Pride and prejudice
In the last decades of the nineteenth century Toronto could be seen at its best and at its worst. The first was evident to the inhabitants and the second to outsiders. Size, population, and economic strength gave easy assurance of supremacy in Ontario. In an age weighed down by economic depression many people still lived comfortably, and if not all did that was the way of the world. Manifest physical progress was a source of justifiable pride, and behind the bricks and mortar were manifestations of the mind and the spirit.
For himself and his fellows a Torontonian might paint a rosy picture, but the chances of impressing others were less certain. Toronto was not popular. It was accused of smug satisfaction with worldly success. Perhaps that could be written off as envy, but the charges mounted: boring because of outmoded puritanism; bigoted in matters of race and religion; more British than the queen. The description becomes a caricature, but like all good caricatures had a modicum of truth. The moderates of the day were as inconspicuous as moderates incline to be and many quiet people pursued their gentle paths. But it was the words of the crusaders that were noised abroad as the voice of Toronto, and the image that they created was open to disagreeable accusations of intolerance and prejudice. The circumstances of the eighties and nineties aroused and exaggerated points of view entrenched in Toronto; and by an unhappy twist of fate extremes in Quebec and Ontario fed on each other.
The revival of ultramontanism in Quebec, following that in Europe, brought with it a conception of the relations of church and state that was wholly unacceptable to majority opinion in Ontario. ‘The church,’ read a joint pastoral of the Quebec bishops in 1875, ‘is not only independent of civil society, but is superior to it by her comprehensiveness and by her end,’ and the state is ‘in the church and not the church in the state.’ In politics in the seventies individual priests intervened with what was described as ‘undue influence’ and ‘spiritual and temporal intimidation’ to such a degree that some elections were declared void by the courts. The Irish archbishop of Toronto, J. J. Lynch, was much more cautious and moderate in defining the relations of church and state.
Honoré Mercier, closely associated with the extreme ultramontanes and a new voice of Quebec nationalism, was swept into office as premier of Quebec on the wave of indignation that followed the execution of Louis Riel, whom many people in Toronto had loudly denounced as a murderer. One of his early actions was to sponsor a bill to incorporate the Order of Jesus and in the following year, 1888, another to compensate them for the loss of their lands. It was this pair of acts, and particularly the second, which touched off the Protestant reaction in Toronto. The extensive Jesuit holdings in Canada fell to the crown after the pope had suppressed the order in 1773. Re-established in 1814, the Jesuits again took up their work in Canada. Their estates passed to the province after confederation and they made claims to them as soon as they had been incorporated. Mercier’s bill was to authorize payment of $400,000 in lieu of estates valued at $1.2 million; but it was left to the pope to determine the distribution of that sum and his decision was followed. At the same time the grant to Protestant schools in Quebec was increased by $60,000. Of twelve Protestants in the Quebec legislature only two questioned the bill.1
A demand, chiefly by the Ontario Protestants, was then made that the act be disallowed. It was true that it was clearly within the competence of the provincial legislature and that it imposed no financial or other obligation on anyone outside the province and therefore could not be declared ultra vires; but the current doctrine of disallowance, especially as interpreted by the prime minister, J. A. Macdonald, was that the veto could be exercised on grounds of general interest. Neither political party would touch it, however, and a resolution in the House of Commons in favour of disallowance was supported by only thirteen members.
Two of them were from constituencies in Toronto where the Jesuits’ Estates Act evoked everything from mild criticism to hysteria. The Globe launched into a series of editorials condemning the act but for a long time held out against disallowance as contrary to Ontario’s conception of provincial rights. It interviewed a number of clergymen. Principal Caven of Knox College censured the act as a flagrant violation of the principle of the separation of church and state and as increasing the domination of Roman Catholics. At that point he conceded that not all Roman Catholics were undesirable, but certainly the Jesuits were. The minister of Carlton Street Methodist Church argued that the order should never have been incorporated, and that there would be no peace in Canada with Jesuits present. The minister of the Central Presbyterian Church said that incorporation should be vetoed, and the minister of Knox Presbyterian Church called for strong opposition to the Jesuits. The pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church said that the act was a menace to civil and religious liberties, while the minister of the Metropolitan Church demanded that Protestants should rise against the abhorrent Jesuits. The minister of St James’ Square Presbyterian Church said that in the light of the bloody history of Rome Protestants should unite as one man and threaten the politicians with withdrawal of support. The Reverend William Patterson, preaching in Cooke’s Church, announced that Romanism had been one of the greatest evils ever to exist. Although he would not prevent its practice it should not have preferential rights. In Western Congregational Church F. H. McGregor warned his listeners to avoid the crafty inroads of the Romans. Of two Anglicans approached by the Globe the rector of Grace Church expressed disapproval of incorporation but deprecated inflammatory writing. The rector of All Saints’ withheld his opinion since a committee of the Anglican synod was examining the matter.
The Toronto Orangemen decided to call a mass meeting to be addressed only by Orangemen. A citizens’ committee of some thirty men with W. H. Howland as chairman circulated an address to the people of Ontario. The Jesuits’ Estates Act, they said, was unjust, unconstitutional, and disloyal (the last two adjectives apparently being drawn out of a hat). It was another attempt by ultramontanes to control legislation and should be disallowed. They decided to call for June a public meeting representative of Ontario for the purpose of creating an organization to secure religious equality. Meanwhile they convoked a meeting in April (1889) at the Granite Rink which, with three thousand people, was filled to overflowing. Howland was in the chair, backed on the platform by seventy-five men, many of whom were clergy.
Those of the ‘glorious thirteen’ members of parliament who were present received an ovation and then the flow of oratory began. W. T. McMullen, moderator of the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, worked his way through a rambling discourse to a resolution of thanks to the thirteen for ‘their noble defence of the true principles of religious liberty enshrined in the British Constitution,’ a curious reference which he wisely did not try to explain. Emerson Coatsworth, Jr., future member for Toronto East, made an even more incomprehensible reference, this time to the Magna Carta, in the course of an argument that the people should decide whether they were to be ruled from Ottawa or Rome. D’Alton McCarthy, a Toronto lawyer and member of parliament for North Simcoe, in a speech of vast length outlined the history of the Jesuits’ estates, noted the vices of the political parties, and argued the case for disallowance. He ended by warning of the growing strength of the French Canadians. ‘Do you realize that if Canada is to be a nation we must stop French aggression? Do you know that tracing history from the time of Lord Durham, who united the country to assimilate, that the French have been becoming more and more French? They are opposed to national unity and are determined not to become British subjects.’ Dangers loomed for Ontario where the French Canadians wanted two languages and better provision for Roman Catholic schools. John Charlton, the next speaker, was enthusiastically greeted. He also wanted to know whether Canada was to be a British country. The Jesuits’ Estates Act, he announced, was unconstitutional and should be disallowed. Altogether it was a long evening with signs of exhaustion at times, but at least there was evidence of a prevailing state of opinion in Toronto.
