _winch_, and
so on. Some combinations are very odd, "_saut morisette_," the
French-Canadian spelling for "_somersault_," the two spellings both
missing the mark, like bracketed shots of gunfire. Compare
_Sainte-Folle_ for _Stanfold_, and wind up with _Saint-Abroussepoil_,
which means _Sandy Brook Point_.

But when allowance is made for all these peculiar factors of the
situation the written French of the metropolitan journals of Montreal is
just as good French as the English of the English newspapers is good
English.

Some French Canadians would go further and say "better." They like the
idea that their language in Canada has retained the original purity of
the seventeenth century, the age of Louis XIV, of Racine and Molire,
lost in France under later innovation. They like to recall that Father
Charlevoix, in his visit to Quebec and Montreal in 1721, said that
nowhere was the language spoken with greater purity (_plus purement_).

It is hard to sustain or refute this claim without getting lost in
philology. Charlevoix probably meant by "purity" freedom from alien
elements. But the original French of Canada was mixed as between le de
France (Paris), Brittany, Poitou, and so on. Moreover, old French is not
necessarily good French any more than English must be good if it can be
proved to be old. Compare in the Ontario English of the farmer and
laborer the phrase, "_You hadn't ought to go_," this, especially when
pronounced, as they do pronounce it, "_You hedden't ought to go_," is
enough to bring tears of joy to the failing eyes of a philologian. It is
a beautiful old Anglo-Saxon pluperfect subjunctive preserved in the
people's speech a thousand years, like a fly in amber, a toad in a
stone, or any other such ecstasy. Except on such ground as this we
cannot rejoice over Montreal workingmen still saying _icitte_ for _ici_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Similarly the French-Canadian habitants of the countryside using bygone
forms of bygone French dialects when they make a number of nouns
feminine which at Paris are masculine: _une incendie_, _une honneur_,
_une orage_, _une (e)squelette_, and so on.[38] These only reflect the
confusion of the old Latin genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter)
breaking down into two, like waters in a Canadian rapid divided by a
rock. There seems to be no sense in retaining such divergences. Nor the
antique dropping of vowels which changed _sud_ to _su_ and _oeuf_ to
_oe_; nor the mixed-up use of what grammarians call _liaison_ and
_hiatus_, as when a French-Canadian habitant turns the Parisian _cent
hommes_ into _cenz' hommes, avant hier_ into _avanz hier_____, changes
_donne-m'en_ into _donne-moi-z-en_, or rather not changes, but retains
an old form. Compare, on either side of the Atlantic, "_Malbrough s'en
va-t-en guerre. Il reviendra-z- Paques_," etc.

Such vagaries are for the peasant to use, the philologian to put on a
card index, and the _Socit du Parler Franais_ of Montreal to
exterminate at sight. They have no more place in the cultivated speech
of Montreal society than "_them there_" has in a London drawing room.

       *       *       *       *       *

If one turns from the French spoken in Montreal to the English spoken by
the French the case is quite different. Almost all the French people
understand English and speak it well enough for the business of the day
in shops or factories; understand it to the full satisfaction at movies
and at public meetings. All young French Canadians, even below the
college class, can read English books if light enough but sink easily
among hard sentences and long words. Anyone in Montreal unable to speak
English and asking his way in French is probably newly arrived from a
locality where French is used. In this "bilingualism," as far as it
goes, the French are immeasurably in advance of the English. Most
English people in Montreal cannot follow a French movie or a French
speech or buy and sell in French. They don't need to. The French,
conversely, have to.

But one must not exaggerate, as the Montreal French themselves do, the
extent of their bilingual grip on English. Real bilingualism is very
rare, in Montreal or anywhere. It can only exist where necessity and
opportunity combine, and where a native taste and aptitude give a
further aid to circumstance. Many Montreal French people speak French
with their children at home and send them to the English schools and
colleges. Such children, if they continue to mix in both circles, become
bilingual to a great extent.

Yet where the French fall short is when they try to write in English,
not casual writing but books intended as literature. Here something is
wanting, and the something wanting means, in a sense, everything. The
English written is all right, the words all right, grammar and
sentences, punctuation and paragraphs all right. Everything is
correct--but that is all. There is a dead flatness, a dull uniformity of
style, nothing of that turn and touch of language that illuminates and
attracts. What they succeed in doing would be, of course, utterly beyond
the English to do in reverse direction. Yet of the dull biographies and
such, written in English by French Canadians, the best one can say is
that they convey the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

There is here intended nothing derogatory, no fault implied. People who
can write at their very best in each of two languages must have a very
low best to write at.

       *       *       *       *       *

Most of the French in Montreal mispronounce English to a certain extent,
offering no injury to an English ear. It is our English habit to throw a
heavy accent on the first syllable of all combination words like
_crow-bar_, _sheep-skin_, etc. The list is legion. A French Canadian,
talking English, is detected as such at once by saying _crow-bar_ (both
alike), _sheep-skin_, and so on.

The almost complete social separation of the French and English in
Montreal is as extraordinary as it is unfortunate. It seems to have
begun very soon after the conquest. A certain number of newcomers, as
notably and typically James McGill, mingled with the French and married
among them. But most of the British traders who first came up to
Montreal from the provinces were, as seen above, very unpopular. Other
British people, coming out from home, kept themselves to themselves as
soon as there were enough of themselves to keep to. This separation
persisted. It was an object of frequent remark a hundred years ago.

The separation no doubt arises from the historical relation of the two
races, from the difference of religion (as apart from the later influx
of Irish), from the separation of the children at school, and from the
fact that British people have an insular difficulty in learning a
foreign language. Each race sees too well the faults, too dimly the
merits, of the other. The English think that many of the French are
priest-ridden; the French think that many of the English are badly in
need of a priest. The English think that those of the French who are
crooked are crooked in a selfish, petty way, using favoritism for little
jobs. The French think that the English, when crooked, are crooked in a
big, unselfish way, stealing a million at a time out of a franchise and
giving silver cups to golf clubs. Merit, we say, passes unrecognized.
All the English admit that, but for the French, Montreal would have had
prohibition. But they differ in their degree of gratitude.

Nor does intermarriage help. There is very little of it; it is
discouraged, generally speaking, on both sides, yet not discouraged
enough to make it romantic and attractive. There is no civil marriage in
Montreal (law of Quebec Province); marriage is only by the clergy, and
for mixed marriages the Roman Catholic Church refuses to recognize the
status of Protestant ministers. An example of this relative rarity of
intermarriage is seen in a family history book recently printed (for
personal circulation only) by one of the best-known families of
Montreal, too well known to mention. The book traces the descent of all
the family and its intermarriages since its ancestor arrived in Montreal
soon after the conquest. The index of the names of the family includes
in all five hundred names, of which one hundred names are those of the
family itself, while the other four hundred represent intermarriage and
collaterals. Of all these less than a dozen can be definitely
distinguished as French.

A certain small number of French families are exceptions to what has
been said. French boys are sometimes sent to English boarding schools,
for the sake of their traditional form of education--full of open air,
exercise, and independence, with study doggedly accepted under threat of
punishment. Some French people admire this type of education; most
don't. Most of all, French boys have always been sent from Montreal to
the Royal Military College at Kingston, a grand old institution, with a
sound outlook in all directions, military glory for the French cadets,
hard work for the Scots, and Rugby football for the English. The heads
of some French families, also, have been business associates with the
English in a large way, and have grown too rich to live anywhere else
than among the English.

Out of these exceptions is made a considerable group of French who spend
most of their time with the English--a group that looks large in a small
circle but almost like nothing in the whole ambit of the city. Even at
that, these praiseworthy exceptions are often called "_anglifis_" by
their fellow French. In the French language to be "_anglifi_" means
something about as rotten as "_Frenchified_" does in English . . .

A visible sign of the separation is seen in the peculiar duality of all
social and charitable organizations. The _St. James's Club_ of Montreal,
its oldest and largest, situated on the English side, has as its
opposite number, a mile east, the _Club St. Denis_. The _University
Club_, situated, as has been seen, on the site of Hochelaga, corresponds
to the _Cercle Universitaire_, a mile and a half away, dispossessed by
the everlasting English of what should in fairness be its own bones and
pipes and tomahawks. Even the softer bond of innocence and union of the
_Junior League_ could not encircle the _Ligue de la Jeunesse Fminine_.
The _Boy Scouts_ must face, or scoot away from, the _Scouts
Catholiques_. The _Board of Trade_ is not the _Chambre de Commerce_, and
money given to the _Federated Charities_ is distinct from any
contribution to the _Fdration des Oeuvres de Charit_. The _Deaf and
Dumb_ hear nothing of the _Sounds-Muets_. The blind grope their separate
ways. There are two ways of being "incurable" in Montreal, two forms of
"isolation" and of "insanity," and at least three methods of
"maternity"--in French, in English, and in Hebrew.

Certain things, of course, are overwhelmingly French or English
(British) by national habit and inclination. Nearly all the golf clubs
are British, since the Royal Montreal Golf Club was one of the first
founded by the Scots in America (1873). But _Laval sur le Lac_ is
French. The curling clubs, as far as can be seen through the mist at
their Saturday luncheons, are either Scotch or full of Scotch. The great
luncheon clubs and service clubs downtown which carry on the Indian
tradition of oratory are, of necessity, English-speaking, owing to the
rarity in North America of guest speakers to talk in French.

A real exception is the _Alliance Franaise_, half French, half English,
made up of people who can understand French and people who wish they
could. Another exception is the Montreal Stock Exchange, knowing only
English, and snappy at that, on its "floor," but whose transactions are
all translated into terms of French exchange in the Montreal French
press.

A happy exception, productive of much good, is seen in the case of the
Bar of Montreal. This has to be bilingual--judges, juries, lawyers,
jailers, and all. Both criminals and litigants are far too open-minded
to confine their activities to their own people. A Roman Catholic would
just as soon murder a Protestant as a Roman Catholic, indeed sooner.
Real estate has no religion and property no proper speech. Witnesses see
with two eyes but testify with one tongue. Hence the English judges and
lawyers (at the bar) in Montreal must and do talk French, from which
results, as between English and French lawyers in Montreal, a more
complete good will (as far as lawyers dare entertain such) than between
any other two classes.

Education, the most vital function, we are told, of civilized society,
the only hope, it is often thought, for a united people with a common
patriotism, is separated in Montreal as completely as with the crosscut
of a sword. People are so used to this in Montreal that they do not
commonly realize its full significance. Elsewhere it would seem
appalling, like Turks and Christians, Moslems and Hindus. "Education in
the province of Quebec," writes Dr. Percival, the Protestant Director,
"is unlike that in any part of the world,"[39] The Roman Catholics have
one set of schools, the Protestants another, a Protestant Committee and
a Roman Catholic Committee as the head authorities (at Quebec), and
everything divided below, school boards, curriculums, matriculation,
degrees, etc. There is a Protestant Board of School Commissioners for
Montreal, as distinct from the Roman Catholic, other boards for other
municipalities on the island, a Central School Board with a (slight)
supervision over all Protestant boards, and all utterly distinct from
the Roman Catholics. All schools are nominally clerical; a Turk is a
Protestant; so is a Jew. There are so few Protestant French that, apart
from the Irish, "Protestant" means English-speaking and "Roman Catholic"
means French.

There are in Montreal 227 Roman Catholic public schools with 118,000
pupils; for Protestants, 47 schools with 29,000 pupils. For all French
pupils the language of instruction is French, that is, they learn
arithmetic in French, a thing either done in infancy or never completely
done. English children learn in English. Each language is also taught in
the schools of the other, and very well taught, as a school subject.
Montreal schools use the direct method of teaching, not the wretched
grammar and translation of Ontario, New York, and such backward
localities, but the natural way of teaching, naming things, not
translating names, calling a spade _une pelle_.

Like the lower schools, the high schools are entirely separated on lines
of religion and language; so, too, the classical colleges and the
universities at the top. The special Irish schools (the Callaghan,
O'Connell, and Catholic High) divide off in their own fashion. Slight
exceptions are seen in the technical schools of the province which teach
both races together, yet at Montreal even the technical school has an
English and a French division.

The most peculiar case of all, the _reductio ad absurdum_, is that of
the almost complete mutual isolation of the University of Montreal and
McGill University. Their present buildings are situated about a mile
apart and down the street, with an excellent sidewalk and streetcars all
the way. In each college are a continuous series of things "open to the
public." There are about six hundred instructors on the staff of McGill.
Most of them, it may be said with assurance, are never inside the
University of Montreal for years at a time. Many live and die without
entering it. The writer of this book can recall personally the case of
a McGill professor, on the staff for thirty-six years, a man of some
distinction, who entered the University of Montreal (Laval in those
days) only once--in his first week at McGill. The students keep entirely
apart, except now and again, once in a great while, they meet in hostile
clashes as in the time of the South African War. It used to be the
custom for Laval students to march over to the McGill grounds in
procession once a winter, a custom now fallen out. There is no
interlocking of studies or lectures. A student of medicine at McGill
does not attend or see or hear anything connected with the lectures or
clinics of the University of Montreal. He may, once or twice in his
course, hear a distinguished local French doctor lecture on a special
topic to the McGill medical public but only as he might, and does, hear
doctors from New York or Toronto.

The two universities know each other, of course, officially. They
interchange seats of the mighty at convocations. They help install one
another's new principals. McGill from time to time confers a degree on a
distinguished representative of the University of Montreal, on which
occasion the principal of McGill speaks, or, rather, _reads_, a
flattering tribute in excellent French--too good to be true, all except
the pronunciation. The Montreal newspapers comment, as they have for a
hundred years, on the principal of McGill's perfect command of French.
But in reality his command is what the restaurants call a "short order."

The question of clashes between the races in Montreal has been mentioned
above. This, of course, is the abiding danger in the life of the city.
The soil under the feet of its people covers ashes never extinct. Its
real volcano still smolders. Every now and then such clashes have
occurred, on a minor scale, and occur as election riots. At times in the
past they have occurred in a form to create the greatest alarm.

A case in point is the Gavazzi Riot of 1853 to which a reference was
made in a previous chapter. Here the danger was heightened by the
further intrusion of Irish animosity. The Irish being mainly Roman
Catholics, but speaking English, would naturally seem a sort of
connecting link, an element of union between the two races.
Unfortunately this is not so. Indeed, the case is the other way or at
least was the other way during most of the history of the city. The
Irish being against England for Ireland's sake, many of them, refugees
and outcasts from a land depopulated under British rule, were more
anti-British than the French themselves. Whenever all these elements
coincide and combine the results have always been terrible to
contemplate.

Father Alessandro Gavazzi, was an Italian ex-Roman Catholic priest who
had given up being that kind of father. He was, or said he was, an
Italian patriot, a thing that sounded better then than it does now. For
these were the days of the sorrows of Italy under Austrian rule, of
England's sympathy, and presently of the hero worship of Garibaldi's red
shirt--the shirt now turned to black.

