Delphi complete works of.., p.758
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 758
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 Théâtre 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.
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. 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 Château 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.
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, 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.
There followed the famous theatricals (1842) played with huge success in the old Théâtre 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.
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. 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 Château 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.
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, 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.