In tune with remarks that have been quoted a group of men led by D’Alton McCarthy organized the Equal Rights Association, although words used in the Granite Rink might have raised some question as to what rights were to be equal and for whom. The association, which attracted some eminent members throughout Ontario, later turned its guns on the school question in Manitoba. Another organization, the Protestant Protective Association, was an alien from the United States, coloured by anti-Catholicism so sweeping as to antagonize all but extremists. For a time it made some impact on provincial, and more especially on municipal, politics; but both the regular provincial parties regarded it as objectionably biased. The torch of militant Protestantism was most strongly carried by Orangemen.
The history of Ontario is full of references to the Orange Order but usually in connection with Orange-Irish street battles on the Glorious Twelfth or with its political influence. Curiously, little other information is available. For many years the order played an important part in the government of Toronto, but the reasons for its concentrated effort in this field are unexplained. Writing in 1923 H. C. Hocken, a leading Orangeman and former mayor, pointed out that since 1834 only thirteen men who were not members of the order had been elected as mayor. In the year in which he was writing only four out of twenty-nine members of the municipal council were not connected with the Orange Order.2 For the late nineteenth century, however, published numbers of lodges vary so greatly that no reliance can be placed on them; nor would such figures in any case have much meaning without a knowledge of the size of each lodge.
Admitting such lacunae, no doubt exists that the Orange Order was a very powerful force and that its membership included many influential citizens. Its views in the latter years of the century can be found by reading its official organ, the Sentinel. To that paper the Jesuits’ Estates Act was but another manifestation of the spreading menace of Roman Catholicism, in which, it repeatedly said, the Jesuit Order was the power behind the throne. ‘At no period since the Reformation,’ it had warned in 1883, ‘was the necessity for a close bond of union among Protestants more evident than at the present.’ On all sides could be seen threats to ‘pure evangelical Protestantism.’ Payment for the estates of the Jesuits was barefaced robbery. ‘What a shame! What a disgrace!’
Day after day and year after year the Sentinel repeated its warning that Protestantism was in danger. Added to that was a racial element since French Canadians were Roman Catholics. Even when the goalkeeper of a Toronto lacrosse team was attacked by spectators after a game in Montreal that was both ‘a sample of Romish bigotry’ and ‘Montreal blackguardism.’ The Sentinel concluded that French Canadians were not desirable immigrants to Ontario. They were, admittedly, frugal, industrious, and not given to any great vices,
But the trouble lies in their lack of education and their subserviency to the Romish Church, not only in spiritual but in political matters, and the impossibility of assimilating them into the dominant English race … The greatest danger to be feared from the French-Canadian invasion is the powerful political lever it will give to the Romish church in Ontario. As it is, through its Irish Roman Catholic vote and the French-Canadian vote already here, Rome is nearly mistress of the political situation …
The French Canadians are the most foreign of all the non-English races that immigrate to the English provinces of the Dominion … The environments of enlightenment and liberalism which surround them have little or no effect in dispelling the dark gloom in which the Jesuits have plunged their understanding.
A detached observer might have wondered where to find the enlightenment and liberalism about which the Sentinel wrote and whether bigotry was peculiar to Roman Catholics. Protests were voiced against these and other demonstrations of extreme Protestantism. The Globe wrote with bitter sarcasm of the ‘fearlessness’ of those in Toronto who assailed ‘popery’ and cast aspersions on the character of nuns. Writing to Laurier in mid-1889 J. S. Willison expressed the opinion that the ultra-Protestant movement had reached its height.3 Perhaps it had, but the complex of religion, race, and language formed a subject still bitterly contested. Not long after the date of Willison’s letter D’Alton McCarthy was calling on the people of Ontario ‘to take in hand our French-Canadian fellow subjects and make them British in sentiment and teach them the English language.’ He warned that votes now were better than bayonets later.4
Twenty years after the confederation of the provinces of British North America one of the principal pillars on which it rested was showing cracks. During the debates of 1865 the two men who best reflected opinion in Lower and Upper Canada, George-Etienne Cartier and George Brown, had praised the terms of union as allowing room for different races, languages, and creeds. The federal design of 1867 was a frank recognition that the union of 1841 had led not to assimilation as Durham had intended but to increased friction between disparate cultural forces. The fences drawn around the provinces under the new order helped the development of differing social philosophies, but they were not high enough to prevent the crusading Protestants of Ontario from leaning over the top.
In spite of generalized and sometimes fiery oratory no serious body of opinion in Toronto would have advocated either the legal disabilities for Roman Catholics that once had obtained in England and Ireland or closed doors against immigrants from Quebec, but remedial action would be taken within the city. As a means of absolving French-Canadian immigrants from the stigma of Roman Catholicism a group of people in Toronto set up in 1889 a mission for French-Canadian Protestants, some of whom were converts. Both the English and French languages were used at services and meetings, at one of which the pastor of the People’s Methodist Church spoke of ‘the efforts put forth by the Roman Catholic Church to keep the French-Canadian Catholics in the city from Protestant influences,’ and declared that the priests ‘were already denouncing the mission and warning the French Canadians against it.’5 The results of this competition for souls are not recorded.
The most practical questions had to do with religion and language in education. In the university problems were being resolved by converting it into a federation. Theology was left to denominational colleges and other subjects divided between the colleges and the university. The high schools, relatively few in number, had never been affected, but in the public schools religious teaching and language were controversial.
‘Separate’ schools in the case of Toronto were Roman Catholic. Before confederation the church had expressed dissatisfaction with the situation of the schools and amendments were made, the most important in the act of 1863. Although it did no more than make minor concessions to separate schools the act was important as defining the rights which, under the British North America Act, could not be prejudicially affected by later provincial legislation. That was not, however, as had been hoped, a final settlement, and dispute actively revived. Some contemporaries thought that the whole system was wrong: that confessional schools should not be supported by public funds. Others would have the privileges restricted; and others again asked, and to some extent secured, more favourable conditions for the separate schools.