Gavazzi came to the United States, lecturing, on Italian Liberty and
Romish Tyranny. He could do a turn on either. He came to Quebec,
lectured on the Inquisition, and narrowly escaped from the row that
followed. Then he came to Montreal to speak in the Zion Church that
stood on what was still called the Haymarket (Victoria Square). The
audience, scenting danger, or a good time, came well armed. The garrison
contributed a detachment of Cameron Highlanders concealed near the
church. The Mayor was there, all ready to read the Riot Act. There was
angry controversy afterward as to whether the scene was all set for the
riot or the riot set the scene. At any rate, a body of Irishmen tried to
break into the church where Gavazzi was lecturing. Firing broke out. The
audience left the church. A confused crowd was apparently, as we now
say, "milling round" on Beaver Hall Hill, some fighting, some trying to
get away. The Mayor, Charles Wilson, read the Riot Act . . . without
avail . . . the fight went on; the soldiers fired. Forty people were
shot down, others trampled down as the mob broke and ran. Gavazzi got
out with his life and was smuggled across the river. The town seemed
appalled. There was no inquiry, no arrests--just horror. They had raised
the devil.

An interesting light is thrown on the French-and-English aspect of
Montreal and of its history by a study of the names of the city streets.

The street names of any great American city offer an interesting study
reflecting its historic growth. They are like the concentric rings that
indicate, on the sawed-off stump of a tree, the years and the rate of
its expansion. Now it shrinks to the narrow lines that mark unfavorable
seasons, now enlarges to the broad bands that recall the generous growth
of prosperous years. More than that. Street names also tell us much of
the culture and the dominant thought of the times, as when the
loneliness of exile prompts early settlers to name their forest stream
the Thames, their log cabins London, and the bush about them Middlesex.
An opposite tendency leads settlers to accept and take pride in the
aboriginal names which they find in use among the savages, a pride which
gives New Brunswick its proud Mettawomkeag, its Passamoquoddy, and its
Skidawabskasis. An equally natural impulse is to name things in a new
land in honor of sovereigns and of great men, as evinced by the
Kingstowns, Queenstowns, Princetowns, the Delawares, the Jerseys, and
the Wellingtons. Equally natural is it, as local history grows, to honor
the names of people on the spot, native allies such as Pontiac or an
Oshkosh, or patriot leaders, a Washington, a Jefferson, a Dorchester. As
time goes on and earlier affections dim, as the demand for business
convenience outweighs the romance of history, there appear First Avenue
and all that follows, crossing First Street as a system as endless as
infinite space and about as interesting. This atrocious system
sacrifices all that goes with words--memory, affection, association, and
individuality--for the mere convenience of number. It sacrifices history
to help an expressman deliver a parcel. We might as well call London No.
1 and Liverpool No. 2 and the Right Reverend William Temple, Archbishop
of Canterbury, by his census number at birth, 36,051,328. It is shorter
and more exact than his present long and clumsy designation. There would
be no mistaking him.

The system, discovered in America, has run across the United States and
invaded the Canadian North West, a community always determined to be at
one and the same time as up to date as the United States and as out of
date as Great Britain. But most Canadian cities still keep thinking out
names till weary fancy, in their outer rings, fades out into the names
of last year's aldermen.

Oddly enough the latest Montreal maps of the latest area of streets laid
out, partly inside, partly outside the city's limits, show a list of
avenues running from "_premire avenue_" up to 39me avenue, and a list
of streets running up to "trente-quatrime rue." But in French
"trente-quatrime rue" doesn't mean Thirty-fourth Street, as a title. It
just means that this is the thirty-fourth street. They will think out a
name later on, perhaps Jacques Cartier.

The Montreal street names are of peculiar interest, for here we find the
contrast of saints and sinners, of French and English, of "bygone
history" and present endeavor, of the passing hour and of things
eternal. From Athlone Avenue of Outer Montreal we may pass to Laurier
Avenue, to Peel Street; we descend to Victoria Square, to McGill, and
then by a procession of saints to the street of Notre Dame de
Bonsecours.

In Montreal the concentric rings of growth are not to be distinguished
until we first separate out the old town, all laid out in one period,
all French and nearly all sacred. St. James Street is of course only a
translation of Rue St. Jacques.

       *       *       *       *       *

Where the old French town ends we find the name McGill Street, but it
was no part of early Montreal, being only created when the fortification
walls were knocked down long after the conquest (1803) and the new
fathers of the city--there was a James McGill and a Peter and an
Andrew--were gratefully remembered, in the names of its street, or took
care to remember themselves. McGill was not named by James, who was dead
(1813) before it was made.

But before the walls were demolished new streets were being named or old
roads renamed in the suburbs outside the original town. Close by, and
all three together, appear the men of the conquest--_Wolfe_, _Montcalm_,
and _Amherst_--all side by side. Amherst afterward rose, or sank, to be
a streetcar as well. So also did the Duke of _Wellington_, whose name
was given to the long street running out through the old St. Ann suburb.
But even before him the early governors, Lord Dorchester and St. James
Craig, were commemorated in the new streets outside the old town and
running, as we now call it, east and west. Dorchester, as was right,
received the fairest portion, the beautiful road along the hill. Craig
got the marsh, long a blot on Montreal, filled, even when a street, with
the refuse thrown into it, flooded in springtime even within present
memory, yet waiting for a glorious resurrection under the new city
planning in which in Montreal as in other cities the last shall be first
and the slum become sublime.

The Rebellion Days of 1837 and 1838 left their grim writing on the
streets with the Place des Patriotes, where their scaffold stood, and
the streets _Delorimier_, _Sanguinet_, _Robert_, _Hamelin_, named after
the men executed. A higher honor is evidenced in the long _Papineau
Avenue_ traversing the city in that quarter. More grudging is _Colborne
Street_, short and narrow, near _McGill Street_, in what had been at the
other end of the town. Durham failed to qualify. The _Durham Avenue_ of
today, away out near the Rivire des Prairies, is just an act of
forgiveness, a gesture toward the past.

The Victorian Age breaks out vigorously in the new advance of the city
over ground still largely empty when the Queen began to reign, which
climbed Beaver Hall Hill and moved south and west. Here is _Victoria
Square_ (though not so named till 1860) and _Windsor Street_ and _Peel_,
just where they should be. The war scare of 1845 gave _Cathcart_, the
Crimean War, _Sebastopol_. On the French side the outward-moving rings
are less clearly marked, the names of the men of the hour standing in
competition with the eternal glory of the saints and with the pride of
history never tired of recalling _Cartier_ and _Maisonneuve_. Jacques
Cartier is a parliamentary riding, a street, a square, a pier, and was a
whole town, "Cartierville," as was Maisonneuve, till the city absorbed
them both. Carrier reappears in the new bridge.

But the English names keep climbing steadily on. Anyone who knows our
history since Confederation could guess exactly where to find _Gladstone
Avenue_, _Lansdowne Avenue_, and _Aberdeen_, how far to go to look for
Lord Grey. The Duke of Connaught had long since qualified in his
youthful, soldierly days in the Montreal Garrison and gave us the
_Prinsse rthur_--_Prinsse Arthr_ of the Park Avenue streetcar call. He
reappeared triumphantly in an avenue, in Montreal West, as the wartime
Governor General with his daughter on _Patricia Avenue_ beside him.
Joffre and Pau got honorable mention at the same epoch but at the very
opposite end of the city. Foch, as who should say, "made" Verdun;
Ptain, luckily nothing. But before this, between Prince Arthur's time
and that of the Duke of Wellington's, the belt of the Macdonalds and the
Tuppers, the Strathconas and the Lauriers carry out our history till the
end with all honor in the outer ring of Athlone in the town of Mount
Royal.

A few streets, not many, recall in Montreal the great names of English
and French literature, but with no great honor. Shakespeare is an empty
road, Milton a dingy side street, Dickens and Thackeray are outside the
limits, near the streets still waiting for names, Burns not even there.
Along with Dickens and Thackeray are Taine and Racine and Ruskin in a
new district that has presumably just heard of them. The addition of
Hugo, Dryden, and Milton makes this municipality of St. Michel de Laval
look like the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. All honor to it for
its rescue of authorship. Chateaubriand, champion of the church, has a
real avenue nearly three miles long, Molire a street one block in
length, and Jules Verne one with three blocks. Most of the literary
names seem an afterthought; Montreal was too busy and had so much
history of its own, and, after all, other cities are just as bad.

Thus lies Montreal, in two languages, from the Victoria Bridge to the
Pont Jacques Cartier repeating its civic official motto, _Concordia
Salus_, Our Salvation is in Concord.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] L. de Montigny, _La Langue Franaise au Canada_, 1916.

[38] A. Rivard, _Bibliographie du Parler Franais au Canada_, 1906.

[39] W. P. Percival, Education in Quebec, 1941.




CHAPTER XIV

McGill University

     _Under the Ginkgo Tree. He's Our Father, Oh Yes, Rather.
     McGill, Its Campus and Its Corpus. Foundation and Stagnation.
     Sir William Dawson and His Work. Marvelous Growth and Progress
     of McGill. World Fame of Its Medicine and Applied Science.
     Scope of Its Work. Men Not Mortar. The University of Montreal.
     Its Fine Classical Training. Music, Arts, and Letters on
     Montreal._


No apology is needed for devoting the larger part of a chapter of this
book to the discussion of McGill University. Its great success in the
past and the reputation which it enjoys throughout the whole world,
especially as a school of medicine and engineering, would make it
natural that readers would wish to know something of it. One who looks
back gratefully to thirty-six years spent in its service and six years
of leaning upon it in old age, without having ever contributed to its
medical and engineering reputation, may perhaps be a fitting person to
bear witness.

The grounds of McGill University are beautifully situated in what is,
in a sense, the center of Montreal, the slope at the base of the
mountain running straight down toward the river. Unlike many colleges
buried in commercial cities, it has the great advantage that it can be
seen all at once; not really all of it, but enough to give the finished
picture of a college and a campus, the oldest building, of the greatest
dignity, recognizable at once as such at the top of the slope. The newer
buildings, magnificent in size, frame the sides of the campus. All the
central open space is a playground dotted with great trees, pierced with
a central avenue of tall elms and maples, running up through the
beautiful Roddick Gates from Sherbrooke Street below. The trees verge
already on a hundred years of age. The photographs of past days show
them as slender little saplings when all Montreal made merry at the
visit of the gay young Prince of Wales in 1860. The old building at the
top is the Arts Building, battered, renewed, built over, pinned under,
having lost everything but its beauty. Again and again common sense
whispered, "Knock it down; build it like Pittsburgh, fifty stories high
. . . stick elevators into it to make it like Columbia. This thing
begins to look like those old places in Oxford." But no one ever dared
to. It was the old dilemma, the old problem as between affection and
change, continuity or a new start. So there it stays.

Before the Arts Building, at the front steps, is James McGill's grave,
with a strange tree, a ginkgo tree, weeping over it, if such a tree as a
ginkgo can indeed weep. This grave seemed so incongruous, years ago,
that they let the bushes grow around the foot of the ginkgo, and James
McGill slept like the beauty in the fairy tale, hidden behind the
leaves, his gravestone moldered and illegible. It was forgotten that he
was there; the records said that he was buried in 1813 in the Dorchester
Street Burying Ground. Then an energetic dean--from the States, and
hence careless of antiquity--had an opening cut in the bushes and the
gravestone scraped and the letters rebuilt, and there it was, the
original epitaph of eulogy of James McGill's _loyalty to his Sovereign
and ability, integrity, industry and zeal as a magistrate_. To this was
added, _This Monument and the remains which it covers were removed from
the Old Protestant Cemetery, Dorchester Street, and placed here in
grateful remembrance of the Founder of this University, 23rd June,
1875_.

So now the students on their evenings of merriment sing,--

        James McGill,
        James McGill,
    Peacefully he slumbers there,
    Though he knows we're on the tear,
    He's our father
    Oh yes, rather,
        James McGill!!!!!

Yet they do say he's not there at all; that he was meant to be there but
was never moved. Some day another American dean may come and exhume him.
Till then we cannot know. It is probable that this legend of McGill not
occupying his own grave arose from the fact--if one may be pardoned for
referring to such grim details of the record--that James McGill is not
all there and never was. Only the "skull and a few of the greater bones
and the bottom of the coffin" were left to remove in 1875.

The Arts Building is all filled with classrooms, even the left-hand end
of it that was once the Assembly Hall and Library given by William
Molson at the time of the same royal visit. But the right-hand end, as
you face it, is the Administration, renovated from what was once
pantries, kitchens, cellars, attempts at chemistry, as inconvenient,
crooked, and impossible as anything in London. Above it is housed the
Law Faculty, crookeder still, fit to compare with any Inns of Court.
Scattered through the building are all sorts of little odd offices for
things left out of the main buildings, such as the principal of McGill
and the registrar and offices that in American colleges would cover an
acre.

Round the campus, as said, are beautiful and spacious science buildings,
the stately sisters, Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics--the last one
now growing to a legend as the place where Lord Rutherford, the great
physicist, conquered the atom; like St. George and the dragon in English
colleges. The Engineering Building and the Engineering Faculty (1931)
have so christened themselves in despair. Taunted that they were not
"pure," they threw aside the earlier title of "applied science" and
admitted straight out what they were: working-class people, not ashamed
of it.

On the other side of the campus is the Redpath Library, a marvelous
repository of books, a hive of working students, busy as bees and
(exactly) as quiet. Beside it, in real silence, is the College Museum.
Years ago it carried a sign, "Admission 10 cents." Nobody went in.
Professors lived and died (it is literally true) and never went in; the
admission, I say, was ten cents. They moved the sign; admission is now
free, but people still hesitate. They say that inside are Hochelaga
skulls, the oyster shells found on the mountainside by Sir William
Dawson (proving the existence of the Champlain Sea), and much else--more
than ten cents' worth.

Just outside the college, just technically off the campus, but as close
to it as they can sneak, are the affiliated Theological Colleges, not
part of McGill but feeding on the bounty of its learning. The
Presbyterian College alone is practically on the campus, with the Museum
blocking it a little, thus representing the early claim of Scotland on
the heart of Montreal.

       *       *       *       *       *

But in reality the largest buildings of McGill and the widest area of
its ground is not on the campus at all but in the background. The chief
of these is the (new) Medical Building, the gift of Lord Strathcona, an
edifice of great beauty if there were anywhere to see it from. It took
the place of the old "new Medical Building" that stood hard by the Arts
Building on the campus, before yet Science was. This went up in flames
one memorable night of 1907 in a sudden and unaccountable fire,
strangely lurid and uncanny from the holocaust of the dissecting room
and all that it contained. Wonder and inquiry were still rife when the
great glow in the sky and the crash of the fire bells in the heart of
the night called Montreal to the second great McGill fire that gutted
the Engineering Building. No known cause was ever found. The flames had
scorched the doors of Arts. In superstitious fear the professors of Arts
moved away the miscellaneous junk they called their "notes." No cause
for the fire was found. There was at the time no night supervision of
buildings. An estimate was published by the Department of Economics to
show that the sum lost in the burning of the Engineering Building alone
would have paid for the services of two night watchmen every night from
the Norman Conquest until 1907. The department might as well have said
"since the Creation," for it is only a matter of annual interest. But
"Norman Conquest" sounded better. The governors were convinced. The
night watchmen were engaged. Since then each night at stated hours their
silent feet perambulate the buildings to call "All well," like the night
watch with the blue sticks in the Montreal of 1818, or at least to punch
"All well, nothing burning," on a time clock.

