INTO CANADA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3804, 8 February 1927, Page 18

INTO CANADA.

'i ' XIV. By Charles Wilson, ex-Parliarnentary Librarian. There, may bo -worse railroads in the world 'than the New York. Newhaveri, and Hartford line, which takes you from New York to Montreal. But fate does not destine me to travel by them. There are, I am told, some perfectly splendid trains in the United States—the New YorkChicago express, the Chicago-Philadelphia train, and others. Years ago I travelled from Buffalo to New York by the Black Diamond express, on the Leigh Valley line, and the speed and the accommodation and. the ’ smoothness were all that could be desired. But a night spent in travelling to Montreal from New York by this Newhaven line is something too awful for words. We are nearly, jolted out of our berths two cr three times, the cars are old and none too clean, and we are unfeignedly relieved when, at an early hour, wo cross the broad St. Lawrence and are soon safely ensconced at the big Windsor Hotel. I am told “the thing” is to go to the Mount Royal, hit the Windsor is central, . the accomwswuation good, almost luxurious,, and the charges quite reasonable, for this side of the Atlantic, at least. On the way up, at a decidedly matutinal hour, £_ ,y. raw ,the car curtains and. see the snow foiling fast—thin, not flaky snow, but soorj

altering the landscape. We leave New York in fine weather just before nine in the evening. At six in the morning it is snowing hard. We are suddenly transported from what was, I suppose the end of an Indian summer, and, behold! we are here in winter. A suitable greeting, this, from Our Lady of the Snows. CANADA’S BIGGEST CITY. A seat convenient to the spruiker, the gentleman who enlightens the company on the sight-seeing car -upon which we go round the. city, enables me to gather a rather disjointed but highly—-,informative mass of knowledge as to Montreal. There is a population of nearly a million. This is the biggest port-of Canada. Nothing is said of the period during which the navigation of the St Lawrence is blocked by ice, and the steamers have to remain at their berths and its trade is simply immense. There were nearly seven millions of tonnage in the harbour in 1925; this year it will be much more. This is the largest grain port in the world; Montreal has the biggest cathedrals in Canada—‘Have you seen our Notre Dame?”— Montreal has two universities, All Gill, the one which produced Stephen Leacock, the humorist, and the older one, the University of Montreal—all these and other facts are cast at you remorsely as bomb shells during the war I am greatly taken with Montreal. Round my hotel is the BritishCanadian quarter, the mercantile quarter, largely the official quarter. But as we drive round the city we see the older, French quarter, where practically everyone speaks the tongue of Gaul, and the Gallio element is everywhere prominent. Quebec, which I should dearly like to visit, is the real old French capital, but Montreal is the commercial centre. Southwards is Toronto, which I am to visit next, and

where everyone, or nearly everyone, is of Scots descent or extraction. Toronto is going ahead like wildfire, so tjiey say, but still Montreal has the biggest population. At Ottawa, the political capital, things official move, but it is at Montreal that the strings are pulled by which the political puppets are worked. At least so they say here., THE FRENCH-CANADIAN. In Eastern Canada, save, of course, in Ontario province, where the Caledonian element rules, it is the French-Canadian population which counts. In these eastern provinces the French influence is clearly uppermost. _ But, mind you, it is a FrenchCanadian influence, not the influence of modern Gaul. The Church—there is practically but one church here in Montreal and Quebec —rules supreme. You have only to recall the War and remember how the French-Canadian failed to espouse the cause of modern France. It is the France of the. eighteenth century that the French-Canadian, the voyageur, the small farmer, is sprung from. He gets on fairly well with his British-Canadian brother, on the whole, if not always in detail, and his politics are not those of Ontario and the prairie provinces. You have not been long in Canada, and talked to men of both sides, to know that. Assuredly, if the French-Canadian’ is not Imperialistic, he is not You will rarely find a Canadian of French origin who will advocate any merging into the United States. * He wishes to remain a Canadian to the end of the chapter, How French can be some parts of Montreal we can see for ourselves when one afternoon we take a stroll through the purely French market of Bon Secours. Tuesday, the day of our visit, is, I think, the special market day for the French settlers from

