Delphi complete works of.., p.740
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 740
The present war brought more direct action. Housing became a defence measure. By 1941 about $290,000,000 had been made available for house-building by the Army, the Navy and the Federal Works Agency.
All this, of course, is just a beginning. The United States Government, once started, will move with giant steps and build with a giant’s hand. The old desire, prevalent in the fabulous forties, to “lick all creation,” is not yet dead.
But it is not possible to indicate, except with a bare mention, all the vast field of social benefit now covered by democratic government. In addition to the things cited there occur at once the parks and playgrounds, the public (municipal and other) concert halls. Notable is the whole apparatus of public sanitation and public health, as contrasted with the plague and pestilence of pre-democracy days, the jail fevers, the sweeping epidemics, the rotting graveyards where death itself bred death.
Much of course remains to do. We have not yet contrived to give to the people the “bread and work for all” that once seemed the boast of America. Our unstable industry staggers, breaks and falls. The sunshine and shadow of good times and bad sweep over the windswept landscape. Yet we have done enough to know that the rest is some day within our reach. Already, if we look rather at what has been done than at what is still to do, the gain is great. The merest glance at statistics shows us that in the last one hundred years the ordinary hours of labour have been cut by one-third, from twelve to eight per day. Wages, as reckoned in what money will buy, have more than doubled in this period. The wages of the skilled workers, the aristocracy of labour, have passed those enjoyed a hundred years ago as the salaries of the middle class.
This obvious view of the progress of free democracy we did not see in the broad sunshine of what seemed world peace. The defects of the foreground showed too clearly; the meaning of the wider view was lost. Now in the lurid light of threatened destruction we can judge better what was.
All this represents a wonderful record, an advance in social progress to which previous history has no parallel. But we must remember that no code or social legislation, no written law, can of itself guarantee true democracy and preserve liberty. The spring can rise no higher than its source. Democracy must continue to be fed from the altitude of the high ideals that founded it.
Here, then, is the summation of the matter. We had thought, the decent people in all countries, that government by the people under democracy, and with it equal liberty for all, were things definitely achieved. We were forgetting the long struggle and the heroic sacrifice that gave them to the world. Bygone tyrannies and cruelties were forgotten in the nearer perspective of lesser things. Hence came a kind of inertia — a little slumber, a little sleep, a little folding of the hands to sleep — and thereby a creeping paralysis that made us almost let freedom slip from our hands.
Now has come the awakening, and even with all its horror and dismay a new inspiration is born for freedom that will bring it back to the world. But we have learned now that it can never survive on form alone. There is no formula for self-government among bad men. For all things in the world the spirit comes first. Liberty can only serve and survive among people worthy of having it. The soul alone can animate the body.
Montreal: Seaport and City
CONTENTS
Preface
CHAPTER I. Hochelaga
CHAPTER II. Place Royale
CHAPTER III. Ville Marie de Montreal
CHAPTER IV. A Half Century of Struggle
CHAPTER V. The Old French Regime in Montreal
CHAPTER VI. The Capitulation of Montreal
CHAPTER VII. The American Occupation of Montreal
CHAPTER VIII. Lower Canada
CHAPTER IX. Montreal
CHAPTER X. Montreal
CHAPTER XI. Montreal in the Twentieth Century
CHAPTER XII. The Port of Montreal
CHAPTER XIII. French and English
CHAPTER XIV. McGill University
CHAPTER XV. Come Up on the Mountain
CHAPTER XVI. L’Envoi: The Problem of a Great City
APPENDICES
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
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 Núñez Balboa had seen the unlimited Pacific, during his famous silence on his peak of Darien, 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, Gómez) 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.
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 León, 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, 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.