So the new Medical Building was built higher up, and the site of the old
building and much adjacent ground used for the home--rectangular but all
there--of biochemistry and such. Past the new Medical Building, McGill
met its medical ally, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and had to move off
sideways to build the Pathological Building and the new Montreal
Neurological Institute, McGill's latest gift to the world, the latest
jewel in the crown of its reputation. Beyond that sideways and a little
higher, for the slope of the mountain has begun in earnest, McGill
begins all over again with the part of it best known to Montreal at
large, the vast playground and amphitheater, the stadium that
commemorates the name and is the legacy to his _Alma Mater_ of Captain
Percival Molson, killed in action on July 3, 1917.

Even at that, the largest part of McGill is still far away, the great
Macdonald College at St. Anne de Bellevue at the upward end of Montreal
Island, the place of the massacre and the "evening chime" of the church
at the meeting of the waters of the wilderness. This, one of the gifts
of Sir William Macdonald (1907), contains the Faculty of Agriculture,
which includes the School of Household Science, with classes,
experimental gardens, and experimental cattle and poultry, the whole of
it somehow intertwined with the training of teachers under the
Protestant Committee of the Council of Public Instruction. The registrar
of McGill is understood to understand the connection.

Such is the outer government of McGill. Now turn to its inward life and
mind.

The origin of McGill University has already been indicated. James McGill
(1744-1813)[40] was one of the earliest of the British settlers in
Montreal and spent there an active, prosperous, and patriotic life. As
the British population increased he realized more and more that Lower
Canada offered no education suitable and acceptable for the young men of
British families. He determined to make a bequest to aid the foundation
of a college. He took counsel, as already said, with the young and
Reverend John Strachan, the later Bishop. On his advice he left his
Burnside Estate and 10,000 to the Royal Institution for the Advancement
of Learning, to found a university whose first college should bear his
name. Soon after this McGill departed in peace (1813). It was left to
his executors (Strachan was one) to carry out the bequest.

This proved a matter of unusual difficulty; indeed it was not until
McGill had been dead thirty years that his college began its actual
teaching as apart from its legal existence. If early adversity makes for
courage and character McGill was blessed indeed.

The difficulties that followed are complicated almost to the verge of
absurdity. The French community was bitterly opposed to the creation of
the Royal Institution. The British government authorities wanted, above
all, peace and harmony. This is often obtained, as it was in the Turkey
of the Sultans, by doing nothing. Hence the Royal Institution of 1801
existed as an idea but not as a fact. No trustees had been appointed, so
there was no one to receive McGill's bequest. When they did at last
appoint trustees (1818) Roman Catholics refused to serve. McGill's
heirs-at-law, meaning his wife's former husband's family, refused to
surrender the property and refused to hand over the money.

The McGill farm, Burnside Manor, was indeed a beautiful estate. It began
at the base of the mountain (roughly the present Pine Avenue) and it
came down to the road--it was no more--called St. Catherine Street and a
little beyond. On one side it reached, as now, McTavish Street; on the
other it was a little wider than the present grounds. Through it flowed
the pleasant little "burn" that gave it its name, a stream that had
meandered down a couple of miles from the northwest (we call it
northeast) where now LaFontaine Park is. It was met just before it
reached the McGill farm by another little brook that had gathered up the
streams off the mountainside. The united rivulet moved in a pleasant
curve round the bottom end of the McGill farm. A surviving relic of its
course is the sunken tennis court at the foot of the McGill grounds that
marks its bed. It was inside this sheltering arm that stood the fort, or
camp, of Hochelaga four hundred years ago.

The McGill property had been cleared into fields and gardens and
orchards. In it then stood a stone house of two stories and an attic, a
barn, and outsheds--buildings all gone long ago. The heirs held it all;
they refused to let it go; they claimed that as there was no college
there was no bequest. Lawsuits followed, beginning October 20, 1820, and
lasting seventeen years. Under the terms of the will the bequest would
lapse if not carried out in ten years. To hold the bequest the Board of
the Royal Institution obtained a charter for "McGill College" from the
Crown, October 21, 1821. They claimed that this brought McGill College
into existence. The heirs said it didn't. They said that there was no
college, there being no staff, no students, no premises, and no
teaching. It was this date, 1821, that was selected for the reckoning of
the Centenary of 1921. But there was reason for that. Wise governors saw
already the storm cloud of depression on the horizon and wanted to
tackle the graduates before they got too wet. Since the real date of the
first teaching is 1843, the happy end of the war might give McGill
another chance to rejuvenate itself back again to one hundred years,
blushing at its first century.

To make the college more real the Board of the Royal Institution
appointed an imaginary staff, Dean Mountain as principal and four
imaginary professors. The heirs still laughed at them. At last the Privy
Council, in 1829, after nearly ten years of legal fights, awarded the
estate, not yet the money, to the board. They held a formal opening
June 24, 1829, with speeches in the farmhouse from the Bishop of Quebec
and from Dean Mountain and the reading of a biblical quotation,
selected, so the Montreal _Gazette_ said, "as suitable to the occasion."
It contains the verse, "The lines are fallen to me in pleasant places;
yea, I have a goodly heritage." Heritage, but no money, the heirs
refusing to sign any surrender of the funds. Failing other use, the
board rented McGill "on halves" to a farmer, to work the university half
and half. The farmer bought, on credit, 3 worth of garden seeds. McGill
was sued for it. That was its first financial breath--a deficit.

The college being now officially open, "governors" were appointed, so
that henceforth the parties concerned were the heirs, the executors, the
Board of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, and the
governors of McGill College, the shadow staff, and the farmer in
occupation. There was still no money except any sum that the board could
get as apart from the bequest. The heirs remained obdurate. Yet the
Board of the Royal Institution conferred a degree, May 1833, on Mr.
William Logie on behalf of the Montreal Medical Institution already
mentioned and since 1824 at work and teaching students. The secretary
used the words "the Medical Faculty" in recording the degree. This was
in accordance with the fact that at the time of the "Opening" of the
college, as described, in 1829 a resolution was passed at the first
meeting of the governors "that the members of the Montreal Medical
Institution be engrafted on the College as its Medical Faculty." The
Montreal Medical Institution had begun teaching classes in 1824,
occupying a wooden house, No. 20 St. James Street, on the site of the
present Bank of Montreal on the Place d'Armes. They moved their classes
in, or possibly before, 1833 to the tall, narrow building of three
stories, described by the present registrar of McGill, who has followed
out the peregrinations, as "a strategic site for a medical
faculty"--being just over the fence from the cemetery. This, too obvious
abode, was exchanged in 1841 for premises on St. George's Street just
above Craig. They did not teach on the campus till after Arts lectures
began. Even at that they moved off again. They entirely controlled
their own funds, their own property, and their own activities. It is
hard to say when they became an organic part of McGill. "Engrafted" is a
slow process, yet in many an orchard the graft presently is the best of
the tree.

Principal Mountain, weary of office, retired. His post was offered to
the Rev. Mr. Wood, rector of Three Rivers; he refused; to the Rev.
Thomas Littlehales of Oxford; he refused. Three professorships, also
vacant by disuse, were offered and refused at Dublin, Aberdeen, and
Edinburgh. The Board then offered the Principalship pro tempore to the
Rev. John Bethune, rector of Christ Church, Montreal. Bethune was an
upright, forcible man who spoke his mind. The only question was what was
in it; certainly not a college education. Bethune's father was a
Scottish minister, an army chaplain in the American Revolution, who
settled among the Glengarry Highlanders. John Bethune was a soldier in
the War of 1812. After it was over he entered the Anglican ministry, the
gate swinging easily then. He was rector of Christ Church for fifty
years (1818-68), dying in 1872 at the end of a long and honorable
career. He was, along with this, acting principal of McGill from 1835
until 1846. He accepted it pro tempore, stipulating that he would not
get out pro tempore--that is, in favor of any pro tempore substitute.

With that began the four- or five-cornered quarrel at McGill that lasted
for years. The money was at last wrested from the heirs (December 1837)
but the governors fought the board as to who controlled it now. Bethune
moved into the farmhouse and ran up a bill for fuel.

At last, however, McGill College, using the meager interest on its
money, decided to open in earnest. As the principal refused to hand over
the house, the governors got the board to ask the government for money
to build. Not getting enough money they sold off some of the Burnside
property, a dangerous expedient, like sawing off a branch while sitting
on it. They were thus enabled to erect, not yet to complete properly,
buildings that were at least fit to use. They represent a part of the
present renovated Arts Building. College teaching began September 3,
1843, with a staff of Principal Bethune; the Rev. F. J. Lundy, an
Oxford graduate in classics, who was made also vice-principal and
touched up with an LL.D. degree; a professor of mathematics on 300 and
fuel; a professor of divinity at 250 a year "as soon as funds admit
it"; a bursar-secretary-registrar at 100 a year and fees; a beadle at
30 a year and board. There were twenty students, of whom seventeen were
classical and three mathematical. The fees were 5 a year. The Medical
Institute, going strong, was still outside of all this.[41]

On this frail raft McGill pushed out from shore. Nor was the opening
voyage easy. Governors and board disputed constantly over authority, the
Board of the Royal Institution accusing the governors of McGill College
and Dr. Bethune of "wasteful and extravagant expenditure." At this time
the available income was 500. Bethune was spending 750. The
distinguished historian of McGill, the Hon. Cyrus Macmillan, M.P., Dean
of the Faculty of Arts, says that the college was "suffering for lack of
funds." The inference seems a fair one.

The quarrel went from bad to worse. There was finally nothing to
do--there never is anything to do--but to get rid of the principal. Here
came in, most opportunely, the ancient and useful British fiction,
connected with all public institutions, of the "Visitor." American
visitors to McGill, studying its calendar and its "literature," feel
perplexed, and perhaps pleased, to see that the Governor General of
Canada is the "Visitor." This means that he is, or represents, in the
last resort for those in distress, King George, who by prerogative can
set right anything outside of the Statutes. In this case the Bishop of
Montreal wrote to Lord Metcalfe, who wrote to the Right Hon. W. E.
Gladstone (Colonial Secretary), through whose mouth spoke the Queen.
Each said straight out, in three pages, that Dr. Bethune was only
principal pro tempore, never confirmed, and that he had never been to
college. That was all the Queen needed. Dr. Bethune must go.

After which the governors, unofficially, and the staff, informally, sent
warm expressions of appreciation to Dr. Bethune.

In this uncertain and impoverished fashion McGill dragged on as best it
could for another ten years (1846-55). It was probably only saved from
extinction by the existence of the Medical Faculty, always strong in
capacity and endeavor, even when as feeble financially as the college
itself.

Then came salvation with the advent in 1855 of William Dawson, as
principal of the college, the second founder and the real maker of
McGill. Dawson was a great man, one of the great men of the nineteenth
century. More than that of any one man or group of men, McGill is his
work. Dawson was born in Nova Scotia, trained in Edinburgh, a student of
geology and natural history, a man of religious conviction and moral
purpose. He found McGill a sort of bats' nest. Its incomplete buildings,
half dilapidated before they were finished, were occupied by professors
and students. Classes were held in the old high school, in any outside
buildings available--none on the campus. Medicine had lectured there
awhile (1845-46) and abandoned the premises as hopeless. They were now
teaching in a house on Cote Street, the doctors paying expenses as best
they could.

Dawson drove at this system as with the sword of the Lord in Gideon. In
less than no time, it seems, he had the professors and students out and
the classes in. He brought medicine back. He found money as he could,
begging, borrowing, and even selling more of the campus. He went at the
city, lectured to it on Natural Science and at it on natural duty.
People rallied to his call. The stream of benefaction flowed from the
stricken rock of Montreal. Money was found for a building for medicine
(1872), not _the_ Medical Building, a building. The Molson Hall (1861),
with the Library on its upper story, turned, with a little other
improvement, the Arts Building (1855) into a thing of beauty, a real
college. Students came. There were 105 students in 1860 outside of those
in Medicine. Law had become a separate faculty in 1853. A new Faculty of
Applied Science was created out of Arts in 1878, an Adam from the ribs
of Eve. The Theological Colleges came as lambs to the new fold, the
Congregational, 1865, the Presbyterian, 1873, the Methodist, 1876. The
Anglican Church, tempted to follow the precedent by which, led by Bishop
Strachan, it had repudiated the "Godless university" of Toronto,
surrendered and came in in 1880. In 1872 McGill built a real and
equipped Medical Building and from it graduated that year, its first and
most famous product, Dr. (Sir) William Osler; all the world was later to
be his classroom.

The generosity that gave the Molson Hall was followed by that embodied
in the Redpath Museum (1882), the Redpath Library (1893), and the
Workman Engineering Building. Then came Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona)
with large donations of funds (1882-1901) to help organize classes for
women (first taught at McGill in 1884) and then with the building and
endowment of the Royal Victoria College, McGill's resident women's
college. When William Dawson, crowned with honors and a knighthood, laid
down his task in 1893, McGill was made.

Yet, in a sense, the greatest remained to come. In sheer volume the
flood of benefaction was only beginning. Even before Dawson resigned,
the magnificent gifts of William Macdonald had begun. These took shape
in the Science Buildings (1893), which led the world at the time of
their first erection. Soon after came the gift of eight hundred acres
and the huge endowment that made St. Anne's Macdonald College, an
Agricultural Faculty and School of Education. With that went substantial
money endowments for professional chairs which set the professors up, as
tight and comfortable as children round a supper table. The great fires
of 1907 only kindled a warmer generosity. Strathcona's answer was the
new Medical Building. He and George Stephen (Lord Montstephen) had
already provided the Medical Faculty with the priceless facilities of
the Royal Victoria, later increased by the gift of the Ross Pavilion,
the gift of J. K. L. Ross in memory of his parents. Of a different kind,
but enlisting equal gratitude, was the gift of Sir William Macdonald of
a great stretch of the near-by wooded slope at the foot of the mountain,
preserved there for the future of McGill. A part of this was to become
the stadium already named. All through the period (1893-1939) the
achievement of McGill in the academic world had kept apace with the
rising glory of its physical surroundings. It is fitting to mention only
those gone; but in addition to Osler such names as those of Sir William
Peterson, Sir James Grant, Sir William Hingston, Sir Thomas Roddick, of
Rutherford, Soddy, Macphail, McCallum, form a roll and scroll of honor
unsurpassed. As the years of peace closed in, they record the name of
the soldier principal, Sir Arthur Currie, than whom no institution ever
had a more beloved or more inspiring commander.

Such is McGill. A wonderful heritage. Now, as careful as children with a
gold watch, let us open the works and look in.

The present organization, scope, and size of McGill may be summarized on
paper thus. McGill is a trust, administered under a Royal (British)
Charter of 1821, amended and amendable by the Legislature of the
Province of Quebec. Its property and money are controlled by a body of
governors, acting for the still-existing, imaginary Royal Institution
for the Advancement of Learning. These governors were, until 1935, a
self-perpetuating body, now only partly so since no governor holds for a
longer term than five years at a time, and in addition to governors
named by the governors themselves, representative governors are elected
for terms of three years by the graduates.

For the organization of faculties, schools, courses, and the curriculum,
the academic authority (but without control of money) is the senate. The
presiding head of the governors and of the senate is the chancellor.
Some chancellors accept their office as purely one of honor. Others
undertake to give administrative and academic help. Next in dignity is
the principal (who is also by title vice-chancellor), standing at the
head of all faculties. This was not true of the Medical Faculty until
1905. Until then it retained its own budget, its own control, and was
not under the headship of the principal. The idea was that doctors were
supposed to be the only people who understood medicine and medical
studies. In the day-to-day life of the college the principal is monarch
of all he surveys unless he doesn't care to survey it and leaves to
others things of which he knows nothing. Some principals have known
everything. Next to the principal there is for each faculty a dean,
managing the internal faculty affairs. His boundaries with the principal
and with the professors of the departments allow for a good deal of
what is called "latitude" or "friction" according to the individuals
concerned. But until very recently there was the tradition of each
department (meaning what ordinary people call a subject, Classics,
History, Physics, etc.) as a kind of little island fortress by itself
with the head of the department as a sort of independent native prince.