In 1888 Archbishop Lynch issued a pastoral letter on education. For the clergy no duty was more important than teaching. On the laity rested the responsibility for sending children to the Roman Catholic schools. ‘Parents sin grievously who prefer a non-religious education for their children. Here in Toronto, where bigotry is still too rampant, the atmosphere of the non-Catholic school is dangerous to children.’ Those who did attend such schools, he added, were more or less tinctured with Protestant ideas. The history taught was biased, leaving the impression that the popes and the Jesuits were bad. On the other side of the argument the pastor of a Congregational church spoke in opposition to separate schools, arguing that ‘the State has no right to acknowledge religious caste, thus legalizing division and perpetuating alienation.’ He refused to describe the public schools as Protestant: they were rather those that belonged to the public. ‘You will notice,’ A. H. U. Colquhoun, editor of the Empire, wrote to J. P. Whitney, ‘that even Toronto school children are fighting over religious differences in the good old 16th. century style.’6
For many years the minority involved in disputes about education was almost wholly Irish, but as migration from Quebec increased a second issue was added, that of the language of instruction in public schools. In 1890 a provincial Conservative circular soliciting votes for Whitney in an Ontario riding mentioned as matters of prime importance,
First, the question whether the separate schools receiving Provincial aid are to be continued practically under the control of the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, and
Second, the question whether the English language is to be the language of the Public or Common Schools all over the province – in effect whether Ontario is to continue an English province or community in every respect.
The first question was of immediate concern in Toronto. In 1886 eighteen out of forty-eight schools were separate, with the Christian Brothers, Sisters of St Joseph, and Ladies of Loretto as teachers. In 1897 the proportion had changed to seventeen out of sixty-seven but the issue was not for that reason regarded as disappearing. Toronto schools were little affected by the question of language, but the more general challenge in the second part of the circular brought a ready response from those who regarded both Roman Catholicism and the French language – even the French-Canadian people – as alien to their conception of a Protestant and British province. For an unknown number of years French and German had both been used as languages of instruction in certain districts of the province where one or other language was spoken more commonly than English, but without statutory authority and without protection comparable to that given to confessional schools in the British North America Act.
The use of German faded out of itself but controversy continued over French. The Sentinel, tireless in its Protestant vigil, remarked in 1910 that ‘our French-Canadian fellow citizens argue that only by the use of their language in the schools can their children acquire an education. This is but a subterfuge to gain their ultimate goal of turning the public schools into French confessional schools.’ That organ of the Orange Order also worried about the method of electing members to the Board of Education, by which, it charged, several members had ‘come to think that they could ignore the Protestant sentiment of the city and put Roman Catholic teachers in permanent positions in the public schools.’
Other religious rifts appeared. A shrewd young observer, Helen Macdonald, noted in 1891 that ‘during summer the Queen’s Park has been disgraced on Sunday afternoons by all sorts of preachers, whose opposite views strongly expressed led to rioting. Park preaching consequently forbidden.’7 A different and somewhat later dispute was that between the supporters of fundamentalism and modernism in the Baptist Church. Several churches in Toronto were affected, but the storm worked up its height in the twenties in the Jarvis Street Baptist Church whose pastor was T. T. Shields, an able orator and relentless controversialist. Questioning the orthodoxy of teaching in McMaster University, Shields intervened in appointments to the staff and in the election of chancellor. Having failed in these moves he and other members of the fundamentalist party set up a separate Pastors’ College. The congregation of Jarvis Street, of other churches, and the Baptist convention were split down the middle; and in 1922 the Park Road Baptist Church was founded mainly by those opposed to Shields’ doctrines and actions.8
Such was the principal evidence for the case that Toronto was intolerant and narrow-minded. Charges less serious but as common were that it was bound down by a heavy-handed code of public behaviour. To the extent that the object was peace and quiet the regime might be defended. A by-law decreed that
No person shall advertise any sale of merchandize, furniture, or other articles, or matter, by the ringing of a bell, blowing of a horn, crying, hallooing, or creating any other discordant noise, in the streets of the City, or on the steps of a house or other premises open to the public street, whereby the public are liable to be subjected to inconvenience and annoyance: Provided always, that nothing contained in this section shall be construed to extend to any person duly appointed and authorized by the Council to follow the calling of Police Crier or City Bellman.
Relenting a little, a later by-law allowed the silence to be broken by licensed hawkers or pedlars, who might ‘moderately cry their wares,’ or by a milk dealer who, on any day but Sunday, might ring a bell in front of a house to which he was delivering. Steamers’ whistles might be blown only as danger signals and those of locomotives as authorized. Public parks were to be cleansed of ‘all drunken and filthy persons, vagabonds and notoriously bad characters,’ and parks might not be used as pastures for horses or cattle.
The ban on begging on the streets might be accepted by even a critical visitor, as might one on profane swearing or ‘any other immorality or indecency.’ The proscription of gambling, indoors or out, would be regarded as in a different category, as would rules forbidding lewd books and immoral plays. Sabbatarianism had strong support. When the Lord’s Day Alliance was formed in 1888 it had the backing of most of the churches; and the churches of Toronto, with some 117 congregations, constituted a formidable force. The effective public opinion of Toronto discouraged both work and play on Sunday. For some years no street cars were permitted to run and boys were arrested for playing on the streets. In 1895 three members of the Toronto Golf Club appealed against conviction by a magistrate of illegally playing golf on Sunday, but when a higher court found in their favour it was on the ground that ‘golf is not a game of ball similar in any sense to the games enumerated in, or intended to be prohibited by, the statute, and also that it is not a noisy game.’ The principle was not by this decision abandoned, but the forty or fifty men who played golf could do so on Sundays.
Most of the characteristics which have been noted would have applied to other cities and towns of Ontario at the same time, but Toronto was large and powerful, and therefore conspicuous. Montrealers or Europeans were inclined to find it at best dull and at worst unreasonable. All that must be on the record if the Toronto of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is to be understood. Whether it was good or bad can be judged only subjectively. What to some honest men was the maintenance of essential principles was to others intolerance and bigotry. What is certain, however, is that all the aspects of the city of that day which have so far been depicted represent only one part of the mood and life of Toronto.
