spent a short time in endeavouring unsuccessfully to make their living in the outside world. This was of course not always the case. The boys were educated in the agricultural school of the colony, and some of the least unpromising were sent to Java. There a certain proportion of them did well. Of those who were sent from the colony to employment in Holland some succeeded, but many returned to the colony to spend there the remainder of their days, in the same way as their parents and grandparents had done. I found also that the average number of children in the colony family was somewhat higher than the average number of children in Holland generally at that time.1

Having some private business to attend to, I had to go to Utrecht the next day; but in a few days I returned to Fredericksoord, and at greater leisure made the acquaintance of the colonists, their families, and the schools in which their young people were taught. On my way to or from the colony I spent a night at Assen, and was amused to find in the inn a number of Frisians talking in a dialect which I found little difficulty in understanding, owing to its resemblance to that of Aberdeenshire.

1

1 Details of the results of this examination of the books of the colony are to be found in Agencies and Methods, cited above.

CHAPTER XXII

CANADA IN 1892

Keep us, O Thetis, in our western flight!
Watch from thy pearly throne

Our vessel, plunging deeper into night

To reach a land unknown.

JOHN DAVIDSON, Scaramouch in Naxos (1889).

ON my return from Germany in September 1892 I rejoined my family at Lundin Mills, in Fifeshire. I found myself in a colony of another variety. Here the colonists also laboured, but in a different field and with a different outlook upon life. Lundin Mills is near Largo, celebrated as the reputed birthplace of Robinson Crusoe, of whom there is a statue in the main street. Largo is a fishing village of some antiquity, and even now of importance. The Bass Rock looms up in the distance seawards, and eastward and westward by land are the links which in an almost unbroken line extend round the coast to St. Andrews. The colony at Lundin Mills was a colony of artists. Among these were Frank Newbery, the headmaster of the Glasgow School of Art,' and Hugh Cameron, a Scots painter of note. Newbery had asked me to sit for my portrait, and he had finished it when I was called to Oxford to see W. J. Ashley, who had just resigned the Chair of Political Economy in the University of Toronto in order to go to a similar position in Harvard University. Shortly afterwards I was appointed his successor at Toronto.

I sailed from Glasgow for New York in the middle of October. Although I have crossed the Atlantic many times since then, my first voyage was by far the worst. About the twentieth of the month we passed into the region of a storm. This storm was known afterwards as the Bermuda Hurricane. Never in any ocean have I experienced anything like it. The ship, the Furnessia, was of about five thousand tons, but she was tossed like a cork in the tremendous seas. For two days we made almost no progress. Hatches were fastened down, and there was no access to the deck. The captain was on the bridge continuously, and on Sunday he sent me a message asking me to take Now Sir Wm. J. Ashley of Birmingham University.

1 Cf. p. 233.

prayers for him in the saloon. I held on to a post and managed to get through the service. Very few of the passengers emerged from their berths. On the third day of the storm I was able to go on deck, and with great difficulty made my way by holding on to a rope to the chart-room. It would be difficult to exaggerate the height of the waves. When we were in the trough of the seas they seemed to tower above the funnels and threatened to overwhelm the ship. To avoid the centre of the storm vortex we had to go out of our course, but when we came to the banks of Newfoundland we passed out of the hurricane into comparative calm and shallow, smooth seas. We reached New York a couple of days late. I did not tarry there at that time, but went on to Boston, where I found Ashley already installed at Harvard. He was very kind and helpful, and I spent a few days with him, meeting several of his colleagues, e.g. Dr. Dunbar, veteran of Civil War days and head of the Economic Department, Taussig, Hart, and others. We called upon General Francis A. Walker, the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known not only as economist but also as diplomatist. The talk fell on the silver situation, for Walker had a hereditary interest in currency, his father, Amasa Walker, having written many years ago an important book on the subject. Speaking of the demonetisation of silver resulting from the action of Germany in calling in her silver coinage after the Franco-Prussian War, Walker said that he believed this action was determined upon by Germany in order to demoralise the financial system of France, and thus to retard or prevent her economic recovery from the exhaustion occasioned by the war. This explanation was new to me. Writing about it afterwards to Foxwell, I found that he also entertained the same view. I did not, however, feel convinced by the argument. In the first place there were other causes for the demonetisation of silver-notably the increase in production which had begun to manifest itself in the early seventies and the condition of the silver coinage of the different States of Germany, which necessitated recoinage as well as a reorganisation of the currency system of the new empire. The fact that the demonetisation of silver would injure France as well as Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, the United States, and India, and through India Great Britain, was no doubt foreseen; but it is hard to believe that the currency policy of Germany was determined by that consideration. I am inclined to believe that the German Government was indifferent to the consequences of its monetary policy excepting as concerned Germany.