The existing faculties in order of historic priority are those of Arts
(Arts and Science since 1931), Medicine, Law, Engineering, Agriculture,
Dentistry, Music, Graduate Studies, and Research.

REGISTRATION OF McGILL STUDENTS, 1941-42

                                          _Men_  _Women_   _Total_

Faculty of Arts and Science                 791      495      1286
of these:
        In Arts                             245      382       627
        In Science                          381       98       479
        In Commerce                         165       15       180
Faculty of Engineering                      478        6       484
Faculty of Medicine                         359       28       387
Faculty of Dentistry                         54        2        56
Faculty of Law                               54        0        54
Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research    184       54       238
School of Household Science                   0       81        81
Faculty of Agriculture                       89        2        91
Faculty of Music                              5        2         7
                                           ____      ___      ____
        Totals (Degree Students)           2015      684      2699

These figures, to those acquainted with the staggering totals of
institutions like Columbia, seem very small. But there is an
explanation. A state university has to teach everybody. McGill doesn't
have to teach anybody. In medicine, McGill, from the richness of its
soil, restricts its crop as they restrict coffee in Brazil and hogs in
Missouri. The enrollment is only a fraction of those applying.
Particularly notable is the way in which the Medical Faculty attracts
students from beyond Montreal and indeed from beyond Canada. In the
enrollment above, of its 387 students, only 115 came from Montreal; 32
came from Quebec Province outside of Montreal; 140 from other Canadian
provinces, and the rest from the United States. The Law Faculty is small
because it represents study for the Bar of Quebec, a theater of French
customary law, isolated, along with Louisiana, in a whole continent of
English Common Law. McGill, moreover, in its registration only counts
students actually attending degree courses, not casual people taking
evening classes or afternoon extension lectures.

Among the things long lacking at McGill was a residence for the male
students, a need now partly met by the endowment of Douglas Hall. Among
those still lacking is a university press with all that goes with it to
stimulate the literary impulse--the weak limb of a strong body. McGill,
to its shame, has nothing to compare in a literary way with the
_University of Toronto Quarterly_, the _Queen's Quarterly_, and the
_Dalhousie Review_.

In its relation to the churches, McGill is a nonsectarian college,
chiefly attended by Protestant students but with a large number of Jews,
especially in the Faculty of Arts, and a certain number of Roman
Catholics. It draws no color line, there being, in Montreal climate, no
color line to draw. But it has a certain aspect of Protestantism in that
all the chief Protestant sects have Theological Colleges affiliated with
McGill and the Jews and Roman Catholics have none. Under its charter and
statutes it is entitled to hold College Chapel, and used to do so,
praying daily in its days of poverty, but easing off as there was less
and less to pray for. McGill has no classes in religion, a contrast with
the practice in the University of Toronto where "religious knowledge" is
a curriculum study of the first year, with as much "credit" as
mathematics. The proposal made at various times to give "lectures on the
Bible" as a general subject in the Faculty of Arts, which gives lectures
on almost everything else, was never carried. It proved impossible to
decide whether the lectures were to be on the Bible as God's Word or as
King James's English. The Department of English, however, maintains a
course--optional and biennial--on the English Bible.

McGill, though in no sense a provincial university, is fortunate enough
to receive a considerable financial support, without any academic
control, from the provincial government. This arises from the peculiar
situation of education in Quebec. It is impossible to find sufficient
common ground as between English-speaking Protestants and
French-speaking Roman Catholics to allow for a unified department.
Education is left on the clerical basis and the so-called Council of
Public Instruction operates through two separate branches, the
Protestant Committee and the Roman Catholic Committee. Education under
the Catholic Committee is clerical both in name and in fact, inseparably
connected with the Roman Catholic religion and its clergy. Under the
Protestant Committee, education is much the same as secular education
under any state or provincial government. The proceeds of local school
taxes are divided according to the declared religious faith of the
taxpayers. These, however, fall hopelessly short of maintaining
education in all its branches. Hence the provincial treasury, in default
of any other method, makes large, direct grants to a long list of
schools, colleges, organizations, and objects not administratively
controlled by the provincial government. The allocation is made on a
rough-and-ready basis of population classified according to declared
religious belief. About $8,000,000 a year is the present total of all
these sums. McGill University gets a general grant and special grants
for such things as its Neurological Institute, Teachers Training, etc.
The University of Montreal receives more than three times as much with
special capital grants for construction. Bishop's College, at
Lennoxville, the Classical Colleges of the province, and a lot of
institutions gather round to get their share. There seems no particular
system. It is what is called, in other than clerical circles, a "pork
barrel."

It seems to work reasonably well. To outside eyes the only amazing
feature is that there is in Quebec no compulsory education. It won't fit
into this dual control.

In the matters of terms and sessions McGill follows what is called the
Scottish model. This was commended to James McGill in the Rev. John
Strachan's first letter of advice. It remains still as the basis of
McGill's studies, though much broken into of late years and almost
shattered in wartime. The Scottish system was especially suited, in
Scotland and in Canada, for a population strong in industry and effort,
but little blessed with inherited family wealth. The young men were to
work on the land in summer and study in the winter. Hence the single
short session, which as late as 1900 had lectures only from September 22
to March 22, with exams all over in mid-April. It was hardly broken by
holidays, a continuous unflagging effort, the "vacation" being in its
own way harder still. Thus did generations of Canadians pitch wheat in
July and pitch medicine in January. What sort of men the system produced
it is not for those of us left over from it to say. The present session,
with lectures from October 1 to May 1 and examinations in May, is
extended more or less all summer by special schools. But it is broken
with many holidays, breaks, gaps, and stops, and is throughout so
punctuated with "student activities" that it is hard to say where
activity ends and study begins.

The Faculty of Arts of McGill shares with those of all other great
colleges the perplexities of the expanding curriculum. The distressed
Alma Mater is like the Old Woman in the Shoe. The children clamor round
her, asking for all sorts of new things, commerce and social science,
music and housekeeping, and some of the little ones crying for
salesmanship and beekeeping. She does what she can, gives out Greek for
little clergymen, English to make boys gentlemen, Economics for those
who don't want to be, and compulsory Latin in a medicine spoon, marked
B.A., "a spoonful before and after matriculation." Commerce students
don't take this spoonful.

Old-fashioned professors think that more than half of the present Arts
Course is just tinsel and frills and fun. Old-fashioned men in colleges
think that Commerce can only be learned in a counting house. But if
old-fashioned men in counting houses endow a course in Commerce in a
college, what are you to do? "Commerce" disrupts modern arts courses
like a bombshell. Students flock to it, by preference, not for what they
learn, but for what they don't. At McGill Latin is compulsory for
entrance to Arts, not for Commerce. Many professors, old- or
new-fashioned, think Latin a great training, even for business
purposes. Businessmen don't. Businessmen want their sons to learn
business English. There isn't any, except bad English. Businessmen want
their sons to learn business psychology; there is none, or none inside
the law. Businessmen want their sons to learn accountancy because they
never learned it themselves . . ..

But all of this is common ground to McGill and all similar places.
McGill has here no particular success or solution to offer for study.

The case is different with endowment. The experience of McGill, as a
great endowed university, may be of a certain interest at the present
time. A controversy, and indeed something like a national problem, has
arisen in both England and America over the question of endowed versus
state institutions. In England the question concerns the so-called
"public schools" (that is, endowed secondary schools such as Eton and
Rugby), as against schools conducted by the government. In America the
problem turns on the rival merits of state universities and endowed
universities. The controversy gathers urgency in proportion as the
increasing scope and cost of education and the decreasing funds
available from endowment begin to threaten the future of endowed
universities.

The latter, however, have found voices raised in their defense. One of
the most prominent among the presidents of endowed universities argues
that without their competition the curriculum of the state university
would deteriorate. Legislatures elected by the people would clamor for a
sort of free-for-all, pleasant and easy higher education, with degrees
for everybody. At present they are held back from this by the stern
example of the private, endowed colleges, still teaching Greek and
trigonometry.

At first sight the outstanding success of McGill would seem a strong
case in point. But it is not so simple. McGill owes much, not only to
its peculiar basis as endowed, but to the peculiar atmosphere in which
it grew up, the traditions brought from Scotland, the scholarship from
England, the class of people from whose sons it drew its students, and
the attitude toward learning current in their homes. McGill did not make
these things. It found them. We realize this when we remember that
McGill is not the only great Canadian college. One other, the University
of Toronto, rivals it and in many things exceeds it. Yet Toronto is a
provincial university, born by act of Parliament, cradled in
legislation, and suckled and fed on taxes.

Toronto is dependent on the provincial legislature. McGill is not,
except in the inapplicable sense of constitutional law whereby a
province is supreme in education, so that the legislature at Quebec
could legally abolish McGill tomorrow. It could also, if it liked, make
it legally a Roman Catholic institution open only to Negroes. Such
things have no bearing on the case. Indeed, it has been argued, no doubt
incorrectly, that McGill, having been created by Royal Charter before
Confederation, is not fully amenable to the province.

But the point is that the legislature controls Toronto, at one remove,
through a board of governors and the legislature does not control
McGill. But is this good or bad? It all depends on how the legislature
acts, as compared with how the self-perpetuating Board of Governors
acts. Either body may be wise or foolish, sagacious or inept.

At the same time colleges of both types, private or state, seem to meet
the same troubles and fall into the same sins. State institutions run
the obvious danger of political favoritism; private institutions to
danger of control by money. Endowment, after all, is just the sister of
capitalism. Both kinds of colleges suffer from the intrusion of business
ideas belonging to another sphere; suffer from the peculiar dry rot of
"efficiency," the attempt to make all educational values provable,
measurable, divisible into credits and units, to make professors work on
time, "produce" by the cubic yard, and be "hired and fired" according as
to whether they "show results."

In any case, the days of endowment are measured. No such funds will
again exist under arbitrary personal control. We cannot, of course, see
far into the veiled future of the hour. But the sweeping tax power
called forth in war will carry forward for the aims of peace. A myriad
voices call for it. Failing hands are lifted up for it. Never again;
never again the rich and poor as they were. Never again will any
individual, however philanthropic, have the chance to give $80,000,000,
even to education.

In the main McGill was made, not by its system, but by its
circumstances, by the models from which it drew, the generous and
unconditioned help of those who paid its cost, and above all by the men
who served it. Men, not mortar, make a college. Trustees and governors
at times get a glimpse of this in their sleep and then wake up and buy
more mortar . . . And not only the great and outstanding men--the
Dawsons and the Oslers--but all the men, all who are given the peculiar
and proper tenure of a university chair, as abiding as marriage, no hire
and fire, no time clock, room for individuality to shape and grow, for
scholarship to walk its own queer path, as odd as Isaac Newton, as
freakish as Edward Gibbon.

A university is hard to recast. We should watch that we do not break the
mold.

It is important to notice that benefactions given to McGill in its great
formative period from 1860 to 1914 were given from pure public spirit,
without self-interest, and carried with them no conditions, no
"strings," no intrusion on the conduct of the university. On these terms
alone is a benefaction worth accepting. Anything else is just a handful
of poisoned thorns hidden in a bouquet of flowers. After all, the
benefactor gets much, gets in the long run the best of the bargain. That
tablet of Latin, high on the corner of a McGill building, _To
Commemorate the Notable Bounty of ---- ---- ----_, what a legacy to
leave to one's descendants. The "Macdonald" Physics Building, known to
the world as the cradle of modern atomic physics, rocked by Ernest
Rutherford, how much better than if the name had ended with the
"Macdonald's ten-cent plug."

So there were no strings. Sir William Macdonald of the "plug" had made
his vast fortune out of tobacco. But he never insisted that professors
must smoke or even chew. The Chair of Economics was endowed by members
of a family whose name was associated with their proprietary interest in
a great brewery. But they made no conditions that the occupant of the
chair must drink beer. If any strings there were, they arose by general
consent out of the ideas of the moment as apart from the personal
interest or advantage of the donor. Thus Sir Donald Smith (Lord
Strathcona), in his foundation, some fifty years ago, of the Royal
Victoria College (the more feminine part of McGill), laid down certain
restrictions. Sharing the fear of women common to his time, he insisted
that the college girls must not come near the men for two years. The
Royal Victoria opened thus, as safe-guarded and secluded as an Indian
purdah, a harem in Hyderabad. Its very doors and its curtained windows
looked mystery. Its entertainments were open only to professors over
sixty and governors over seventy. Old graduates of McGill, quite old
now, will remember the glorious incident when two college boys, dressed
up all in flounces and fans and feathers, entered a Royal Victoria
entertainment with bogus cards of admission and were shown into their
seats by an eager and competitive group of elderly governors and
professors.

The restriction proved a nuisance, especially as applied to what were
then the best classrooms and the best assembly room at McGill. A legal
fiction was eagerly found. The men students came over to the "R.V.C."
not as men but as students, members of a class. The governors thought of
this idea, submitted it to themselves, asking what they thought of it,
and approved it. This illustrates the ease of operation without a
legislature. At present, of course, women enter all buildings and attend
all lectures, and in the Faculty of Arts outnumber the men 382 to 245.

If no apology was needed for saying much of McGill perhaps some apology,
or at least explanation, is due for saying little of the French
University of Montreal. In point of fact this university, if taken in
connection with the parent institutions of Laval University of Quebec
(1852) and the antecedent "Sminaire de Quebec," can boast a far higher
antiquity than McGill. In the number of its registered students of all
faculties and departments it exceeds McGill, according to the last
available figures, by approximately eight thousand to three thousand. A
beautiful and extensive site was given for its new buildings, beyond the
mountain, on the elevated mountain slope itself, looking out toward the
setting sun of summertime over a landscape that seems boundless in
extent, the stretch of river and river land, rising slopes and distant
mountain, the "_vaste et belle contre_" of the departing Governor
Vaudreuil. This incomparable site exceeded in opportunity anything that
McGill ever had; it is doubtful if many colleges in the world ever had
as good. Whether the architectural opportunity has been rightly used,
whether the buildings even face the right way, and whether they are
pleasant to look at are matters for individual judgment. The University
of Montreal has been unfortunate in the devastating effect on it of the
great depression which prevented, and still prevents, the full
completion and equipment of the premises and, until 1942, the
installation of the classes. The university is not, like McGill, an
endowed institution. It is financed by the province of Quebec, though
controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. As a result it felt the full
strain that went with the crippled budget of the province.

But apart from these considerations the interest felt in the University
of Montreal by the world at large cannot be compared with that long felt
for McGill. Its admirable courses (while still Laval) in theology,
classics, rhetoric, etc., were offset by a relative disregard of the
technique of modern science, a study obviously lower from a certain
point of view. Its work being entirely in French, it could not easily,
even as a medical school, invite students from the outside. Of necessity
its scope and utility are domestic to its own surroundings and belongs
especially in the orbit of its church. Yet those who know its work both
in its main courses and in such branches as its commercial _cole des
Hautes tudes_ realize how thorough it is and how well it maintains,
perhaps even better than its English counterpart, the tradition of hard
work, of real study, the thoroughness that went with the Jesuit schools
and became a tradition of classical education.

