Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 4

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IN the sunlit year of 1910 an unsuspecting Canada began the most painful and momentous years of its education for nationhood. For all it knew of what lay ahead, it might have been a happy child swinging a five-cent scribbler in one hand and a shiny new pencil box in the other on the way to the first day of school.

Canada’s nationhood was already more than half won and the rest was within certain grasp. But the education needed to make it fruitful had a long way yet to go. The phase now beginning on the threshold of a new general election was to see bitter conflicts within the country’s borders and draw it deeply into two wars beyond them. It was to revolutionize Canada’s economy, its individual ways of living, its philosophy of government, and its whole attitude and relation to the world.

But in 1910 the impending deluge of events was not discernible even at its sources, much less on the far-off tidal flats of North America. For most Canadians their country’s greatest hazards were securely lost in the past, among the shadows of the Hurons and Iroquois, the Plains of Abraham, the Family Compact, and the War of 1812. The most serious of them all, the affair between Wolfe and Montcalm, was not quite forgotten, but its scars had nearly ceased to throb and what new grains of salt fell on them were apt to be directed more by carelessness than by malice.

For almost a decade and a half the Protestant English “conquerors” had loyally accepted and indeed helped to elect as their Prime Minister one of the Catholic French “conquered.”

It was true that there recently had been a not well resolved altercation between the two main branches of the Canadian family concerning the country’s involvement in the South African War of 1899-1902; English Canada had wanted more involvement, French Canada had wanted none. Too, there were fresh quarrels about separate Catholic schools in the fast-growing West. By and large, nevertheless, Canada was living comfortably in its two solitudes in the golden, unauspicious year of 1910.

The wondrous new age of gadgetry and gingerbread was well under way, and new shrines and talismans, and slightly old ones grown in splendor, gleamed and beckoned from every quarter of the compass: the Model-T and the gasoline tractor, the Comptometer, the time clock, the alarm clock; Palmolive soap and Blue Jay corn plasters; Puffed Wheat, Shredded Wheat, and ketchup; the electric iron, the electric toaster, the soda fountain, the fountain pen, the flashlight; the portable outboard motor and the waterproof, gentleman’s washable collar, the Dictaphone and the Gramophone. Not all these benefices, to be sure, were within the reach of everyone—not with farm labor running around twenty-five dollars a month, a good hired girl half that much, and six-room houses renting at twenty dollars and more. It was also true that behind the glittering façade a person with a sharp eye could detect intimations of decay. The turkey trot, the bunny hug, and the puppy snuggle were imminent and implicit in the nature of the times, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was able to report with even more assurance than usual that in the past twelve months another fifteen hundred once wholesome Canadian girls had been spirited away to white slavery, mostly in Chicago, and mostly because of drink or drugs. As against this testimony to social malaise it could be proved by government statistics that in the entire forty-three years since Confederation only 305 divorces had been granted in the whole Dominion and that the average adult was drinking no more than a gallon and a half of whisky a year and smoking only four cigarettes a week.

The year before had not been a prosperous one, but the coal strikes had ended in Nova Scotia and new railway lines were stretching farther into the growing West. The railways were still a—perhaps still the—prime source of public satisfaction. Even poets stood before their builders in self-abnegating reverence; the well-known literary man Arthur Stringer wrote in the Toronto Globe’s New Year’s Day edition: “The sad truth is our whole busy bunch of novelists and storytellers and verse-writers today constitute nothing more than an attenuated choir of street sparrows, chirping disconsolately from the rafters of a locomotive roundhouse. Canada’s great artists today are Shaughnessy and Mann and Mackenzie and Charlie Hays and those epic-minded workers who are writing a new kind of blank verse in town sites and railway iron and grain routes.” Despite such thoughtful homage, the railway heroes got their names in the papers somewhat less frequently than the hockey heroes: Joe Malone and Joe Hall of the world-champion Quebec Bulldogs, and Cyclone Taylor, the already legendary “man who scored goals skating backward,” who had just been stolen from Ottawa by the upstart town of Renfrew on the offer of four thousand dollars for ten weeks.

A cynic might have said the eastern respect for railway iron and grain routes reflected nothing deeper than the scent of new profits for the bankers, middlemen, and merchants who provisioned the travelers and dwellers thereon and later bought and sold their produce. But something more exciting was involved too. A new current was in motion within the mainstream of human history. The railways opened up a new caravan trail for the restless, the driven, and the questing and led them to the heartland of Canada. The travelers set forth on many impulses and from many places: some drawn by fear, some by ambition, some by faith, some by gullibility. There were earthy mystics from Russia; heartsick Ukrainians without land and without a country; Cockneys from the crowded East End mews; younger sons of gentry from Surrey and Kent; Ontario farm boys; ranchers from Texas, Oklahoma, and Montana cramped by fences.