the country districts, and you will see the homespun suits and costumes and hear the quaint Norman patois which the original French settlers talked a good 300 years and far more ago. Bon Secours Church is the oldest in Montreal, and you can see that this is the historic city of Canada. THE RIVAL PARTIES. No doubt the church is very strong-here, and I have heard certain comments which go to show that in matters political some of the English-speaking elements do not hit it off very well with the French Canadians. But I am no politician and know v ?ry little of Canadian political alleged rights and wrongs. Unquestionably the nrst I ( rench explorers and settlers were not bent upon territorial conquest as much a ®. Ju® spreading of religion. But all this you can read for yourselves in the chronicles of the earlier missionaries. Later on came the political element, and it is easy to see how the clerical influence nas been continued and how naturally strong it must have been. It is not for the stranger to attempt to probe into problems, still less to take sides, although “ ee( i not be long in Montreal to find that both parties seek to impress the visitor with a sense of their own real or alleged rights. MONTREAL TO OTTAWA. It is snowing hard when we leave Montreal by a capital Canadian National train for the political capital, Ottawa. As we go along, the snow, however, clears off and we can see the country better. I hear they have had a very wet “fall ” or autumn, as we should say, and that a good deal of the wheat is “out” on the prairies which we are to traverse a few days later. I shall have something to sav later on as to this wondrous system of National whlch 18 styled the Canadian National line and to whose representatives in hew York and at Montreal I am greatly indebted for many courtesies and much useful information. To Mr Thompson, pubhcity manager for the Canadian National, whom 1 first meet, a very busy man, in New York, and who is enabled to make our stay in Montreal so enjoyable, I am particu.arly indebted. Like so man}' other Canadians, he has a keen eye to the importance of New Zealand, and is a warm advocate of the people of the two dominions, which have so much in common knowing each other better. Shortly after leaving Montreal we stay a few minutes at b amt Anne, first, however, passing Lachine an interesting little historical town whence La Salle, -Tie famous French exPi° rar > embarked as far back as the middle 2* I he m2 venteenth century, on his way Ihe ROO , (l fe Now actually imagined that sooner or later he and his companions would land in China, and the name of tne town Lachine w-as actually given it m jest. Only about a year later Lachine was destined J o be practically wiped out by a band of predatory Iriquois, of which J.”, - you can read for yourselves not a little in some of the novels of that Fenimore Cooper whose “Pathfinder,” “Deerslayer, and other stories were the delight ot my youth.

SAINT ANNE AND ITS SHRINE. Jiist before you leave the western end j l6 on which Montreal is situa r il x ge t lea the industrial suburbs ot that great city, you cross the river, Ottawa, near which you see the pictures- i old town of Saint Anne, made famous for many by that “Canadian Boat which Tom Moore wrote, and from which I make bold to take a few lines: — Faintly as tolls the evening chime Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time— Soon, as the woods on the shore look dim. We 11 sing at St. Anne our parting hymn. ■Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near and the daylight’s past. Tom Moore, that witty and clever Irishman, who wrote so many delightful ballads —shall we ever forget “The Last Rose of Summer ’—lived for a while at Saint Anne, where, I believe, you can still see his house. He had been in Bermuda, where he mdn t stay long as Registrar to the Admiralty. The tiny little church with its shrine at Saint Anne, at which the voyageurs used to utter their pious prayers before embarking upon the dangers of a trip west, across the Ottawa and so much further, was burned down about a year or so ago. Rebuilt, it has been burned down a second time, and, it is said, at Montreal and therabouts, that this was the work of some fanatical incendiary. With what truth I know not, but it seems a pity tnat so historical a place of worship should have been twice destroyed by fire.

AT OTTAWA. At Ottawa we are at the political capital of the great Dominion of Canada. You run across the Rideau River just as you enter tne station. This river, which joins the Ottawa near the city, owes its name to the first French voyageurs,"as they paddled m view of it, and, seeing the river tumbling over a rocky ledge into the Ottawa, noticed th Q spray in the form of a veil. Rideau Hall is the title of the official residence of the Govprnor-General. Here it was that lived Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, and her Scots husband, the Marquis of Lome. Here, too, lived another member of Queen Victoria’s family, the Duke of Connaught. Canada has had her share of British aristocracy at Rideau Hall, but she still remains intensely democratic at heart. It is quite easy to see that. She is soon, I believe, to have direct representation at Washington, but frqm what is said at Ottawa it- won’t matter very much _ to Imperial connections. The Canadian representative at the City of Magnificent Distances will, primarily and solely, attend to commercial relations between the two countries. The best thing to be seen at Ottawa is the huge block of legislative buildings, which stand upon one of the finest sites in the world. I was there in 1905 and never dreamt that this fine block was equivalent to saying it is commercially fated to be almost totally destroyed by fire in 1916, to be rebuilt after its original, purely Gothic design, in 1920. There is surely no such site in the world for a legislative building which is possessed ot such picturesque beauty as this and for this sight alone it is well for the New Zealand traveller to Europe, who goes by the Canadian route, one of the very best of all routes, for comfort and for variety, to make a short here. There are about- 140,009 people tn Ottawa, and I fancy the pubhp service is very well repre-