We really touch here, but touch only to abandon, one of the greatest
problems that face the French Canadians. To what extent must their
education be directed toward learning English, toward acquiring the
scientific and practical knowledge that means a career and success for
English youth, without which the world offers few openings beyond the
range of the learned professions? The whole world of business success is
shut. Hence some French Canadians, especially in the dual area of
Montreal, advocate compulsory English, more science and more practical
training. Yet the discussion no sooner enters the door of the
legislature than apprehension beats against the windowpane. This looks
to many minds, even legislative ones, like the danger of losing the
distinctive French nationality, of gaining the whole world to lose one's
own soul--a bargain long since repudiated.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not possible in such limited compass to say much of Montreal as
the home of arts and letters. Nor is there much to say. No one can deny
the charm of Montreal's history or the splendor of the commercial
development of which it has been the center. But having brought forth a
great university it does not appear to have been capable of a wider
motherhood of letters and science. It has always been notoriously what
is called in the Broadway offices a "poor theater town," equally a "poor
lecture town." Montreal is notoriously not a publishing town, the whole
Canadian publishing business centering in Toronto with the lion's share
of the magazine and editing business.

Music seems to be something of an exception to Montreal's general place
in the world of culture. Just as Montreal is a "bad" theater town, so it
is notoriously a "good" musical one. It is possible to gather larger and
more frequent musical audiences in Montreal, even in proportion to its
size, than in any other Canadian city. This is a matter not so much of
outstanding musical talent in execution as the widespread appreciation
of good music; and this again is due in great measure to the presence of
the French Canadians. The British, at any rate the English, in Montreal
resemble those in England in showing what is called in electrical
science a strong "resistance" to music. They are able to go without it
as uncomplaining as a camel in the desert. Hence in Montreal at a
performance of either one of its two admirable symphony orchestras, many
of the English present represent social rather than musical behavior,
admiring what it is the thing to admire, rapt in their attention, no
doubt, but not really difficult to unwrap. With the French, genuine
appreciation reaches the saturation point.

Montreal is decidedly not a (English) literary center; still less is
there a Montreal school of English literature. It is, of course, the
center of the Metropolitan French Press and of the publication of French
books, extremely numerous and of high merit, considering the limited
area at command. Such literary life as there has been in
English-speaking Montreal has centered round various little
organizations past and present, of which the Pen and Pencil Club is
without doubt both the most venerable and the most notable. This
organization, meeting every fortnight in the half-light of a studio,
falling asleep over essays read to it, and waking up to look at pictures
or drink scotch and soda, developed a life and character all its own.
Its records hold the names of Sir Andrew Macphail and of John McCrae,
author of the immortal _Flanders Fields_. But as a matter of fact it
lived rather on brush than on ink. The pencil was mightier than the pen.

For painting is perhaps something of an exception to what was said
above. If there is no distinctive Canadian literature, that is, no
Canadian way of writing, there is a certain distinctive Canadian art, a
Canadian way of painting. What foreign painter ever put on canvas the
melting snow and the black open water of the Canadian spring, the
tremble of the birches, and the glory of the autumn all tawny and red
and gold? Perhaps the painters of Montreal, the young men of forty years
ago, Maurice Cullen and such, gone now, represented a real and unique
contribution to the history of art.

No doubt this work was helped by the existence in Montreal of the
notable private picture galleries. They were the outcome, it is true, of
private taste. But they helped to give opportunity to rising artists
privileged to see them. They helped also to stimulate the foundation and
aid the future of the Montreal Art Association. Its beautiful building
on Sherbrooke Street, its annual spring exhibitions, and its constant
special displays of individual and particular exhibits render it a
factor in the cultural life of the city. Yet here again a complete
discussion would be beyond the scope of the present volume.

FOOTNOTES:

[40] C. Macmillan, _McGill and Its Story, 1821-1921_, 1921.

[41] M. Abbott, _History of Medicine in the Province of Quebec_, 1931.




CHAPTER XV

Come Up on the Mountain

     _The Ascent of the Mountain. The High Altitude Cab. The Extinct
     Volcano. A View of Sixty Miles. And a Vision of the Future._


Come on up to the top of the mountain. For no tour of Montreal, no book
on the city is complete without such a visit. And this lovely afternoon
of the closing month of May shows the mountain at its very best,
unsullied as yet in its billows of luxuriant green.

The mountain, it is true, seems to have dropped out of this volume since
its earliest chapters. It always does in the pages of Canadian history.
Jacques Cartier goes to the top of it; Maisonneuve erects a cross upon
its summit, and then, apparently, no one goes up it for three hundred
years. It does not appear in history again until in 1920 when a pious
and energetic provincial secretary re-erects Maisonneuve's mountain
cross. There with its vast frame of steel at the loftiest corner of
Mount Royal, it stands visible in daylight from the city below and with
its myriad lights visible at night over river and country for fifty
miles. The Cross of Christ, in this case frequently spoken of as
Athanase David's Cross, still guards the city.

[Illustration: _International News Photo_

Montreal Today, the Farthest Inland Seaport of Any Importance in the
World. Yet Geographically Closer to Liverpool Than Any Seaport in the
United States.]

The writer of this book--by which I mean myself, for I wrote it--can
well act as guide, having walked the mountain now for forty-two years.
But let us on such a pleasant excursion dismiss the formal dignity as
between writer and reader and talk as between ourselves.

You note at once how relatively insignificant the mountain appears at a
first view from the city. This is like the disappointment so generally
felt, at first sight, at the small size of Niagara Falls. But just as
Niagara gains in majesty from day to day, so does the mountain gain a
loftier attitude. This is partly an effect of the weather and the
atmosphere. At times, as on a clear winter day, it shrinks till it seems
little more than a rim of frost above the city sky line. But at times of
gathering thunder it rises high like a shield of rock towering to
protect its city.

But the diminution of the mountain arises also partly from the fact that
the city has climbed halfway up it. What Cartier and Champlain saw from
the riverbank was vastly different from what is seen now. The St.
Lawrence River at Montreal in midsummer has an altitude of thirty feet
above the level of the sea. The harbor wharves lie twenty feet above
that. The Windsor Station is one hundred and ten feet above sea level.
As you go uptown you come to the tunnel that plunges under the mountain
just beside the great Roman Catholic Cathedral. The tunnel must be on a
level almost the same as Windsor Station, and McGill University when the
tunnel dives under it is eighty feet above the tunnel, and the city
reservoir is, at a guess, almost one hundred feet above McGill, and
eighty feet, say eighty feet, above the reservoir level again, there
runs Pine Avenue belted round the waist of the mountain. These
altitudes, except the sea level itself, may not be absolutely correct,
but they are good enough for your trip up the mountain. They only mean
that you are nearly halfway up, over 350 feet of its total 763, before
the mountain gets a chance to begin. Indeed, private land, built on or
ready to be built on, climbs so high and so eagerly all around the
slopes of Mount Royal that it is too late to save it now as what it
should have been. It would have been so easy at the start. It is
everywhere. Ask anybody from Philadelphia what might have been done with
Philadelphia, or ask anybody from San Francisco why they did to it
whatever it is that they have done to it, and the answer is always the
same. As to New York, it was ruined before it began, and London has
never recovered from the Saxons. But if there is ever again a new city,
let it learn to beat down private property as you beat down house dogs
from the breakfast table.

So let us go up. You ask how do we go? Well, that's just the trouble;
there isn't any real way to go. In fact, the great majority of the
1,476,737[42] of Greater Montreal have never been to the top of the
mountain. There are no statistics on this question, and I admit that if
you took one of the popular polls that now obviate and obliterate
popular thought, you would find that 99 per cent of the Montreal people
have been up on top of the mountain. But that is because the kind of
people who go up to the top of a mountain are the kind of people who
send an answer to a popular poll; and the kind of people who live beside
a mountain and never go up it are the kind of people who never answer
popular polls. But if you take the common experience of those who walk
Mount Royal you will find it always comparatively empty. Often, even at
nine in the morning, on a fine day, you may walk around a half-mile
circuit on its open summit and see not a living soul: you may walk
easily a quarter of a mile, and perhaps half a mile, down the winding
road and still look in vain for that same soul. It is true that for
three hours on a fine Sunday morning the mountain becomes a promenade,
but this is a special crowd like the flock of young skiers that tears
its frozen snows on a winter day, telemarking among the trees.

As we say, there is no easy way up. Years ago there was an inclined
railway, but it was so wheezy and uncertain, its beams trembled so much
at its own temerity, that they _disinclined_ it. While it was there it
started from the streetcar level in an attractive open car, all fresh
air and wickerwork, up a slope as pleasant as that of sin itself; it ran
to the most precipitous face of the mountain, then shifted into a
caged-in car, all set on a slant so as to come straight on a track that
was crooked, and then, with a clanking of cables and a wheezing of
machinery, up it went above the treetops, its passengers turning green
at the ascent. Women didn't mind it so much, since women always trust
machinery as they do men; but men who distrust machinery as they
distrust women were glad to get out of it. So it was disjointed and
never rebuilt.

Nor can you ride up in your motorcar, since motorcars are excluded from
the mountain. Excluded also is the streetcar company. It is true that
the streetcars have found a cunning way round, by the back of the
mountain where the slope is gentler, a route as strategic as Napoleon's
plan of invading Europe by going to Egypt. It winds its hidden way
behind a screen of trees and conceals itself cleverly under the hillside
of a cemetery, and so crosses the entire mountain, reaching quite an
altitude, then runs down a concealed ditch and out again, without anyone
suspecting it. All cities have these engineering triumphs.

No, we have to drive with a horse. Since it is too far to walk all the
way up and around the top and down again, we must take one of those
special Montreal mountain cabs for which the route is reserved. These
open cabs, carriages if you will, or _calches_ if you like, or
victorias if you must, are the last survivors of a past age like the
sailing whaling ship and the sedan chair. The horse ended in Montreal as
elsewhere in a cloud of gasoline. Time was when it was not so. The city
of forty years ago lent itself to the glory of the private carriage.
Along the firm winter snow of its wide upper streets swept the open
supersleighs that bore the superrich, buried deep under astrakhan fur,
in front of them two flunkies in tall bearskins and fur capes, one to
drive and one not to drive. Between the beautiful horses that seemed to
dance before the equipage rang tall silver bells on a prong like a
Russian troika. In summer beneath the leaves a lesser glory displayed an
even greater luxury, silk hats for bearskins and livery replacing fur.

All that is gone. The mournful hackman sits his box, waiting for us to
embark. We see as soon as ever he begins the ascent that he is one of
two kinds, of only two. He may sit sunk in dejection, his head bowed
like Rodin's Thinker while his tattered horse hauls us its gradual,
laborious way; or he may commence at once, gesticulating with his whip,
that flow of information that in some hackmen is not to be quenched,
not even by alcohol.

But it is better to pay little heed to his murmurings. His mountain is
not yours. You will get no history out of _him_. Don't ask him about
Cartier and Maisonneuve. Especially not about Cartier; for if you do
he'll wave his whip sideways and tell you that right over there you can
see the top of Cartier's monument, the tall stone pillar with a bronze
angel on top. He says it is just close to where they used to build the
Ice Palace. Having said this and started a thrill of historic interest,
he will then spoil it all by adding that his father always voted for
Cartier. After which you have to sleep that off among the leaves as best
you can.

You see, he lives here. He is only interested in what happened
yesterday. He will show you where they held the horse show last year and
where the Mayor of Montreal shook hands with the Mayor of Westmount; if
you let him he will drive a little out of the way to show you where one
of the city aldermen lives. Even as it is, he begins as soon as you
reach the first slopes of the mountain road to point down to the houses
below and say where people live. There is the house where Sir Edward so
and so lives, and there is the one that used to be Sir Henry so and
so's. Sir Henry, it appears, was a very fine man, very fond of driving
up the mountain with him, our hackman, just as we are doing. Sir Henry
was a generous man; it seems he always paid a dollar extra over the
regular fare. He used to say, "Take that for the horse"; yes sir, always
that extra dollar for the horse. The last time they drove it was a day
just like this one. What's this?--the thirtieth of May. Well, that's
odd, because the last time the hackman drove Sir Henry up here it was on
a thirtieth of May. That's queer, isn't it? Sir Henry, it seems, is a
great loss. We need men like that . . .

So it is well, perhaps, not to talk with the driver. Let us think of his
figure as there in front of us, like what the mathematicians call a
constant in a function. If you pay no attention he will cancel out . . .

We wind up a road that has been cut as a spiral of gradual ascent,
never too steep for the horse to walk, just too steep for the horse to
run. All the mountain has a thin cover of trees through which one sees
more and more of the widening prospect below--the city, the river, and
the country beyond. Then as we turn the last wind of the winding road
round a corner of rock we lose sight of the city, and there we are on
the open "top" of the mountain--not the highest point but what is
evidently the top. It is a great hollow space, mostly open grass dotted
with bushes, sunk like a shallow bowl with banks of trees rising all
round it. Sometimes we can see no further than these trees, but here and
there we can see, through gaps in them, ever so far away, a glimpse to
the north of a "vast and beautiful country"--the woods of
Vaudreuil--reaching to the Laurentian Mountains.

Sunk in the bottom of the bowl is a beautiful artificial pond, almost a
little lake, with flagstoned banks and beds of flowers all in a row--a
bit of art against nature. This, we are told, was long ago a beaver
pond.

The mountaintop suggests, you say, the crater of a volcano. Why, that's
exactly what it is, not exactly what the geologist would call a crater,
but the stump of a volcano that has blown its top off, crater and all.
This that is left is what geology calls the "plutonic core," once just a
shapeless bulk of bare rock. Time's hand has long since covered it to
make it nature's garden.

That was long, long ago, long even to a geologist, although they have
their own way of reckoning time. One of the most distinguished of our
Canadian geologists wrote, as a part of his legacy to us, a marvelous
book on the formation of this part of North America. He called it _The
Last Million Years_.[43] He didn't mean to be funny; he only meant that
he was not dealing with antiquity. But even he would admit that it must
be a long time since the Mount Royal volcano was active. Dr. Frank
Adams, the distinguished professor emeritus of McGill, the leading
authority on the subject, reckons it from thirty to forty million years.
Yet even that, from Dr. Adams' point of view, was not the geological
beginning of Montreal. Deep down under the mountain itself is the bed of
old Laurentian rock; overlying that is what is called familiarly (by
geologists) the Ordovician, a bed of rocks mostly limestone in which are
found marine fossils from the ancient sea and through which the mountain
broke upward. The volcanic action shot a great shaft of steam and ashes
and uptorn rock toward the sky. As the column fell it tore away the core
of the volcano itself, leaving only this core. Later came the glacial
age, burying all under ice, to leave behind the "moraine," boulder clay.
Over this came the present upper surface of post-glacial deposit, clay
and sand.

This means, then, that there was a time when these pleasant hollows,
this wide sunken cup that marks the empowered summit of Mount Royal,
showed the place where the volcano, long ages ago, blew off its top.
Time must have been when the glow of the angry fires lit up the sky and
reflected on the waters of the inland sea that then lay at the foot of
the mountain, must have carried far across to the north to be reflected
from the fireless stones that are the Laurentian Hills.