Toronto was not as yet a big city, but big enough to embrace many kinds and conditions of men. Plenty of them were detached from the kinds of controversy that were conspicuous beyond the city limits, either because they had more practical problems to think about or because they were attached to other values. J. V. McAree, columnist of three Toronto newspapers, wrote delightfully of his youth in the poor area east of Parliament Street, where for many families existence itself was sufficient problem. He was brought up in his uncle’s little grocery store, one that for the most part was patronized by those whose personal finances ranged only between bad and worse.9 The conception of credit held by both the uncle and his customers tumbled the store into bankruptcy in the end, but not before it had fed the hungry and penniless. It was a hard life in a way, but McAree’s picture is not a sombre one, and from the milieu of his youth came men of ability.
Leafing through the petitions addressed to the city council brings out a series of partial photographs as unrelated to each other as would come from turning the dial of a radio. Why, asked a number of petitioners, should cows not be kept on Borden Street and Hope Street? Would the city, asked residents east of the Don, kindly abate the nuisance caused by the cow byres belonging to Gooderham and Worts? Would the city pay compensation for damage suffered by two women who fell into a hole in the sidewalk on Queen Street East? Multiplied hundreds of times the sum of day-to-day practical questions should dissipate any idea that all the residents of Toronto devoted their time to debating religious and educational questions.
The worldly-wise have laughed at the implications of such tags hung on Toronto as ‘city of churches’ or ‘city of homes’ – at what they envisaged as a dull, plodding, bourgeois regime. Yet other moderns wonder how to recapture something of the family life of those days. Quiet, shady streets were seen from rocking chairs on front verandahs. Small gardens were carefully nurtured. On Sundays the family, heavily draped in Victorian costumes, set off for church once or twice a day. Was their life dull? If an observer could have seen through the thick and frequently ugly curtains he would often have noticed shelves of good books, perhaps the family engrossed in round games, or clustered about a piano. Such people – and there were many of them – had the enterprise to make a considerable part of their own recreation.
There were, however, other opportunities. As had long been the case most of the leading professional musicians were church organists, thus ensuring a high standard in the churches and leadership for secular organizations. Edward Fisher, an American by birth, became organist of St Andrew’s Church in 1879 and in 1887 founded the Toronto Conservatory of Music. Arthur E. Fisher (who was no relation) played the viola in the Toronto Chamber Quartet and established the St Cecilia Choral Society. F. H. Torrington was organist of the Metropolitan Church from 1873, conducted the Philharmonic Society, and founded the Toronto College of Music. Elliott Haslam started, in the late eighties, the Toronto Vocal Society which excelled in unaccompanied singing. Perhaps the highest point was reached by A. S. Vogt, organist of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, in the Mendelssohn Choir which he began in 1894. Performance of music was enhanced through the gift by Hart Massey of Massey Hall in 1892, a building which proved to be almost perfect acoustically. The theatre, too, was active in Toronto. Hector Charlesworth wrote happily of the Grand Opera House within whose baroque walls were to be seen most of the noted actors and actresses of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.10
Nothing could have been more remote from the strident cries of controversy than the quiet lives of the gifted few who were brought together by common interest in music, literature, and the arts. Amateurs among them came from the ranks of business, teaching, medicine, and the law. Professional musicians associated in their gatherings as did the artists of the day, such as George A. Reid, president of the Ontario Society of Artists, Edmund Wyly Grier, the portrait painter, and Sydney Tully, daughter of the architect. Members of the staff of the small university fitted into the social and cultural life of the town more than they did in later days. James Loudon and Robert Ramsay Wright were scientists, Maurice Hutton a classicist, James Mavor a political scientist, George M. Wrong an historian, and W. J. Alexander a professor of English literature.
Men and women such as these joined in what were known as salons, held in private houses. Helen Macdonald wrote of some that she attended. Music usually took up a good deal of the evening. A male quartet included a physician and a painter. At other times papers were read on literary subjects, one, for example, by Pelham Edgar of Victoria College on Walt Whitman. Pauline Johnson read one of her new poems. It was all highly civilized, and the more so because it was inexpensive and required no more equipment than a piano. Such gatherings had been traditional and continued into the twentieth century. By their very nature they were unadvertised and seldom recorded, but the performances by such groups of amateurs and professionals were of very high quality.
The city in which such diverse types of people lived, in which the best features were all but concealed by the worst, was growing in size and in physical comfort. Residential areas were moving away from the waterfront, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that distinctively residential districts were evident and were necessarily north of the business section. Looking at the streets in 1897 it seems evident that some were, like Church Street for example, being abandoned to commercial activities, but parts of other older streets, such as Beverley and Jarvis, were more than holding their own. Admiral Road was pretty well filled up but Spadina had more vacancies than houses. St George Street had many large houses, Rosedale only a thin scattering.11 Queen’s Park was now in the centre of the best residential districts, and, in competition with the old King Street parade on foot, ‘some carriage people here,’ to quote again from Miss Macdonald, ‘are trying to establish driving 2 afterns. a wk. in the park as a fashionable event.’ Soon after she had written that (in September 1891) she ‘went tearing up across park to Bloor Street suddenly to my disgust found myself entangled in a mass of carriages, children, maids and a few promenaders. Quite a number of very good horses in pairs, two or three tandems and carts, several fairly showy single horses in Gladstones and a drag and four-in-hand turning in from Bloor Street as I reached there.’