The immediate lures had been and were the offer of free homestead land and the persuasiveness of the Dominion Department of the Interior, the Canadian Pacific and Grand Trunk railways, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and a few private colonization concerns. For twenty years all these agencies had pooled their resources behind one of the largest, noisiest, and most successful medicine shows of all time. It covered two continents and was conducted in a dozen languages. Its message was simple and direct: Whatever ails you, come to western Canada! In its role as chief barker, the federal government published millions of pamphlets extolling the large stretches of still unsettled land and offering it gratis to anyone who would come and get it. In impressive rounded phrases worthy of a multi-lingual Phineas T. Barnum, its literature cajoled the Swedes in Swedish, harangued the Germans in German, beguiled the French in French, coaxed the Hollanders in Dutch, wheedled the Norse in Norwegian.

A generation before, the white population of the Canadian prairie, from the Red River across a third of the world’s third-largest country to the Rockies, had been only sixty thousand. Now it was a million.

In a country of three million square miles, whose total population had grown to only seven million in three hundred years, this was an impressive rate of growth. And its impressiveness was only underlined by the anachronisms and paradoxes. The first gasoline tractors were already appearing, but the last teams of sturdy Doukhobor women, harnessed to a single-furrow plow, could still be seen on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In Winnipeg, Regina, and Calgary the wooden mansions of the middlemen were multiplying fast, but in the intervening subcontinents of wheat and prairie grass there were more sod huts and poplar cabins. There were a few hundred miles of roads safe for automobiles, but bull trains still creaked and rumbled up to the new frontier on the Peace River and pack ponies stood bolt upright and stone dead, mired in the muskeg of the Edson Trail.

The Canada of the early 1900s remained, in short, very much a pioneer country. Along with the pioneer’s traditional eagerness for new adventures it also inherited his traditional hostility to new ideas. If there was any shifting pattern or augury of change in the news of the world outside, it was almost as hard to perceive from the six-story skyscrapers of Toronto and Montreal as from the poplar cabins of the prairie.

Who could have seen any possible meaning for Canada in the fact that when Czar Nicholas of Russia walked behind the bier of his great-uncle in the snow of St. Petersburg it was thought necessary to line the funeral route with three solid miles of soldiers in order to protect the Czar from terrorists? What homesteader in the West or what tenth-generation tiller of a few score arpents beside the St. Lawrence could be expected to expect that he or his children would be affected in the remotest way by a coming fight between a corporation called U.S. Steel and a man called Samuel Gompers? If Arthur Balfour’s warning that Germany was arming at a dangerous rate struck closer to home, it still seemed too outlandish to worry about, particularly in view of the fact that Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George accused him of trying to catch votes by spreading panic.

Even if they had had the desire to weigh these shadowy portents, Canadians still lacked the means either to weigh them independently or to do anything about them. Though Canada had obtained and was exercising almost complete control over its internal affairs, it still dealt with the world outside as a ward of Great Britain. It discoursed and bargained with foreign governments through British embassies and consulates. Britain negotiated and signed Canada’s treaties, and not always to Canada’s advantage or with Canada’s free consent. British officers commanded and trained the meager Canadian army, and in the absence of a Canadian navy of any sort Britain maintained its own naval bases on both Canadian coasts. For diplomatic intelligence, Canadian statesmen could read the newspapers or wait for such sparse and grudging reports as those appearing in the irregular dispatches from the British Colonial Office to the Governor General.

Although it had led in the recent past to a good deal of unpleasantness over Atlantic fishing rights and the Alaskan boundary, Canada’s position of tutelage was by no means universally deplored. Many French-Canadians saw in it their surest defense against engulfment by the English-Canadian majority. Many English-Canadians saw in it a simple and wise acceptance of two simple and unchallenged precepts: the rightness of everything that was British and the Britishness of everything that was right.

Deep in the heritage of every Canadian boy and girl who had gone to school outside Quebec lay the seeds of his or her personal education for nationhood. For more than a century the basic texts for citizenship in the English-speaking parts of the country had been books either borrowed straight from England or borrowed from England and slightly modified. In their spirit and chief message they found their exemplar and perennial best seller in the Ontario Readers.

The Ontario Fourth Reader of 1910 is perhaps worth a moment’s attention, if only for the Talmudic certainty it brought to bear on moral and political questions, as did several generations of its ancestors and cousins.

On the flyleaf, beneath the Union Jack, appeared the motto “One Flag, One Fleet, One Throne.” Some verses from Deuteronomy 8 faced the first page of text: “For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, springing forth in valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.