The fires died. The rock cooled into a solid mass, riven here and there
with faults and channels, to be filled later with other molten rock,
their traces visible today. Over the surface the wind and sun and rain,
the bursting ice and the melting snow, broke and wore down the rock to
form the thin soil that now covers Mount Royal and clings to its abrupt
sides. Down from its sides the streams and rivulets carried the soil to
the mountain foot to spread it wide at the base. This flat layer of
uneasy sand and clay could bear the trifling weight of Cartier's
Hochelaga, even as magnified into Ramusio's fanciful drawing. But it was
to become the despair of the modern architect and builders, whose houses
leaned crookedly sideways, leering with premature old age, till they
learned to pierce down and search for a foundation on the moraine, or
lower still on the plutonic core, or lower still on the Ordovician rock.
The bedrock of Laurentian they cannot reach. As the mountain cooled and
crumbled the great inland sea beside it shrank and drained away from the
upheaving earth, to leave nothing but the three streams of the St.
Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the Richelieu hurrying along the hollows of
its lower bed. Seen thus, what Cartier saw, the waving trees, the
grassy slopes, is but a thing of yesterday. Nature with a twist of the
hand (or of the equinoxes) could turn it all back again to the fierce,
lifeless panorama of fire and rock from which it began.

Cartier dreamed of empire and of the Kingdom of Faith . . . Champlain,
of inland waterways and a metropolis. The geologist, of these vanished
fires and this forgotten sea. Which dream is the dreamiest?

But that's enough geology. As we drive along the high side of the bowl
the city is hidden still but one sees, off in the other direction, and
rising clear above the trees, the great dome of the basilica of the
Shrine of St. Joseph, so vast that it seems to dwarf even nature itself.
Indeed the nature lover, if unaware of its meaning and sacred character,
might well think it a blot on the landscape. Yet this shrine has
acquired within the last forty years a reputation almost equal to that
of the famous Ste. Anne de Beaupr beside Quebec. Here was built at the
close of the nineties by the Corporation of Our Lady of the Sacred
Heart, whose college stands near by, a chapel to contain a statue of St.
Joseph. Here began the ministrations of Brother Andr, presently called
the Miracle Man of Mount Royal. The wonderful cures effected and the
spiritual relief afforded to thousands of the sick and the lame led to
the building, behind this shrine, of the great basilica. It stands on
the rising slope at the foot of the Little Mountain. It can accommodate
five thousand people. It rises two hundred feet high. Up the one hundred
stone steps that lead to its doors the supplicants climb on their knees,
in the two great public supplications for divine intercession held every
year on May 10 and on Labor Day.

But our winding through the trees on the mountaintop has now brought us
from the bowl back again to the face overlooking the city and we are now
at the point of the mountain called Observation Point, or commonly the
Look Out. It is by no means the highest point on the mountain but it
commands the widest prospect. A natural projecting ledge of the rocky
mountainside here falls away sharply so that a wide-open view, a
panorama, is afforded, both far to the right and far to the left, over
the trees and the city and up and down the river and across the river.
This ledge has been converted to a wide, semicircular pavement, some two
hundred feet across, with a cement balustrade over which, on such a
lovely day as this, lean little groups of people, looking at the view.

Suppose we let the cabman go; we don't need him--we can walk down. What
about giving him . . . You remember what he said about Sir Henry? Good,
I will.

As we look out over the balustrade it is the sense of distance that
first strikes us, just as it did Jacques Cartier: miles and miles of it,
clear away to a dim, flat horizon with mountains on it here and there,
each little block of them dimmer than the last. We are looking right out
over the city, over the trees just below us--we can almost touch the
tops--and beyond it over the St. Lawrence coming down from our right, as
far away as we can see, passing below us in the foreground, and then
moving on to the left to be lost again where the shoulder of the
mountain blocks our sight.

But for the moment the distance holds us. Those nearest mountains--they
are over twenty miles away--are over beside the Richelieu. The tallest
one, reaching to a high point from which there must be a wonderful view
all round the compass at once, is Beloeil--or "good eye"--which is the
French for what they call Bellevue in the States. It overlooks the
Richelieu. Our little guidebook tells all about Fort Sorel and Fort
Chambly and the Indian Wars and the Patriots of 1837, but we don't need
that. We had that in Chapter Four. Our cabman, if we had kept him, would
have told us about the horse show at Sorrel last fall and say we ought
to come back for it this fall, but he's off, trundling down the winding
slopes at a pleasant jog trot, half asleep under the leaves, as happy as
the horse. So we can pick the mountains out for ourselves--Rougemont,
and that one like a sugar cone must be Johnson. How far away is it? Let
me look it up--a hundred and twenty-four miles! Just imagine that! A
hundred and twenty-four miles!--oh, wait, I beg your pardon--twenty-four
miles!--imagine that instead! Further still to the southeast is the dim
outline of the Green Mountains in Vermont, seventy-eight miles away,
and almost straight south, the top end of the Adirondacks, sixty miles
away. Looking at them, our eye catches the river again, far away to the
right; the Lachine Rapids--we can just see them or just not see
them--they are half hidden by islands. To see them you must take a
flying carpet and fly to them from the mountain, and make it not the end
of May but the end of March, with the river breaking open and all one
wild roar of rushing water and breaking ice that you hear half a mile
away. Stand at the turn of the old Lachine Road, lonely still, and you
can hear the sound come from across the river and from down the stream,
the "hiss" of the smashed ice rushing past your feet and the undertone,
the "roar," from a mile away . . . "My hair stood on end," said Champlain
at the terror of it.

But come back; get on the carpet and come up; turn it back to the
thirtieth of May. And let us look down at the nearer view, the city
itself, the towering stone buildings of the Sun Life and the Royal
Bank--that beats any rapids, doesn't it?--and the great grain elevators
. . . There's so much on the river front that we can't see the ships,
not the ones in dock. The harbor lies framed between great bridges, the
Jacques Cartier downstream and the Victoria up. The shipping we do not
see. But look off to the left, away off; you wouldn't realize that
that's an Atlantic liner coming up, but it is.

Then we look nearer--all the business city seems a tumble of houses and
all the huddle of the slums smothered over and looking all right at a
distance, as poverty always does. As we follow the city up the slope of
the town, trees break out in it, and then more trees; that enchanted
wood with stone tops sticking out of it is McGill University; the small
object moving slowly along a road in front of it is a professor hurrying
to his lecture. Beside the university lies the residential district of
the rich that were--you remember we talked of it--beautiful indeed, as
seen from above, as seen from here, for the trees cover all traces of
the demolitions and the placards of houses for sale are too far away to
read.

Even above this the houses among the trees climb higher and higher
still, unwilling to let go, unwilling to admit the mountain too steep,
till they reach the last, their highest thrown, in the beautiful little
Redpath Crescent whose slated houses and lovely gardens we can see just
below us. Just below? Why, it looks as if we could almost touch them . . .
It can't be more than, what, two hundred feet? Why, look! You can see
the people, almost hear them, look at the bright dresses. Why, of
course, it must be a wedding party! How charming on this lovely
thirtieth of May! Good luck to them, whoever they are, starting life
together, high, high up . . .

As we reach this point in our speculations we hear beside us, as coming
up from among a little group of visitors looking over the balustrade,
the voice of a statistician (they are not forbidden on the mountain) or,
what is worse, the voice of a statistical tourist who only lives to give
information, explaining:

     _The Island of Montreal is thirty miles long and between seven
     and ten miles wide. The city occupies almost one quarter of it.
     Montreal itself has a population of a million and Greater
     Montreal a million and a half. Montreal has 127 parks,
     playgrounds, and gardens. It has 247 churches. It has 907 miles
     of streets. It has 19 hospitals, 2600 manufacturing plants and
     773 miles of sewers . . ._

Come away! It's time to go. And don't admire the man's erudition. He got
it all out of the blue pages of the Montreal Telephone Book except the
population: he makes that up, himself. But in any case we want to move
on so as to get to the top of the mountain in the literal sense, for the
high shoulder where the great cross stands is far higher up than the
Observation Point.

We reach it by the winding road, or, if we like, straight through among
the sparse trees of the summit of the mountain. We wish now that we had
kept the cabman--it's quite a walk. But it has been worth it, for now we
can see all the lovely country beyond the mountain--the islands of
Montreal and Jesus and the Laurentian Slope. Let me show you the Sault
au Recollet rapids, away off this way, and now, if you want to see the
St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary, look right out toward--You don't? No,
perhaps not. Seems terrible, doesn't it?--those great high walls with
guards on top, walls so high that the people in the yards can never see
the beauty around them; they can hear the river and not see it . . .

Look further then. Away off there is St. Eustache, where they killed the
rebels--you can't see it, but it's there. And away at the end, most
beautiful of all, is the Lake of the Two Mountains, lovely as its own
name. The island ends there and where it ends is Ste. Anne's, the
village of the "evening chime" that we spoke of (you haven't forgotten
Chapter Three?), near it, mentioned three times already? Well, never
mind, it's worth it. Close by St. Anne's--you can't see them but you can
see where they are--are some of the most beautiful country estates and
lake-shore houses in all America. They look out over the lake toward the
sunset. Some are historic too. They represent, and here and there part
of their buildings actually were standing then, the old French "fiefs"
granted and occupied as a sort of first line of defense from Indian
raiders coming down the two rivers. Such is Boisbriant, just beside the
little village of Senneville. It was a fief granted to Sidrac du Gue
(1672), then passed into the hands of the famous Charles Le Moyne de
Longueuil, then to Jacques le Ber and later to Le Ber de Senneville. A
round stone tower was built as a fort and windmill (1686). It underwent
fierce attacks by the Iroquois in 1687 and 1691 in the first of which,
at any rate, several people were massacred. A real Fort Senneville was
built in 1692, its ruins still existing. After that a manor house was
built, which itself was enlarged into a fort. It had a long history
extending to an attack made by Benedict Arnold in 1776.

All about the present manor house and the beautiful lawn and gardens
which surround it are the characteristic memorials of two and a half
centuries of history, which lend distinction to these surviving remnants
of New France.

When Jacques Cartier looked around this vast circuit he saw a country
that seemed empty--north and south and east and west--just as nature
made it. All the fifteen hundred miles south to Florida, empty; all the
fifteen hundred miles north to Ungava, empty. The visitor of today looks
south over the same fifteen hundred miles that is now the greatest area
of industrial civilization in the world. He looks north, but beyond the
Montreal islands and a little strip of ski-side of the hills all is
empty still, empty, largely unknown.

Yet on the north side the available energy of water power and the latent
mineral wealth (apart from coal) are incomparably greater than that to
the south.

Come, it is time to get down from the mountain. There are things to do.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] Lovell's _Montreal Guide_.

[43] A. P. Coleman, _The Last Million Years_, 1941.




CHAPTER XVI

     _L'Envoi: The Problem of a Great City_


The Romans had a saying to the effect that from any one thing you could
judge all others of the same class. So it is with our great American
cities. If you study one, you study all. They have all had something of
the same origin in the adventurous days of early settlement, of Indian
warfare. All carry the same pride of achievement in the record of their
foundation. Boston thinks of the Puritans and the Massachusetts Bay
Colony; New York, of Hudson's ship entering the spacious shelter of its
waters; New Orleans, of old French days; and Chicago and the cities of
the Mississippi Valley recall the stockade forts of the plains and the
lonely grandeur of the prairies. Our early American founders stand in
stone, Winthrop looking toward Maisonneuve, John Smith searching the
horizon for Iberville, and Pontiac sending across the lakes from Detroit
a message of good cheer to Oshkosh of Green Bay.

Hence it is that in North America we can all read the story of one
another's cities with a peculiar sympathy and understanding which we
cannot bring to bear on Europe. Our interest in the origins of Rome and
London or in the lost antiquity of Athens may be profound, but it lacks
the peculiar appeal of the cities on our own side of the ocean.

Nor is it only the origin of the cities. Their history from stage to
stage runs a similar course--the early years of struggle, the beginnings
of comfort, the building of real houses, the first meeting of a city
council. Later comes transport, highroads that replace the trails
through the forest, canals, a very wonder of the age, with canal boats
seeming to the pioneers of the bush floating palaces of luxury; the
railroads all put together in little bits, then turning, overnight as it
seemed, into trunk lines, and with that the oncoming of the machine age;
the millions of immigrants that turned frontier towns to metropolitan
cities; the age of electricity and power that annihilated nature; the
vast accumulations of wealth that made Europe look poor, and the spread
and growth of the new industrial poverty, the reproduction of the
European slum in the New World, a thing so sudden, a poverty so
unexpected, that it made the life of the pioneer in his log cabin in the
forest seem wealth itself.

All of our cities wear these marks of history, traced on their streets
and evidenced in their monuments. Each of us can read the story of any
American city without a guidebook from what we know of our own. That
stone figure in the breastplate and the plumed hat, with a drawn sword,
that is, of course, the founder of the city. The bronze Indian crouching
below the pedestal--the proper place and proper attitude for
him--recalls the salvation of the city by the founder. Those military
figures, with little three-cornered hats, knee breeches, and stockings,
their hair in pigtails, those are the great American generals who beat
the British and the great British generals who beat the Americans, and
both of whom beat the French.

In another concentric ring of history are solid metal statues of men in
frock coats, wide iron trousers, and wearing semicircular metal beards,
their faces absolute calm, more in calculation than in anger. These are
the city patriots who first built docks or urged for years the
construction of a tunnel, or worked hard till they at last persuaded the
city to lay out the great woodland cemetery, a very dream of rest, where
they now lie.

Nor do we need to be told where we are when we enter the college
area--where the Medical Building alone cost ten million. In front of
such a building is again a statue, this time of a man in more modern
dress, like an office coat, and with an air of shrewdness not seen in
the broad face of the man who made the cemetery. This man built
railroads, an uneducated man but with the peculiar driving force that
was developed in the transcontinental days of the railroad. Beneath his
feet is a Latin motto, crisp and terse--the kind of thing he would have
said if he had known Latin. He can't read it, least of all now: he
doesn't know, never did, whether it means "Labor conquers everything,"
or "Look out, low bridge." But the motto dates him as a period. Inside
the building, done in great canvases in oil, are the portraits of the
later donors, indoor men, who never drove anything, never saw the plants
and labor other people drove, but just organized things and then
reorganized them and when they fell apart organized the pieces of them
bigger than ever, and gave what was left over to the college, which now
rest in shadowed rooms, dark in oil, looking a little darker perhaps as
time wears on.

All that we have in common. It is a wonderful record of human
achievement, a wonderful story of energy and progress. And yet can we
feel as sure of it all as we had expected to? Are we quite certain of
its outlook on the future? This city of yours and mine and of all of us,
so beautiful in its leafy residential streets, so inspiring in its
college area, so triumphant in its downtown section jostling with wealth
and luxury, ostentatious with plate glass--does it not contain, like all
its sister cities, those tangled, narrower streets of the part of the
city where the poor live, and the long miles of crowded tenements and
inglorious apartments, just room to turn around, just room to breathe,
except in the hot weather; is all that, even with its lighted streets
and its picture shows, is all that so much better than what was there
before we conquered nature?