Commercial and public buildings were appearing on a larger scale. The Bank of Montreal at the corner of Front and Yonge streets was built in 1885 to a design by the firm of Frank Darling and S. G. Curry. Together with charm of form it reflected something of the confidence and solidarity peculiar to Montreal. Darling also planned the Toronto Club’s new building on Wellington Street in 1897. St Paul’s Roman Catholic church on Queen Street was designed by Joseph Connolly in the style of the Italian renaissance, with an interior that would recall happy memories to those who had visited Italy. The chief monuments of the nineties were the main parliament building and the city hall. The first was begun in 1886 and finished in 1892. A massive building in a heavy style, it was the work of R. A. Waite, an English architect living in Buffalo. It had a fine setting in the southern part of Queen’s Park. What became the city hall was originally intended to house only the courts of justice. The site, on Queen Street opposite the lower part of Bay Street, was expropriated in 1884. Before the plans were drawn by E. J. Lennox it was decided to provide accommodation also for the municipal government; and the completed building of red sand stone had a total floor space of 5.4 acres. It was ready for occupancy in 1899 when those going through the front door faced a great stained-glass window, designed and made by Robert McCausland of Toronto and entitled ‘The union of commerce and industry.’12
Increasing attention had been paid by the city council to types of construction, the principal consideration being to guard against fire. At intervals the regulations were consolidated, in each case becoming more comprehensive and strict. The code of 1890 was embodied in a by-law (number 2468) of twenty-six pages. Buildings were not to be erected on streets less than thirty feet wide or without a vacant space of at least three hundred square feet. Furnaces, stoves, and chimneys had to meet certain standards and the ladders of early York must still be in place. Inflammable liquids and gunpowder were restricted. Churches, hospitals, colleges, schools, halls, and theatres must have such stairs and doors as in the opinion of the director of buildings were required. No seats were to be put in the aisles. Theatres had to have fire hoses plugged in. The city was divided into four fire limits, the first being approximately bounded by Jarvis, Queen, and Simcoe streets and the Esplanade. That limit was to have the maximum protecton, including fireproof walls and roofs.
Nothing is more basic to the well-being of an urban community than a plentiful supply of pure water, and no need of Toronto was less well met. Long before water pipes were in use constant complaints were made that the bay was becoming hopelessly contaminated. When water came to be pumped out of it sewers were at the same time drained in. A comment by the Globe in 1882 was characteristic: that the whole sewage of Toronto flowed into the bay, unpleasant in itself and dangerous to the water supply. The municipal government could not be other than painfully aware of the gravity of the situation and it did make efforts to solve the problem, albeit with limited success.
In 1872 the city decided to replace private with publicly owned waterworks. A provincial statute of that year gave as reason for the change the unsatisfactory performance of the Toronto Water Works Company, and while this was true enough it was only one side of the story, for it was not the company that was making the water impure. In 1873 the bought the company’s plant at the foot of Peter Street and ran a four-inch wooden pipe into the lake. For a time this gave a steady if inadequate flow but in 1890 it became plugged with sand. In 1891 a new five-inch steel pipe was carried into the lake to a distance of 2,500 feet, but it developed leaks and rose to the surface, causing a serious epidemic of typhoid fever. In 1895 the same thing happened again and the citizens had to go back to the ancient practice of buying water from carts.
The city then called in an expert, a hydraulic engineer from England. He rejected the suggestion of using Bond Lake on the grounds that the water in it was both insufficient and impure, and recommended instead bringing water from Lake Simcoe, overcoming the height of land by means of a tunnel and siphoning. The alternative, favoured by the city engineer, was a tunnel under the bay together with improved pumps and reservoirs. This was broadly the method followed but it did not bring water of unimpeachable purity since the intake could never quite escape the outlets of the sewers. For many years thereafter citizens continued to buy water by the bottle brought from springs outside the city. Under the circumstances by-laws that required that each house was to have wholesome water and that wells should annually be cleaned had a hollow ring.
The invention of electricity suggested many conveniences for a city. At the end of the seventies experiments with interior electric lights, supplied by small generators, were made successfully; but the first concern of the city council was with street lighting. Several companies sought contracts for that purpose. In 1879 the Consumers’ Gas Company secured a provincial statute authorizing it to expand its operations, including the manufacture and supply of electricity. ‘Whereas,’ the preamble read, ‘the company alleges that other modes of artificial light have been discovered and that gas may be beneficially used as a cheap fuel for heating and cooking purposes,’ the company was to be permitted to launch into these two fields. In one it did, and the application of gas to cooking was to have very wide results. The company, however, seems to have dropped the idea of supplying electricity, partly, perhaps, because of the amount of new business created by gas stoves, partly because gas lighting was not automatically ruled out by electricity.
The city council and its committee on fire and gas found the whole new problem puzzling; and certainly they have puzzled later historians by a series of moves and counter-moves confusingly and incompletely recorded. One alderman was so unimpressed by the electric lights installed in the council chamber that he proposed that the whole thing should be removed as nothing more than a nuisance. The city fathers as a whole had no such devastating criticisms of the new-fangled device but neither were they at all sure what to do. They were not convinced that gas lighting was obsolete or clear as to what company or companies should be permitted to provide whatever electric lights were to be on the streets. On the first point they hedged, renewing the gas company’s franchise for a limited time only.
That left two electric companies, Canada Electric Light and Manufacturing Company and the Toronto Electric Light Company, moving on and off the stage like Cox and Box, and two others – the J. J. Wright Electric Company and the Royal Electric Company of Montreal – hovering uncertainly in the wings. It was not taken for granted that any one company should have a monopoly and indeed it was decided that one, for a financial consideration, might use poles erected by another. After consulting American cities the committee on fire and gas concluded that, ‘owing to its superior brilliancy,’ electric light was used in the central parts of most of them. Meditation on the respective claims of the companies in the field led to the proposal that the two principal ones should each exhibit twenty-five lights, and whichever showed the better results would be chosen.
Whether that was done is not clear; but out of a scrappy record it appears that both the Canada Electric Light and Manufacturing Company and the Toronto Electric Light Company secured one-year contracts in 1883, used each other’s poles, and provided lighting on different streets. In 1884, after some debate, the franchise for the first company was terminated and the Toronto Electric Light Company seemed to be left triumphantly alone until five years later out of the blue came the Toronto Incandescent Electric Light Company of which the manager was Frederic Nicholls, later the president of the Canadian General Electric Company. An agreement of 1889 between that company and the city noted that it was the intention of the company to manufacture and supply electricity, and that for the latter purpose it was empowered to lay underground wires. Whether it was to provide street lighting and if so on what terms are, incredibly, not even mentioned. It appears, however, that this was but a glimpse of a beautiful future in which poles would be no more, but that the agreement was never implemented. Meanwhile electric lighting gained in popularity as is indicated by petitions addressed to the city council asking for its extension to additional streets. Some houses and other buildings were wired but for years gas lighting continued to be used in others. At the end of 1890 the Consumers’ Gas Company was awarded another five-year contract for street lighting.
