Pictures Of Canadian Life - J. Ewing Ritchie - Bog

Lunching one day in Toronto with one of the aldermen of that thriving city (I may as
well frankly state that we had turtle-soup on the occasion), he remarked that he had
been in London the previous summer, and that he was perfectly astonished at the idea
Englishmen seemed to have about Canada. He was particularly indignant at the way in
which it was coolly assumed that the Canadians were a barbarous people, planted in a
wilderness, ignorant of civilization, deficient in manners and customs a well-meaning
people, of whom in the course of ages something might be made, but at present in a very
nebulous and unsatisfactory state. It seems my worthy friend had gone to hear a
popular Q.C. a gentleman of Liberal proclivities, very anxious to write M. after his name
deliver a lecture to the young men of the Christian Association in Exeter Hall on Canada.
Never was a man more mortified in all his life than was the alderman in question. All
the time the lecture was being delivered, he said, he held down his head in shame. ¿I
felt,¿ said he, rising to a climax, ¿as if I must squirm!¿ What ¿squirming¿ implies the
writer candidly admits that he has no idea. Of course, it means something very bad. All
he can say is, that it is his hope and prayer that in the following pages he may set no
Canadian squirming. He went out to see the nakedness, or the reverse, of the land, to
ask the emigrants how they were getting on, to judge for himself whether it was worth
any Englishman¿s while to leave home and friends to cross the Atlantic and plant
himself on the vast extent of prairie stretching between Winnipeg and the Rocky
Mountains. What he heard and saw is contained in the following pages, originally
published in the Christian World, and now reproduced as a small contribution to a
question which rises in importance with the increase of population and the growing
difficulty of getting a living at home.