“And thou shalt eat and be full, and thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which He hath given thee.”

The first page was Kipling: “Oh Motherland, we pledge to thee, Head, heart and hand through years to be.” The last page was Kipling too: Recessional. The first picture in the volume was a portrait of the late King Edward VII; he looked out approvingly on Shakespeare’s verses on ingratitude and the ending of a vignette by George Eliot on life in an English public school. Nor was there a word in the four hundred pages that followed to which the departed monarch could possibly have taken exception. There were verses from Browning:

Oh, to be in England

Now that April’s there ...

There were verses from Henley:

Mother of Ships whose might,

England, my England,

Is the fierce old Sea’s delight,

England, my own,

Chosen daughter of the Lord,

Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword,

There’s the menace of the Word

In the Song on your bugles blown, England—

Out of Heaven on your bugles blown!

There was a hymn of empire by the Canadian divine F. G. Scott:

Strong are we? Make us stronger yet;

Great? Make us greater far;

Our feet Antarctic oceans fret,

Our crown the polar star.

There were, of course, Thomson’s Rule, Britannia, Scott’s Love of Country, Thomas Campbell’s “Ye Mariners of England,” Maccaulay’s The Armada, Byron’s The Eve of Waterloo, Tennyson’s Funeral of Wellington, Felicia Hemans’ The Homes of England, and Sir Francis Hastings Doyle’s The Private of the Buffs:

Yes, Honor calls!—with strength like steel

He put the vision by;

Let dusky Indians whine and kneel,

An English lad must die.

The praise of militarism, Imperialism, and England was by no means confined to the poetry selections. William Howard Russell wrote of Balaclava, Southey of the death of Nelson, and Goldwin Smith of London. Under the title “An Elizabethan Seaman,” James Anthony Froude contributed an essay on the special joy it gives God to see a man die with his boots on. And although it was widely believed that the sole criteria for inclusion in the Ontario Readers were literary excellence and the audience’s range of comprehension, the Ontario Fourth Reader of 1910 devoted five full pages to an unsigned article from the Atlantic Monthly stating that, thanks to her colonial and naval power, Britain could win any conceivable war against any conceivable enemy, including the United States.

There was no compulsion on the children of English Canada—any more than there had been on their parents or their parents’ parents—to accept wholly or only the patterns of thought imparted in their public schools. It is equally true that most other nations were bringing up their own young to attitudes at least as jingoistic, unsophisticated, and bloodthirsty. In following the general example, Canada may, nevertheless, have taken extra risks and made itself liable, later, to extra penalties.

For while English Canada’s historic faiths and prejudices were being settled and solidified in one direction, French Canada’s were being settled and solidified in another. The Canada which solicited the loyalty of the French-Canadian schoolchild took its roots and values from the ancien régime. Drake and Nelson and the Thin Red Line were almost wholly foreign to it. The equivalent heroes, who had the considerable virtue of being far closer to home both historically and geographically, were Champlain, the Jesuit Martyrs, and Dollard’s heroes of the Long Sault. In the literature classes of French Canada the English classical poets and writers received approximately as much attention as those of Spain and Germany.

The differences in tradition and values seemed, however, at the start of the century’s second decade, to be a somewhat less serious irritant than they had been during most earlier decades. Perhaps the “language difficulty,” which had so often widened the divisions of race and religion in the past and was very soon to be doing so again, really had in times of natural quiet some of the virtues of a sedative. So long as there was no cause for serious trouble, it sometimes seemed that there was no cause for any trouble at all. What, after all, if les Anglais did take as their household gods small silk Union Jacks and enameled sea shells sent over from Blackpool instead of wall crucifixes and portraits of the Pope? What if the French did close their stores and send up fireworks on the feast days of obscure and doubtful saints while virtually ignoring Victoria Day and turning their backs on the Glorious Twelfth? It was a free country and no man was obliged to argue with the misguided in small affairs or defer to them in large ones. Canada’s chances of burying the family skeleton within the next twenty-five years—or at least of speeding up the slow and painful process of digging it a decent grave—seemed more promising than they had been in a hundred and fifty years.

But before the year was nicely started the placid climate already began changing for the worse. Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government proposed to build a Canadian navy.

The navy itself was not to be nearly so far-ranging or important as the decision to build it. The sea of debate it churned up, with its floods and eddies, its suddenly remembered backwaters, and its wild crests, was to surge back and forth across the country’s political landscape for at least forty more years. Laurier himself was engulfed by it. So, much later, were his opponents, the Conservatives. Even the sure-footed Mackenzie King came near to being swept away in the third main inundation.