Delphi complete works of.., p.760
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 760
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.
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 Châteauguay.
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 Château de Ramezay, the garden secluded from sight behind the Séminaire. 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 9½ was par, at which resting place a hundred pounds’ sterling was worth $4.86-2/3 in Canadian money. No teller ever knew why 9½ was par. The secret was closely kept. It really meant that if you added 9½ 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:
A. Descelles, The “Patriotes” of 1837.
A. Sandham, Ville Marie, 1870.
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.”