The eventual ascendancy of the Toronto Electric Light Company is suggested by the contract it was granted in 1890, following its tender. The period was five years. The company was to provide not less than eight hundred arc lamps of at least one thousand candlepower each. For that the city was to pay twenty-four and a half cents per lamp per night, that being considerably below the earlier rate.
Transportation was the third of the essential public services. Shops and other commercial organizations used horse-drawn vehicles. Many of the old houses still surviving have stables, now converted into garages or flats. The coachman usually lived on the floor above the horses’ stalls. To have a private carriage was in itself a mark of economic, if not always social, distinction, as indicated by the common phrase ‘carriage trade.’ For those not within this exclusive class forty-five cab operators advertised their services. The tariff was based on zones. Within the central one – bounded by Peter, Sherbourne, and Carlton streets and the bay – the rate was twenty cents for a one-horse cab and twenty-five cents for a two-horse one. From midnight until six in the morning the fare was double. The roads were steadily improved, but no technological change came until the automobile was introduced in the twentieth century.
The street car system, on the other hand, was radically altered by the adoption of electricity. In 1891, when the franchise of the Toronto Street Railway expired, the company had sixty-eight miles of track, 1,372 horses, 361 wheeled vehicles, and one hundred sleighs. It averaged fifty-five thousand passengers a day.13 Rather than renew the franchise the city acquired ownership of the company’s assets for $1,453,788, the value determined by arbitration. Apparently, however, the council – or perhaps the public – soon tired of public operation, for later in the year tenders for repurchase were invited. That accepted was from a new corporation in which the principal, briefly described as ‘William Mackenzie of the City of Toronto, contractor,’ was one of the great figures of transportation in Canada. The Toronto Railway Company was only one of his many enterprises, which included some of the radials that will be mentioned and his greatest achievement – in partnership with Donald Mann – the Canadian Northern Railway.
Under the agreement between the city and the company, confirmed by provincial statute in 1892 (55 Vict., c. 99), the latter was to reimburse the city for the cost of its previous purchase, adding the value of new works and improvements during the months of public ownership. In addition the company committed itself to an annual payment of $800 per mile of single track, $1,600 of double, and graduated percentages of gross receipts. The wide gauge (four feet, eleven inches) was to be retained; night cars to be run as deemed necessary by the city council; cars, of the most approved design, to be heated and lighted; no cars to be run on Sunday unless and until approved by a vote of the citizens (passed in 1897). Horses might be used at first but electrification was to be begun within one year and completed within three.
And so the thirty-year span of the Toronto Railway Company began. The electric cars made possible greater speed and service. The heating system, consisting of a coal stove at one end of the car, was not perfect but a distinct improvement. When open cars were introduced for the summer, families could go for rides all round the new Belt Line (within the city this time), and children watched with fascination the conductor swinging with his fare box along the continuous steps at the side. Double-truck cars came in 1895, to the regret of schoolboys who had already discovered that entertainment could be derived from rocking the single-truck ones. Air brakes were not installed until 1905.
In the agreement the price of tickets was set out, followed by a clause which read: ‘The payment of a fare shall entitle the passenger to a continuous ride from any point on said railway to any other point on a main line or branch of said railway within the city limits.’ Transfers, which had not existed in the regime of the old company, were therefore available. Later on the company took the position, upheld by the courts, that ‘city limits’ meant those of 1891, the date of the agreement, and refused to extend the one-price system beyond them. There is some reason for believing that the consequent cost of travel discouraged people from living in the newer districts.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century it becomes particularly important to think of Toronto as an urban area as well as a city. Population figures for the city itself certainly show the number of persons for whom the city council was responsible, but as they jump whenever an adjoining district is annexed any analysis of density becomes difficult; and it is not always possible to distinguish between the number of people in the urban economic complex and the number under one political jurisdiction. The word ‘suburb’ introduces as much confusion as light, since it can apply to an area touching the city limits or another twenty miles away.
All that can be said with any confidence is that on all sides of the city were people, connected with it, who were looking for some city services and always for transportation. The island was a special case since its residents – estimated at three thousand in 1900 – were seasonal. In 1894 they formed an Island Association the objective of which were better roads and sidewalks, improved sanitary conditions, adequate ferries, and gas and telephones. To some extent they succeeded. North, west, and east lived people who wanted better means of reaching their daily employment.
One early attempt to meet this need was by a steam railway, the (original) Belt Line, more famous for relics than performance. Already the city had taken steps to improve the valley of the Don, once beautiful but now sadly defaced. A provincial statute of 1886 was passed ‘in view of the necessity which exists for improving the Don River and securing the sanitary condition of that part of the City of Toronto contiguous to the said river,’ which was a polite way of saying that the Don had been turned from a salmon river into a drain. The river was to be deepened, the banks cleared, and agreements made with railway companies that used the valley for access to Toronto.
The Belt Line Railway Company, incorporated in 1889, was designed to serve outlying areas then without satisfactory public transport. For the southern part of the large circle or belt it was apparently always intended to make use of the Grand Trunk tracks, perhaps by running rights over them. On the western end the Belt Line was to run north from those tracks by way of the Humber Valley, cut across on a line north of Lonsdale Road and through the Rosedale ravine, and then down the Don Valley to rejoin the Grand Trunk. For that last stretch it was necessary to fit into the general improvement scheme. Terms were not easily reached. Arbitrators named by the city and the company failed to agree and finally a settlement was made by an umpire. The city was to lease in perpetuity a strip of land twelve feet wide, receiving in return compensation determined at intervals of fifty years. The company was to make crossings and to accept other obligations such as contributing to the cost of whatever bridges were necessary.
Construction went ahead and during it an arrangement was reached with the Grand Trunk under which the latter would operate the line on completion through a forty-year contract at an annual rental. That point, however, was never reached for the Belt Line Company got into such serious financial difficulties that it could not proceed with laying the track. In 1892, therefore, the local company unloaded the white elephant on the Grand Trunk on terms that could hardly have led to other than loss. With its considerable resources the Grand Trunk was able to complete the line later in that year and open it for traffic, but the scheme was a failure and operation was abandoned after two years. For long afterwards portions of the track were used as freight spurs, while citizens explored abandoned sections and gazed at empty stations resembling Swiss chalets.