So it comes that in all our cities we are busy in the same way with city
planning for the future, with city housing, with the demolition of the
slums. To shovel up the slums, to shovel up half the city and throw it
away, that is the word of the day in every great North American city.
The biggest man is the man who will throw it furthest. Later he will
have a statue with a Latin motto on the base to mean, "Knock it all
down."

It seems strange, doesn't it, after so much effort, after so much that
seemed a continuous triumph, that it has come to this? The city--my city
and your city--is all wrong. The thing has got to go. It's built wrong.
It's congested. It hasn't got light enough, air enough, space enough.
It's full of noise, strident and discordant, not like the noise of the
wind and the sea that used to be here. There's no place for the children
to play in, no fit apartments for them to live in, and so there are no
children to play, or not enough of them. The founder was one of ten,
wasn't he?--and even the sheet-iron man with the broad face one of six.
But now? Why, a lot of the city fathers are unmarried women.

So we must knock it all down and start over. Everybody must live in a
place fit for everybody to live in. The trouble is that the poor are too
poor to afford it; so it won't do to have any poor: they must either get
rich or get out. So the problem of city planning somehow turns in our
hands to the problem of the rich and poor, the problem of poverty, of
starvation in the midst of plenty, which all now see and none as yet
alleviate.

But we must be at it. If our city means anything, at least it means
inspiration. If it all has to be done over again, let's do it over, with
the same courage as that of the first settlers. Remember what the
founder did--drew his sword and said, "Come on!" Let's do that.




_Appendix No. 1_

POPULATION OF MONTREAL



                        Estimated

1642 First Settlement          50
1642 End of Year               72
1650                          196
1660                          472
1667                          766
1710                        3,492
1720                        5,314
1730                        6,351
1750                        8,244
1800                        9,000
1809                       12,000
1825                       22,000
1831                       27,000
1839                       35,000
1844                       44,000
1852                       57,719
1861                       91,169
1871                      115,000
1881                      155,238
1891                      219,616
1901                      328,172
1911                      400,504
1921                      618,506
1931                      818,577
1941                      890,234




_Appendix No. 2_

CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF MONTREAL


1535  Jacques Cartier at Hochelaga.
1603  Champlain at the Grand Sault.
1611  Champlain laid out Palace Royale.
1642  Maisonneuve founded Ville Marie.
1660  Dollard des Ormeaux was killed at Long Sault, May 21.
1665  Maisonneuve dismissed, returns to France,
      23 years after founding Ville Marie.
1667  Census of Montreal, 766 souls.
1673  Frontenac arrived in Montreal.
1676  First market place opened.
1682  Frontenac recalled by the King of France, May 10.
1689  Massacre of Lachine, August 5; Return of Frontenac, October 15.
1694  Two watchtowers built as part of the Fort of the Sulpicians
      and still standing beside the Collge de Montral.
1700  2100 population of Montreal.
1734  "The Great Fire."
1759  Fall of Quebec.
1760  Montreal capitulated, September 9.
1774  Quebec Act.
1775  Montgomery entered by the Recollet Gate, November 13.
1782  John Molson came to Montreal. Northwest Company formed.
1785  The Beaver Club starred.
1791  Canada divided into two parts, Upper and Lower, May 14.
1800  Montreal Waterworks.
1809  The _Accommodation_ made her first trip from Montreal
      to Quebec, November 3.
1811  James McGill made a will, January 8, leaving forty-six acres on
      Burnside and University streets and 10,000 for a university.
1817  Formation of the Bank of Montreal.
1821  Work commenced on Lachine Canal.
1825  First Lachine Canal completed.
1830  Montreal Harbour Commission.
1832  Visitation of the cholera.
1837  The Rebellion.
1846  Montreal Telegraph Company organized.
1849  Parliament Building burned.
1854  First pier of Victoria Bridge laid.
1857  St. James Club, Dorchester Street, West, established.
1858  Decimal currency.
1860  Victoria Bridge opened by the Prince of Wales.
1861  Montreal Street Railway.
1870  Fenian Raid.
1879  Art Association of Montreal opened.
1882  Electric Light Company.
1886  Nearly one quarter of Montreal flooded.
1892  Montreal Street Railways (electric).
1893  The Royal Victoria Hospital opened.
1899  Royal Victoria College opened.
1902  The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, King George V and
      Queen Mary visited Montreal.
1909  The Children's Memorial Hospital opened.
1917  Mount Royal Tunnel finished.
1919  Cornerstone of Sun Life Building laid.
1920  General Sir Arthur Currie made Principal of McGill.
1930  Harbour Bridge opened.




INDEX


Abbott, Sir John (Prime Minister, 1891-92), 171, 189

Acadia (_Evangeline_), 76

_Accommodation_ (vessel), 136, 174

Adams, Dr. Frank, 317

Agniers, 44

Aix-la-Chapelle, 91

Albani, Madame, 181

Alexandra Pier, 241

Algonquins, 43, 48, 50

Allan, Captain Alexander, 173

"Allan Co., H. and A.," 173

Allan, Hugh, 173ff.

Allan Line, 144, 200

Allen, Ethan, 119-22

_Alliance Franaise_, 280

American Presbyterian Church, 183

Ames, Sir H., 223

Amherst, General, J. H., 78, 99ff., 105, 161

Andr, Brother, 319

_Anglo-Saxon_ (vessel), 174

Angus railway shops, 197

Annapolis, 33

Annexation Manifesto (1849), 170ff.

Arabian (trading ship), 145

Army of Congress, 122, 124ff.

Arnold, Benedict, 75, 118, 122, 123ff.

Art Association (Montreal), 181, 311

Ashanti War, 202

Assiniboia, 192

Association of Montreal, 52

Atherton, Dr. W. P., 113, 170, 223

Aultsville (Long Sault), 207

Austria, 85


Baby, Judge, 108, 109

Bachelor Club, 142

"Back River" (Rivire des Prairies), 66

Bagot, Sir Charles, 162, 164

Baikal, Lake, 250

Balboa, Nez, 2

Bancroft, G, 123

Bank of British North America, 184

Bank of Canada, 184

Bank of Montreal, 152, 184, 228

Barnes, Howard, 178, 247

Barr, Charlotte, 41

Bay of Fundy, 82

Beaver Club, 142

Beaver Hall, 139

Bcancourt, Baron de, 75

Bell Telephone Building, 139

Bellestre, Picotte de, Fief of, 66

Bellevue, Fief of, 66

Beloeil, mountain, 320

Bergithon, Carl, 228_n._

Bertrand M. Camille, 65

Bethune, Rev. John, 296-97

Bienville, Sieur de, 58

Biggar, H. P., 10_n._

Black Watch, 202

Blake, Hume, 167

Board of Trade, 226

Boisbriant, Fief of, 66

Boisclerc, M. Lanouiller de, 77

Bonaventure Station, 87

Bonsecours, Church of, Notre Dame de, 48, 140, 184

Bonsecours, Market Building, 177

Bonsecours Street, 62

Boston, 325

Boucherville, seigneurie, 67

Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 104

Bourgeoys, Marguerite, 48, 54, 58, 59, 79, 140

Bourlamaque, 103

Braddock, General Edward, 101

Brbeuf College, 79

Brbeuf, Father, 38, 51

Brick, Jefferson, 169

_Britannia_ (vessel), 144

_British America_ (vessel), 144

British Columbia, 187

British Montreal, 76

Brock, General Isaac, 138

Brockville, 175

Brookings Institution, 261

Brown, Major John, 120

Brown, Thomas S. (General), 145, 155, 156, 200

Bullion, Madame de, 52

Burton, Colonel Ralph, 107

Burton, General, 105, 109

Butler, Sir W., 3_n._

Butt, Isaac, 191

By-town, 168


Cabot, John, 5

Cabot, S., 7

California, 218

Callires, M. de, Governor of Montreal, 47, 63, 68, 71, 72

Calvin, D. D., 206

Canada (New France), 77ff.

Canada, United Province of, 159ff.

Canadian (ship), 145

Canadian Northern Railway, 217

Canadian Pacific Railway Company, 197ff.

Cannon Commission, 224_n_.

Capitulation of Montreal, 97ff.

_Captain_ (boat), 262

_Car of Commerce_ (boat), 143

Carignant, Louis, 121

Carleton, Guy. _See_ Dorchester

Cartier, Sir George tienne, 196

Cartier, Jacques, 3ff., 312, 323

Cartier's Hochelaga, 318

Casson. _See_ Dollier de Casson

Cataraqui, 69

Cataraqui (Kingston), 90

Cathcart, Lord, 165

Caughnawaga, 70

Cayugas, 44

Cazot, Father, 79

Chambly Rapids, 50;
  fort on, 60;
  seigneurie of, 67

Champ de Mars, 79, 141, 167

Champlain and St. Lawrence Railway, 154ff.

Champlain, Lake, 91

Champlain, Samuel de, 15, 24ff.

Charlevoix, Father Pierre, 76ff., 91

Charron Building, 141

Chteau de Ramezay, 124, 140, 161

Chteauguay, 85

Chteauguay (seigneurie), 67, 208

Chaudire River, 123

Chenier, Dr., 155

Chicago, 173ff., 325

Children's Memorial Hospital, 149

Chippewas, 43

Cholera, 169

Cholera in Montreal, 150ff.

Christ Church Cathedral, 147, 181, 184

Citadel Hill, 62

Citizens Association, 224

City Government, 147ff., 225

City Hall (Htel de Ville), 74

Civil War, American, 131, 181, 190, 193, 197

Closse, Lambent, 51, 88

Clubs and leagues, 279ff.

Cobdenites, 197

Colborne, Sir John, 154-55, 166

Collge de Montral, 54, 151

Common (Commune), 89

Company of the West Indies, 55

Confederation, 182, 187

Congregation, Daughters of the, 78

Congregation, Sisters of the, 59

Congress, Continental, 117

Connaught, Duke of, 235

Connaught, Prince Arthur of, 190

Constitutional Association, 154

Cook, Captain James, 86, 102

Cooper, J. L., 226_n._

Corporation of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart (college), 319

Corte-Real, 2

Cte des Neiges Road, 54

Courcelles, M. de, 57, 60, 68

Coureurs du bois, 67

Court House, 141

Crimean War, 173, 193

Cross of Christ, 312

Crystal Palace, 176, 180, 182

Cullen, Maurice, 311

Cunard Line, 144

Currie, Sir Arthur, 300


Dalby, Henry, 222_n_.

Dalhousie Square, 52, 140

Dauversire, Jean de la, 39

Davis, Bob, 119_n_.

Dawson. S. E., 2_n_.

Dawson, Sir William, 171ff., 291, 298

De Belvge, Commander, 177

de Casson, Dollier, 39, 61, 68, 87

de la Salle, R. C., 66, 93

Delawares, 43

De Lry, 78

Denonville, 44

Descelles, A., 166_n_.

D'Estaing, Admiral, 102

De Soto, Fernando, 2

d'Iberville, Sieur, 58, 325

Dickens, Charles, 143, 162, 169, 204

Dillon's Hotel, 142

Dodd, A. F., 94_n_.

Dollard des Ormeaux (Daulac, Parkman's spelling), 51

Dominion Square Building, 219

Donnacona, Indian chief, 12, 20

Dorchester, Lord, 106

Douglas Hall, 302

Drake, Sir Francis, 2

du Lhut, Greysolon, 68

du Luth, Daniel (engineer), 63

Dunkins, Christopher, 188

du Pont, Franois Grav Sieur (Dupont-Grav), 28, 31, 34

Dupr, Sr. George, 121

du Puys, Zachary, 66

Duquesne, Fort, 100

Durham, Lord, 152, 157, 160, 221

Dutch conquest, 91


Eastern Townships, 188, 190

Eire, 192

Elevators, 241ff.

Elgin, Lord, 79, 159, 165ff., 171

_Empress of Britain_ (boat), 240

Eskimos, 43

Esquimault, 187

Exchange Hotel, 142


Faillon, Abb, 39

Farnsworth, 83

Ferguson, Alexander, 88

Finlay, James, 121

Fire Brigade, Montreal, 184

Fire Club and Fire Society, 146

Fleming, Sir Sanford, 167

Flood of 1861, 209

Fox, Captain, 35

Francis I, King, 9, 18

Franklin, Benjamin, 75, 112

Fraser, Colonel, 105

French Regime, 73ff.

French West India Company, 75

Frontenac, Comte de, 69, 70, 71ff.

Frontenac, Fort, 69, 71


Gage, General, 105

Galissonnire, M. de la, 91ff.

Galop Rapids, 207

Gama. _See_ Vasco

Garry, Fort, 192, 193

Gavazzi riots, 283ff.

_Gazette_, 137ff.

Geddes, Auckland, 235

_Geneva_ (boat), 173, 176

Gesu, Church of, 183

Gibb, Sir Alexander, 243

Gibbon, J. Murray, 197_n_.

Gladstone, Mr., 192

Glasgow, 173

_Gleneagles_ (wheat carrier), 262, 263

Goat Island, 173

Grand Sminaire, 54, 151

Grand Trunk Portland Railway, 176

Grand Trunk Railway, 172ff., 175, 177

Grant, Sir James, 300

_Graphic_ (London), 202

Gray, Edward W., 121

Great Britain, 189

Great Fire (1721), 81ff.

Great fires, 168ff.

Great North American Confederation of Sovereign States, 170

Great Sault (Lachine Rapids), 86

Great War, 185

Green Mountain Boys, 119

Green Mountains in Vermont, 320

Grey Nunnery, 140-41

Griffintown, nickname, 172, 184, 209

Guy, Pierre, 121

Guy Street, 80


Hakluyt, Richard, 16

Haldiman J. Colonel, 105

Halifax, 187

Harbour Bridge, 178, 244

Harbour Commissioners, 172, 242ff.

Harbour Gate, 78

Harvey Institute, 195

Hausmenil, Philippe-Vincent de, 66

Haviland, Captain, 99, 103

Haymarket, 184

Hazen, Colonel, 124

Head, Sir Edmund (Governor General), 177

Hennepin, Father, 68

Henry Morgan and Co., 215ff.

Henry, Alexander, 114

Henry, Judge, 123

_Hercules_ (ship), 144

Heron Island, 173

Hincks cabinet, 178

Hingston, Sir William, 300

Hochelaga, 1ff., 197, 231

Hochelaga (suburb), 222

Hodges, James, 180

Holliwell, 233

Holmes, Benjamin, 161

Holmes, Sherlock, 188

Home Rule, 191ff.

Honor Mercier Bridge, 244

Hotel Dieu, 47, 51, 58, 61, 181, 194

Hotel Dieu (church), 79ff.

Hotel Dieu (fire), 81ff.

House of Commons, 188

Howe, General, 105

Hudson Bay, 75

Hudson, H., 3

Hull, General William, 78, 138ff.

Hundred Associates, 50

Huntley, Richard, 121

Hurons, 43


Ice Palace, 211ff., 213

Ilot Normandin (Market Gate Island), 87, 145

Innis, H. A., 7_n_.

Irish Protestant Benevolent Society, 192

Iroquois, 33ff., 44ff., 48ff., 70ff.

Isle Perrot, 85


Jackson, Peto, Brassey, and Betts, contractors, 180

Jacques Cartier (bank), 194

Jacques Cartier Harbour Bridge, 178

Jacques Cartier Square, 74, 136

James, Captain, 35

Jesuits, 38, 78ff., 183;
  gardens of the, 75;
  Church of the, 147

Jogues, Father, 44ff.