I found Boston much more like an English city than New York.

The streets were narrow and winding. The deadly directness of the New York thoroughfares was absent. At that time (1892) the street railway ran on the surface of Tremont Street alongside the Common. At the so-called "rush hours," when people were going home from business, between five and seven o'clock in the evening, the cars were crowded to suffocation inside, and along the footboards as many people as were able to obtain a foot- and hand-hold clung to them outside. Ere long the rails were to be removed from Tremont Street, a system of subways was to be made, and overcrowding was to be prevented by rigorously enforced regulation.

When I arrived in Toronto the street cars were drawn by horses, as they were in Glasgow when I left it; but a fortnight after my arrival the electrical system, which had been in preparation for some time, was inaugurated. Electrical power was generated by means of steam engines; these were some years later to be replaced by the turbines of Niagara.

I had been struck by the beauty of the autumnal foliage in Boston, and on the way from that city via Albany and Buffalo. In Toronto the foliage was very fine. Horse chestnuts, lining many of the streets and avenues and affording a delightful shade, were becoming rusty; but the maples were superb. In the parks and gardens the maples gave a note of gorgeous red and yellow, while in the suburbs the shumac shrubs were brilliant scarlet. There is a peculiar pungency in the air of North America in the fall, which may perhaps be attributed to the change of the leaf. From an eminence like the tower of the University, or the higher tower of Upper Canada College in the north of the city, Toronto looked like a settlement in a forest. When the trees were in leaf they concealed all but the high buildings, and in 1892 there were no buildings more than about sixty feet in height. Now there are many "sky-scrapers," and these have changed materially the aspect of the city.

The growth of a lake town inevitably acquires a character peculiar to its position. Toronto was situated between two rivers—the Don and the Humber-at the points where they flow into Lake Ontario. The original settlement was extended along the lake shore for a short distance west of the mouth of the Don. Gradually the settlement grew northwards, sometimes jumping over long distances, and established itself sporadically on the thoroughfare from Toronto into the interior. This thoroughfare, Yonge Street, extends from the lake northwards to Lake Simcoe, a distance of about forty miles. From the end of the eighteenth century settlers established themselves upon it. There

still remain a few of the adobe or sun-dried brick houses and barns of these early inhabitants. I have elsewhere given an account of the attempted settlement about twenty miles north of Toronto of French émigrés, under the leadership of the Comte de Pousaye.1 A group of French ladies and gentlemen reached their intended settlement in a sadly bedraggled condition, and after a struggle against adverse Nature sold or abandoned the land that had been granted to them by the British Government. The only important survivor of this ill-fated enterprise was a youth called Quetton, who came as a servant and lived to buy out his masters. He took the name of St. George, lived to a great age, acquired much land, and bequeathed a large estate to his descendants.

While sporadic settlement took place northwards, the population of the town settled in the arc of a circle, the chord being the lake shore. This arc has gradually extended until now the city extends beyond both rivers and northwards for many miles. The country to the north of Toronto is broken by the valleys of the two rivers and those of their numerous tributary streams. These valleys are sometimes narrow and form ravines, many of which remain, bridges over them having enabled the population to spread beyond them. Natural parks of great beauty have thus been plentifully provided.

Coming as I did from closely built towns, and familiar as I was with congested districts in these, the most striking feature of Toronto was the wide area over which the population was spread. The city presented the aspect of a rural village on a large scale. Even the smallest houses had garden space, and the larger houses had from a quarter of an acre upwards in all parts of the city, there being even some of these in the very heart of it surrounded by factories and business premises. Mr. Goldwin Smith's house, for example, in 1892 was in the heart of the city and yet was surrounded by a demesne of about seven acres. There were several houses in its neighbourhood with demesnes of from one to five acres. These wide spaces were valuable from an æsthetic as well as a sanitary point of view, as were even the smaller lots upon which less imposing dwellings were built. Yet this generous distribution of land involved distance between the houses, distance between the houses involved streets of an extent very great in proportion to the numbers of persons inhabiting them, and these conditions involved relatively heavy municipal expenditure for the maintenance of the streets and for the provision of public services, such as water supply, sewerage, lighting, and transport. For this 1 In my forthcoming Economic History of Canada.