Electric railways were more promising. Instead of a complete train with its crew one electric car could rapidly convey passengers and light freight over limited distances. Most of the country around Toronto was relatively flat and so construction was not difficult. The Metropolitan Street Railway Company, incorporated in 1877, had pioneered in suburban transport with horse-drawn cars as far as Eglinton Avenue. Electric ones were introduced in 1889, with permission to increase the speed to twelve miles an hour, but only if that did not cause alarm or injury to horses and vehicles on Yonge Street. The new motive power made possible a series of extensions northward: to York Mills in 1890, Richmond Hill in 1896, and Newmarket in 1899. The farthest point reached was Sutton, in the twentieth century. Some freight was carried, the delivery of milk being so important that in 1895 the ban against Sunday cars was lifted for that purpose only. Eastward the Toronto and Scarborough Electric Railway, Light and Power Company, incorporated in 1892, built a line beside the Kingston Road, reaching Victoria Park Avenue in the following year and West Hill ten years later. Along the lakeshore to the west a radial under various ownerships ran from Sunnyside to Long Branch in 1894 and in 1905 to Port Credit. To the regret of the public the gap between there and Oakville, to which a line went from Hamilton, was never filled. The Toronto Suburban Railway built northwest to Weston and much later on to Guelph. All in all the radials provided a valuable service, a rapid and pleasant means of travel when roads were extremely bad and motor cars, when they existed at all, few in number.14
Citizens of Toronto were proud of the advances made by their city but aware too that progress was limited by the economic depression which slowed up agriculture and industry throughout Canada. With other Canadians they hoped always for improvement, and some of them were prepared to examine any plan designed to that end. The current one was tariff reciprocity with the United States. That was an ambition never far below the surface, and efforts had earlier been made to restore and perhaps widen the agreement that had existed before confederation. By 1887 two alternatives were being commonly discussed: unrestricted reciprocity, that is complete free trade between the two countries, and commercial union, a zollverein with a common tariff against third countries. The distinction between them, real enough, was sometimes made, sometimes deliberately blurred, often misunderstood. The Liberals, traditionally inclined to low tariffs, debated among themselves as to which, if either of the two, might fill the need of a party long out of office and seeking a platform with appeal to the electors. In the end they chose unrestricted reciprocity, but it served the interests of their opponents to represent their policy as the more vulnerable commercial union, which indeed some leading individual Liberals were known to prefer.
Within Toronto one of the main supporters of commercial union was Goldwin Smith, but as he was more than suspected of being unsound on both Canadian nationalism and the British connection he was as much a hindrance as a help to that cause. He founded the Commercial Union League with G. Mercer Adams, a journalist associated with his literary enterprises, as secretary. From Toronto the league spread its operations through nearby counties where, with some reason, it was anticipated that the principal support might be found. Prices of agricultural products were low and farmers had seldom seen any advantage in protective tariffs. It was quite a different thing to convince the business community. H. W. Darling came very close to persuading the Toronto Board of Trade of which he had been president. The board did endorse the maximum freedom of commercial intercourse with the United States, but only if that did not place Great Britain at a disadvantage or weaken the bonds of empire. Under no circumstances would it go as far as commercial union which it saw as a threat to Canadian autonomy.
The newspapers were divided. The Empire maintained the Conservative party line, which was opposition to any form of reciprocity not designed by Conservatives. With Edward Farrer holding the pen the Mail fell completely from grace, having no doubt about the virtues of commercial union. In supporting that policy it was automatically called upon to refute the common arguments that commercial union would damage the United Kingdom by putting her in an unfavourable trading position, weaken the imperial relationship, and even lead to annexation. ‘The argument in favour of reciprocity,’ it wrote, ‘has originated, we firmly believe, as much in a patriotic desire to preserve the integrity of Confederation as from the more material consideration of dollars and cents.’ This was a little hard for some people to swallow, as was the thesis that Britain would actually gain by being able to extend her investment in a more prosperous country.
Although in the end it had to accept the phrase ‘commercial union’ the Globe preferred to talk about ‘free trade,’ with the United States or better still with all countries, that being not a new position for the paper to take. In phrases that recall the imperious reign of George Brown it expressed its disapproval of George T. Denison. ‘Since the Unrestricted Reciprocity discussions began he has been insolent enough to accuse all those who favour free trade with the state of being annexationists, traitors, renegades and what not. By implication he uttered his slanders against this journal.’ Insolent was not a word that Colonel Denison would expect to be applied to himself, but certainly he had talked with unbridled candour, describing commercial union as ‘veiled treason.’
Thus in Ontario, where commercial union or unrestricted reciprocity seemed to arouse the greatest interest, two principal sources of opposition became evident. One was that the financial and manufacturing groups were more than reluctant to see the end of protective tariffs which they had long demanded and enjoyed. The other objection was political: that such policies would lead to the destruction of the empire or complete absorption by the United States. Those who had been seeking to recast the empire in some federal form attacked the commercial unionists and in so doing were backed by numerous people. Denison claimed that Toronto was the most loyal city in the empire, and certainly it was in part because of its British sentiment that it rejected either form of reciprocity.
It did not follow, however, that the Imperial Federation League as such became a popular movement. Toronto was not even the first Canadian seat of a branch. When it did get one all three members of parliament and some other citizens of repute stood up as sponsors, but the league continued to have an esoteric ring which it could never overcome. Because the league in Canada was a continuation of that set up in London in 1884 it was interpreted by some critics as no more than quiescent colonialism. This, in fact, was not the temper of its leaders. What they hoped to do was to strengthen the solidarity of the empire but at the same time to give to Canada a voice in its direction.
The project of a federation faded out for the present but not the political debate to which the league had turned its attention. The Liberal party chose to fight the general election of 1891 on what they called unrestricted reciprocity but what their opponents usually called commercial union. J. A. Macdonald, great politician as he was, announced that he hoped to die as he had been born, a British subject. Another great politician, Oliver Mowat, said the same thing but without the resultant publicity. In Toronto two Conservatives, F. C. Denison and G. R. R. Cockburn, retained their seats, and a third, Emerson Coatsworth, Jr., was elected. Against the embattled ranks neither Washington nor Liberalism had prevailed, and the Conservative lines in Toronto seemed to be intact. Yet public life in the city was not forever to run in such predestined grooves. During the political campaign of 1896 it was proposed that Wilfrid Laurier hold a meeting in Toronto, a suggestion thought most unwise by the Liberal candidate for Toronto Centre, William Lount (who was subsequently elected). The meeting, nevertheless, was held and Laurier was greeted with enthusiasm that could hardly have been excelled. Hundreds of people who could not squeeze into Massey Hall waited outside and escorted Laurier to a second, overflow meeting in another auditorium. ‘Is this Tory Toronto?’ Laurier asked as he moved in the midst of a cheering crowd.