_John Bull_ (ship), 144

Johnson, Sir John, 142

Johnson Mountain, 320

Johnson, Sir William, 105

Joint Board of Engineers, 265

Joliet, Louis, 68


Kalm, Peter, 90ff.

Karlsefini, Thorfinn, 5

Kennebec River, 123

King Edward Pier, 241

King of France, 75, 91

Kingsford, Professor, 123

Kingston, 69, 207

Knox Church, 183


La Barre, Governor, 18, 70

La Chine Seigneurie, 66

Lac  l'Outre, 87

Lachine, canal, 86, 144;
  massacre, 71

Lachine (town), 66, 93, 198

Lachine Rapids, 86ff., 203ff.

Lachine Road, 172

_Lady Eglington_ (boat), 173

_Lady Grey_ (boat), 250

Lafontaine, L. H., 165

Lafontaine Park, 178, 294

Lajeunesse, Marie, 181

Lake of the Two Mountains, 323

Lake Ontario, 205

Lake St. John, 107

Lalemant, Father, 38, 51

_La Minerve_, French paper, 154

La Prairie Basin, 87

La Salle (town), 66

_Laurentian_ (boat), 200, 255

Laval, Bishop, 55

Laval University, 309

Law Courts, 74

Le Fort des Messieurs, 47, 54

Lemoine, J. L., 117_n._

le Moyne, Charles, 58

le Moyne, Pierre, 58

Lescarbot, 9, 68

Lvis, Chevalier de, 100, 102

Liberal Government, 197

Lighthall, W. D., 17

Lincoln, Abraham, 182

Littlehales, Rev. Thomas, 296

Little Mountain, 319

Little River, 198

Liverpool, 173ff.

Livingstone family, 117

Logan, John, poet, 220

Logan's Farm, 178, 181

Long Sault, 51

Longue Point, 120

Longueuil, 58, 67, 120, 323

Longueuil, Baron de (Governor), 91

Lorimier, Chevalier de, 157

Lorne, Marquis of, 202

Louis XIV, 70

Louisburg, 85

Loyalists, 84, 127, 151, 170

Lucas, Sir C., 57, 69

Lundy, Rev. F. J., 296


Macdonald College, 67

Macdonald, Sir John A., 196, 197

Macdonald, Sir William, 292, 299ff.

MacKenzie, Alexander, 196

Macmillan, Hon. C., 293_n_., 297

MacNab, Sir Allan, 167

Macphail, J. G., 249

Macphail, Sir Andrew, 300, 311

Magellan, Fernando, 2

Maison des Prtres, La, 151

Maisonneuve, 209, 312ff.

Maisonneuve, fort, 89; house, 80

Maisonneuve, de, Paul de Chomedey, 37, 47, 49ff., 50, 56ff.

Maisonneuve, suburb, 232

Mance, Jeanne, 40, 47, 52

"Manchester Martyrs," 190

Manitoba Act of 1870, 193

Manitoba Boom, 197

Mansion House, 142

Marine Parade, 89

Maritimes, 193

Market Place, old, 80ff.

Marquette, Jacques, 68

Marryat, Captain, 155

Massachusetts Bay Colony, 325

Massachusetts, state of, 85

Maternity Hospital, 149

Mayor of Montreal, 316

McCallum, Professor, 300

McCrae, John, 311

McGee, Thomas D'Arcy, 190

McGill, James, 75, 111ff., 121, 127, 129, 131, 277, 285, 290, 293

McGill Medical Faculty, 149, 295

McGill University, 152, 177, 195, 288ff., 321

McIntosh, Colonel, 153

McTavish, Simon, 109, 129, 270

Mechanics Bank, 194

Mersey (river), 201

Metcalfe, Lord, 75ff., 164

Mezire, Pierre, 121

Mzy, M. de, 57

Michilimackinac, 84, 86

Micmacs, Indian tribe, 43

Mille Isles, 204

Miquelon (island), 6

Moffatt, Hon G., 161

Mohawk Indians, 18, 44, 71, 85

Mohawk Valley, 85, 105

Molson, John, 94, 136

Molson, William, 290

Molsons Bank, 183, 228

Monklands, 79, 167

Montagnais, Indian tribe, 43

_Montcalm_ (boat), 250

Montcalm, Marquis, 98ff., 102

Montgomery, General, 75, 113, 117ff., 122ff.

Montigny, L. de, 271_n._

Montmagny, M. de, 41

Montreal Fire Brigade, 184

Montreal Gas Light Company, 147

Montreal General Hospital, 141, 149

Montreal Hotel, 142

Montreal Ladies' Benevolent Society, 194

Montreal-Longueuil ferry, 174

Montreal Ocean Steamship Company, 173

Montreal Passenger Railway Company, 217

Montreal (seaport), 186ff.

_Montreal_ (steamer), 174

Montreal Stock Exchange, 228, 235

Moodie, Mrs. S., 150

Mount Royal (cemetery), 174

Mount Royal Hotel, 220

Mount Royal (town), 217, 313ff.

Mount Royal (suburb), 232

Mountain, Bishop George, 147

Mountain, Bishop Jacob, 147

Mountain Street, 78

Mountstephen, Lord (George Stephen), 299

Moyne, Charles le, 51

Munk, David, 144

Munro, W. B., 108

Murray, General, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109ff.

Musgrove, Lord, 162


Nansen, F., 5_n_.

Napoleon, 135, 136

Napoleonic Wars, 204

Narragansetts, 43

National (Tariff) Policy, 197

National Ports Board, 243

Nelson, Dr. W., 153, 155, 156, 157

Nelson Monument, 74, 136

Neurological Institute, 292

New Dominion, 185

New Jersey, 91

New Orleans, 325

New York, 325

New Zealand, 175

Niagara, 84, 178

_Normandie_ (boat), 239

Norsemen, 5

Northwest Territory, 192

Notre Dame, Church of, 61, 74, 79ff.

Notre Dame de Grace, 232

Notre Dame Street, 62, 78


O'Callaghan, Dr., 155ff.

Odelltown, 156, 166

Ogilvie (house), 181

Ogoki River, 265

Ojibways, 43

Old Gaol, 141

Old McGill House, 75

Ollier, Abb, 39

O'Neil, General, 190

One Hundred Associates, 38, 55

Oneidas, 44, 72

Onondagas, 18, 44, 72

Orange element in Ontario, 193

Orr's Hotel, 142

Osler, Sir Wm., 298ff.

Ottawa, 168, 188, 204, 217

Oyster Island, 145


Pacific Railway, 187

Pacific Scandal, 196

Panet, P., 121

"Panis" (Pawnes), 82

Papineau, L. J., 153ff.

Paris Exhibition, 177

_Parisian_ (boat), 200

Parkman, Francis, 51, 59

Parliament, British, 166

Parnell, Charles Stewart, 191ff.

Patriot's Square (_Place des Patriotes_), 157

Peace of Paris, 1763, 107

Peltrie, Madame de la, 41

Pennsylvania, 83

People's Ball, 181

Percival, W. P., 280

Perrot, Nicolas, 71

Peterson, Sir Wm., 300

Petit Sminaire, 141, 151

Phaneufs, _See_ Farnsworth

Pine Avenue, 313

Place d'Armes, 63, 74ff., 183

Place des Patriotes, 244

Place Royale, 22ff.

Plains of Abraham, battle of, 103

Point St. Charles, 51, 169, 172

Pointe  Callires, 41, 87

Pointe aux Trembles, 66

Polk, W. M., 61_n._

_Polynesian_ (boat), 200

Ponce de Lon, 3

Poncet, Father, 41

Pontiac's War, 106

Population of Montreal, 176, 194ff.

Port of Montreal, 237ff.

Port Royal, 33

Porte des Recollets, 78

Porte la Chine (gate), 78

Porte St. Martin, 78

Porteous, John, 114, 121

Prescott, 207

Prescott, General, 121

Prevost, Sir C., 138

Price, James, 124

Priests' Farm, 54, 151

Prince Albert Edward, 180ff., 289

Prince Consort, 182

Prince Edward Island, 187

Prince of Wales, 178, 180

Prince of Wales Terrace, 181, 234

Princess Louise, 202

Protestant House of Industry, 195

Protestant Infants' Home, 195

Puiseaux, M. de, 41


Quebec, 33ff., 75

Quebec Act of 1774, 113, 117ff.

Quebec Gate, 78

_Queen Elizabeth_ (boat), 239


Raimbault, Pierre, 48

Raleigh, 3

Ramezay, Chteau de, 73ff., 183

Ramezay, Claude de, 73, 75

Ramusio, G. B., 16, 318

Rapide Plat (Morrisburg), 207

Rasco's Hotel, 142

Raudot, Intendant, 84

Rebellion of 1837-38, 161

Rebellion of 1885, 187

Rebellion Losses Bill, 165ff.

Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, 171

Recollet (church), 147

Recollet Gate, 122

Recollet (suburb), 139

Red River, 192, 193

Red River Rebellion, 187

Redmond, John, 192

Redpath Crescent, 322

Redpath Library, 291

Rennes, College of, 46

Richelieu, Cardinal, 38

Richelieu (fort), 49

Richelieu River, 77, 84, 320

Riel, Louis, 192, 193

Rivard, A., 276_n_.

Rivire des Prairies, 66, 204

Rivire St. Pierre, 87

Roberval, Sieur de, 11

Rocky Mountains, 85

Roddick, Sir Thomas, 300

Rogers, Captain of the Rangers, 106

Rose, Sir John, 180

Ross, A. M., 180

Ross, J. K. L., 299

Rougemont (mountain), 320

Royal Artillery and Riflemen, 193

Royal Bank, 74

Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, 152, 294ff.

Royal Military College, 279

Royal Train, 175

_Royal William_ (boat), 144

Rutherford, Lord, 300

Ryswick, Peace of, 72


Sadler, H. C., 262

Saguenay, 12

Saint-Jean-de-Luz, 27

Salvation Army, 196

Sandham, A., 169

_Sarah Sands_ (boat), 173

_Sardinian_ (boat), 200

_Sarmatian_ (boat), 200ff.

Sault au Recollet, 25, 322

Saunders, Admiral, 102

_Savannah___ (ship), 144

Schools in Montreal, 281ff.

Schuyler, General, 118, 124

Scott, Thomas, 193

Seigniorial system, 64ff.

Seminary of Philosophy, 54

Senecas, 44

Senneville (fort), 323

Senneville (village), 323

Seven Years' War, 76

Shay and Merritt, building firm, 144

Sisters of Providence, 194

Smith, Donald. _See_ Strathcona

Smith, John, 325

Soddy, Professor, 300

Sons of Liberty, 155

Sorel, Fort, 60

Sorel (seigneurie), 67

South African War, 214

Spanish Succession, 72

Stebbins, G. W., 242

Stephen, George. _See_ Lord, Montstephen

Stephenson, Robert, 180

Stock Exchange. _See_ Montreal Stock Exchange

Strachan, Rev. John, 152, 293, 303

Strathcona, Lord (Sir Donald Smith), 213, 214, 291, 299ff., 308

Streets of Montreal, 286ff.

St. Ann's Market, 166

St. Antoine (suburb), 139

St. Bridget's Refuge, 195

St. Catherine Street, 184

St. Cungonde, 222, 232

St. Denis Street, 140

St. Eustache, 156, 323

St. Francis Lake, 207ff.

St. Franois Xavier Street, 62

St. Gabriel Street, 63

St. Helen's Island, 100, 105, 121

St. Hlne Street, 79

St. Henri (suburb), 222

St. Henry (town), 232

St. Jacques Street. _See_ St. James Street

St. James Street, 63, 78

St. Jean Baptiste, 79

St. John (St. Jean) River, 108

St. John's, 119, 121

St. Joseph, Shrine of, 319

St. Joseph Street, 47, 62

St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railway, 176

St. Lawrence Gate, 78

St. Lawrence Hall, 182

St. Lawrence Main Street, 184

St. Lawrence River, 77ff.

St. Lawrence timber rafts, 203

St. Louis (mission), 51

St. Louis (suburb), 232

St. Louis Lake, 87, 207

St. Martin's Brook, 42, 61

St. Patrick's Day, 192ff.

St. Patrick's Orphanage, 195

St. Paul Street, 47, 52, 57, 62, 80, 89ff.

St. Peter, Lake, 77

St. Pierre, Island of, 6

St. Pierre River, 42, 47, 52

St. Pierre Street, 62

St. Sulpice, Sminaire of, 39, 48, 59, 63, 78

St. Sulpice Street, 47

St. Thrse (fort), 60

St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary, 322

St. Vincent de Paul Society, 195

Ste. Anne (suburb), 139, 184

Ste. Anne's, 85

Ste. Anne de Beaupr, 319

Ste. Anne de Bellevue, 66, 85

Ste. Foye, Battle of, 103

Ste. Marie College, 79

Sulpicians, 47ff., 54ff., 64ff., 109

_Swiftsure_ (boat), 143

Sydenham, Baron, 161

"Sylvains" (Sullivan), 83


Tadoussac, 28, 77

Talon, Jean, 57, 68

_Thalia_ (ship), 144

Thtre Royal, 142

Thirty-ninth Regiment, 177

Thompson, Poullett, 161

Three Rivers, 77, 85, 106

Thwaites, R. G., 69_n._

Ticonderoga, Fort, 119

_Times_, London, 212

Todd, Isaac, 114, 138

Tombs, Lawrence, 86, 254

Tonnage, 183, 199

Toronto, 175, 188, 218

_Toronto_ (ship), 144

Torrance, John, 144

Tracy, Marquis de, 18, 57, 58

Traill, Mrs. C. P., 150

Treaty of Utrecht, 72ff., 76

Trent Affair, 181

Trinity Church, 183

Trinity House, 145

_Tunisian_ (boat), 203


United States, 170

University of Montreal, 308ff.

University of Toronto, 306

Upper Canada, 84, 91, 172

Ursulines, 38


Vancouver, 187

Varennes, 67

Vasco da Gama, 11

Vaudreuil, Chteau de, 89ff., 141

Vaudreuil, Marquis de, 85, 97ff., 98, 100ff.

Vaudreuil, Rigaud de, 85

Verchres, 67

Verchres, Madeleine de, 71

Verdun, 172ff., 232

Vrendrye, Pierre Gaultier de Varrenes de la, 85

Vermont, 182

Verrazano, Giovanni, 2, 9

Versailles, 82

Victoria (city), 187

_Victoria_ (boat), 203

Victoria Bridge, 177ff., 244

Victoria Pier, 199

Victoria Square, 181

Victoria Tubular Bridge, 178ff.

Victorian Nurses, 196

Ville Marie de Montreal, 37ff., 77

Ville Marie Mission, 194

Vimout, Father, 41, 45

Vinland, 5

Virginia, 83

_Virginian_ (boat), 203


Walker, Admiral, 140

Walker, Thomas, 111

Washington, 190

Waterworks, 146

Weir, Lieutenant, 155

Westmount (city), 232ff.

Windsor Hotel, 16ff., 139

Winter Carnival, 212

Wolfe, General, 86, 102

Wolseley, Colonel, 193

Wood, Rev., 296

Wooster, General, 124ff.

World War I, 187

Wyandot, 43

Wyoming Valley, 105


"York shilling," 94

Young, Hon. John, 178, 180, 233, 243

Youville Square, 166




[The end of _Montreal: Seaport and City_ by Stephen Leacock]