sented. They do say that since the Liberals nave come into power the number of public servants has enormously increased. But this is perhaps a Conservative cry. __We must “wait ana see” how many public servants will follow in the trail of Canberra, AT TORONTO. From Ottawa you run down a south-wes-tern slant to Lake Ontario, the first of the great lakes to the west, skirting the waterside and passing a lot of small towns which all look brisk and prosperous, and none of which possess Gallic names—a sign you have got right away from French Canada — till you roll into the fine National Railway depot at Toronto. At Toronto we put up at an old-fashioned, but very comfortable hostelry, at which I stayed when at Toronto 20 years ago, and find it as old-fashioned—-save for jazz dances in the evening—as it was then. I have yet to find the traveller who does not like Toronto. It is bustling and go-ahead; it is very ’Scots, which is solid; and it has some very fine publio institutions. A municipal authority, _to whom I am indebted for many courtesies, is good enough to inform me that m Toronto “64 per cent, of the people own their own homes.” Would that such could be said of a New Zealand city! Also, a good point, the charges for lighting—the power comes from Niagara Falls —are the lowest in all America and Canada. The residential lighting rate for a six-roomed house averages only a dollar a month or so. I am greatly struck by the extent and beauty of Toronto’s university buildings. To the ornamentation of some of the university grounds I am told that the students themselves have greatly contributed by sound, hard, manual work, and by the monetary generosity of their parents. Alas, I call to mind the truly awful state of a roadway to a certain university college I know of in New Zealand, and think of the things which ought to be done—and are not. Some of our university men and the students ought to come to Canada and see how they do things here. TORONTO’S PUBLIO SPIRIT. Then, the gardens and homes of Toronto are a lesson from which much could be learned. It is a tough work, gardening in Canada, where the winter months are so long, and you can never expect to. see the same beautiful gardens you see in New Zealand and Sydney. . But is is astonishing what can be done in the way of beautifying a city when the hearts of the citizens are in the right place. There is a fine civic pride here, a public spirit in everything, which works wonders, and which, I for one. wish were more present where I come from. Of all cities I see on this side of the Atlantic, Toronto most takes my fancy. I like the place, and I like the people. I am told the picture shows prosper exceedingly, but, on the other hand, the people are very thrifty. That’s the Scots blood in them, I suppose. At least they look all very prosperous, though in the winter months the place is invaded by unemployed, and there is a “bread line” which has to be dealt with. This is a big manufacturing city, and it seems to me that they can make everything here just as well as in the United States. Best of all, the place has the lowest death-rate but one —identity not disclosed by my table of statistics—of all the cities on the American continent. Evidently there is not much the matter with Toronto. A DAY AT NIAGARA FALLS.

Of course, we could not visit America without seeing the famous Niagara Falls. We go down to Niagara one Sunday—the better the day the better the deed—and have a thoroughly enjoyable time. It is a pleasant two hours and a-half trip to Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side of which we alight. Here at this station you can connect, if you desire, for Buffalo the Wonderful —concerning which a good American “drummer” on the train tells us, it is miles beyond anything you can see in Toronto —for New York, and so forth. On the Canadian side of the river there is a public park of some 1500 acres, controlled by the Government of Ontario and most beautifully laid out with drives and walks. It is a great place this for summer visitors. The day is fine and clear, although we are told there has been much rain here, and we are lucky enough to find a chauffeur who is not only reasonable in his charges, but knows the Falls, both on the Canadian and American sides, from A to Z, and is full of chatty and. well-planned information. At first, as we drive along the park below the Falls, there may be, I must confess, some slight feeling of disappointment. But alight and stay a few moments gazing at the mighty flow of water, and gradually there comes over you a sensation as of quiet enchantment. It is really a most wonderful sight. At one spot, close to the Falls, you descend a long rocky passage to a point where you don waterproofs and big gum boots, and are soon avtually below the descending waters, the roar of which is so great as to cause you to shout aloud to your companions. It is an awesome and wonderful experience, never to be forgotten. The Falls come over a sheer escarpment averaging 165 ft, and in " such volume as to be capable of generating about 1,200,000 horse-power of hydroelectric energy. A COMPARISON. This power is dealt with at power stations on both sides of the river, but whereas on the Canadian side the stations are trim, sightly buildings, and the sides of the stream are as Nature left them, on the American side is nothing but an uncomeliness which is positively ugly. The Canadians have assuredly all the better of the comparison._ Of the two towns •- separated by the" river it is easy to see the Canadian town is -well laid out, well kept in every way, whereas when you cross the bridge to the American side untidiness meets you on every band. The American town is far the larger, but unquestionably the less pretty. Crossing to Goat Island we get some fine views of the two Falls, which seem so close to the water that the experience is decidedly weird. In the summer time the crowd of tourists is so great that vantage spots from which the Falls may be viewed are almost inaccessible at times. One thing, I think, the tourist from New Zealand should make a point of noting, and that is to take his luncheon on the American side of the river. At the Canadian town the restaurants —if our own experience be any guide—are but poor. From Niagara back to Toronto is a pleasant enough journey, but barring the vineyards, which are unusually plentiful, although of course the vines are all bare, there is not much to be seen of any interest. A day or two more in Toronto and we are off west to Winnipeg by the splendid National train.