The end of the nineteenth century saw the zenith of imperial Britain, dramatically symbolized in 1897 by the diamond jubilee of the Queen and Empress who had come to the throne in the year of the Canadian rebellions, so long ago. In London princes and kings assembled in glittering ceremonies and throughout the worldwide empire the Queen’s subjects applauded the stern old lady who had restored the prestige of the throne and presided over the unequalled progress of her people in territory, wealth, and power. It was heady stuff, not least in British Toronto; but imperial triumph was soon to be tested in blood.
The newspapers of Toronto kept their readers well informed of the course of events that led to the outbreak of the South African war.15 News despatches from London, explanatory articles, maps, and editorials occupied much of the space in the daily press. For contemporaries they provided information and for later readers impressions of how the people of the city reacted to the crisis. Martial spirit rose high even before hostilities were inevitable. On 2 October 1899 the Globe wrote,
The proposal to offer to the Imperial Government a Canadian contingent for service in the event of hostilities in the Transvaal has aroused considerable enthusiasm among militiamen throughout the country. In no other city in the Dominion has the proposal received more hearty approval than in Toronto, and at a general meeting held in the Canadian Military Institute on Saturday night it was endorsed in an emphatic manner.
On the following day the editor, J. S. Willison, expressed the opinion that ‘The despatch of a Canadian contingent would be in the nature of a national declaration of Canada’s stake in the British Empire.’ Such a force, he went on, should be as obviously Canadian as possible, in personnel and insignia. On 11 October news of the probability of a Canadian contingent was received at the armouries with loud approval. On the following Sunday thousands of citizens lined the streets as the 48th Highlanders paraded to St Andrew’s Church, and in several Methodist churches sermons demonstrated sympathy with the position taken by the British government.
In Monday’s editorial Willison laid out the position he was to maintain, and he had considerable influence. The situation, he argued, with the Orange Free State supporting the Transvaal, was serious enough to justify unusual steps. Canada should fulfil its obligations but also claim a voice in questions of peace and war. Canadians sought a united empire, but a united Canada too; and he deplored irresponsible talk of French domination in Ottawa and other remarks calculated to make a breach between the two races.
The mayor, John Shaw, called a public meeting to discuss arrangements for a send-off for the contingent and suggested collecting money for clothing, food, and medicines. At Government House a gathering of ladies considered what comforts could be sent to the troops. Events moved rapidly. A recruiting office for the Military District was opened on 21 October and was thronged with applicants. On 25 October those accepted left for their ship. At the armouries they were addressed by the mayor and the chairman of the committee. The officers from Toronto were presented with binoculars and other ranks with silver match boxes. Tens of thousands of people, packed like sardines, were all along the streets and showered souvenirs and flowers on the soldiers while bands played Rule Britannia and God Save the Queen.
Never [wrote the Globe] has Toronto been more enthusiastic in honouring her valiant sons. The heart of the people went out to the men who marched forth to devote their strength, if need be their lives, to the defence of the empire and the expansion of her power … The departing soldiers saw on either side a solid bank of crowded faces alive with admiration and enthusiasm, and they marched through one continuous patriotic cheer that followed them along the route. Such a demonstration, unprecedented in our history, shows the sincerity of Toronto’s military spirit.
Unprecedented then but to be repeated over and over under circumstances far more serious and compelling. In some ways it seems now, as it must have seemed at the time, more than a dozen years between the Boer war and the first great war, for in that interval Toronto had grown and prospered. New factories had sprung up, motor cars introduced the atmosphere of a new age, and the population had more than doubled. But if the people were far more numerous the prevailing attitude toward the British empire had changed hardly at all. In reality they thought of the empire in terms of the United Kingdom, which in time of need must be supported at all cost. Whether the motive was gratitude for the past, advantage in the future, or undefined sentiment is of little consequence since the result was the same. The rule of Britannia must not be weakened, whether by distant rebels or Teutons aiming at world power.
The Toronto newspapers in 1914, while again serving their readers well by their accounts of events leading up to the war, were editorially of one mind on where Canada should stand. The World held that the country should contribute at least fifty thousand trained men to the imperial forces. The News called for co-operation between political parties to help the mother country. ‘This country,’ said the Star, ‘must do all it can to support the arms of Britain.’ On 31 July an editorial in the Globe declared that ‘Canada must do her part as an integral part of the Empire, and assuredly must discharge the imperative first duty of self-defence. When Britain is at war Canada is at war.’
As in 1899 the first few months were full of good, if misleading, news. The war had hardly begun before banner headlines exulted over the sinking of the German navy. In land campaigns the allied armies suffered occasional reverses, but they were declared to be only temporary. On the eastern front the German forces were having a very bad time against Russian power. Such a tone was by no means intended to discourage recruiting, nor did it. The militia regiments of Toronto enrolled new men with regularity and awaited calls from Ottawa for specified numbers of personnel for the battalions going overseas. The 3rd Battalion (Toronto Regiment), drawn from the Queen’s Own Rifles and the Royal Grenadiers, and the 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders) were included in the first contingent. Others followed as large numbers of Toronto men enlisted in the army and in the navy. Since Toronto was the headquarters of No. 2 Military District, however, it is not possible to identify the exact numbers who came from the city itself.
In 1914 the Mail and Empire daily recorded the activities of both the militia regiments and other organizations which trained for possible service: the Toronto Homeguard Sharpshooters’ Association paraded 769 men, of all ranks, and twice weekly had classes for officers; the Board of Trade Rifle Club drilled at the armouries; the College Heights Association decided to join forces with the Toronto Military Training Association; the Toronto Rifle League was formed by twenty-one civilian rifle associations in the city.
Men and more men were needed as the hopes of early victory faded and the way to Tipperary proved to be long and hard. Toronto continued to respond to the calls of the armed forces, and others of its people did what war work they could as daily – amid the mud and horror of Flanders and France, at sea, and in the air – toll was exacted to bring both sorrow and pride to hundreds of Toronto families.
