« p. 107-112: Crossing Lake Ontario
Toronto, the English City
p. 112-121
At first glance, you’d think you were in Europe. Barely half a day away from the states, with just the tip of a lake separating the state of New York from the province of Ontario, you’d think you had gone back to Europe, some strange corner of Europe, a way-station filled with a motley group of people.
I need to get this out right now: it’s a terrible group of people and they’re all rotting together. Someone said this to me in Ottawa, in Winnipeg, and someone else from the Salvation Army said it in Toronto: the immigrants of the eastern cities, Toronto and Quebec and Montreal, are the least welcome kind of immigrant. They’ve taken their small chance and are happy with it. They don’t want the earth; all they see is asphalt. They’ve taken to the sea in vain, and all they’ve done is exchange one gutter for another. They could’ve just stayed in their gutters at home. To the west, cities sprout up fantastically like mushrooms, but these immigrants don’t build cities. In the west they could be men, but instead, they’re freeloading in the east. They will make eastern Canada the same intolerable center of rot that they'd known in their hometowns on the old continent.
On street corners, giant placards stick out of the ground, covered in writing which reads like cannon fire or distress signals:
“50,000 farm workers needed immediately in the west!”
“30,000 harvest workers needed in Manitoba!”
“The greatest number of unharvested crops since Canada first grew wheat! (I’ve never heard of more) . . . One hundred million bushels are waiting for the sickle!”
This kind of healthy boasting just goes to show that the country needs people. But the sort of people I’ve been talking about prefer to sweat out their years slouched over in factories fabricating the same machine part over and over again. They walk by the garish, promising placards as if they were blind and deaf.
In this relatively small city, it might seem that the foreign element has completely taken over, but that’s an illusion. It simply demonstrates the English liberality. They let their foreigners do whatever they want. There are entire streets covered in Armenian writing. The ghetto is particularly large. Russians and Greeks have their own segments of the city. So do Syrians. Generally, it looks like the immigrants come mainly out of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor. One Sunday afternoon, I went for a walk on Scarboro Beach and could not come across a single joyful, human face. Not a single confident, optimistic visage that I had come across so often in the states. Greedy, small-town folk with yellowish, bitter, proletariat faces. Repulsive crudeness in the park. The most popular item there was the Splasher, where you throw balls at a poor schlub sitting on a plank over a tub. When the ball hits, everyone cries Hallo, and the poor schlub falls into the water. At least someone had the heart to give him a mask, but he still has to scrabble up, soaking wet, out of the tub and back onto his plank. This is how these people entertain themselves.
But then you come into the good quarter, where the Englishmen live, and you see it immediately. Oh, yes, this is Old England. The houses are made of brick and stone, not out of wood like in the states, where the rich segments of the city are filled with frame houses one after the other for blocks at a time. You really have the sense that, on streets like Jarvis or Rosedale, that people actually live here. Over in the states, you never lose the feeling that houses are temporary encampments. Even at the height of summer, when the curtains are pulled open, you get the sense that a picture of this house is sitting on a table in a room of some distant hotel.
Another thing in Toronto that reminds me of England are the number of churches. I took the streetcar around the city and couldn’t believe my eyes. In forty-one minutes, I counted twenty-two churches, nearly one per stop. Then I listened to a very informative gentleman, who said that the 300,000 souls in Toronto are supplied with about 250 churches.
But a different detail reminds me that I’m still far away from the old country. A number of hulking, wild-west types stand under rough, curving tree trunks that serve as telegraph poles. With their broad, yellow hats and red shirts, you can imagine all sorts of romantic professions in the forests of Ontario, the gold mines of British Columbia, the streams of the uncharted Yukon and the monumental prairies of southern Alberta.
My hotel crawls with the younger sons. Outside, in the city, at the harbor, in the elegant streets, in the warehouses, in the offices of shipping, railroad and estate companies, I recognize them over and over again. For the most part, they sit or stand around, they smoke, they yawn, they say Mister like Mistah and make their mark on everything they do: the younger sons.
They look like exiles, and in all honesty, because they’re the second or third sons of older English noble families, they are completely exiled and disinherited. According to English law, the firstborn inherits the title and the money, and the younger son is at the mercy of the parents and the firstborn. The younger son has come up short. He has nothing to expect. Either he gives up, or winds his way through life in a state of outrage. The days of this unlucky sort of people are numbered. One of these days, this cruel anomaly of moral law will be removed from the earth. It is not the product of the English spirit, but instead of the doomed caste system of the old world.
If the military or cloister have no place for these unlucky people, then at least they have the stomping grounds of the colonies of Britain at their disposal. These colonies give them room enough to grab some money, to speculate, to grow wheat and fruit, if that’s what they want. All of a sudden, they barely know themselves. Instead of their morose club-chairs in Piccadilly, they sit on a good, cold clod of Mother Earth! Most importantly, they don’t have to worry about running into the eldest brother Viscount or Lord So-and-So, the man who needed no more luck than to come into the world first.
The younger son really does look like a man of the club, who sits in the gutter after a party and thinks to himself: should I soak myself in whiskey, should I soak myself in ladies, or wouldn’t I rather shoot myself and be done with it?
He can become an aviator or a sports correspondent. If he’s clever and good with his hands, he takes the Empress of Ireland to the Dominion. And now we stretch both our feet on the same hotel table. And we both have, for different reasons, bags full of brochures on farm land, cattle breeding, trip routes, real estate speculation . . . brochures that are tossed among the people and which encourage the sluggish fantasies of these younger sons.
At the moment, most people are hiding behind long political speeches, all of which repeat the nasty word reciprocity.
Unfortunately, I will have to hear this malevolent word for seven weeks. On the 21st of September, Canada held elections, and the question is: should there be a reciprocal relationship with the Union or not? A liberal government or a conservative? Sir Wilfred Laurier or Mr. R. L. Borden?
In this country of the future, where the impatient earth cries out to be fertilized, I’m forced to listen to a political scolding for seven weeks. I decided to thoroughly anesthetize myself in advance.
A young Canadian, the product of a well-known family, supplies all of Canada with harvesting machines, gives away concert halls and organs, and serves as my tour guide through Toronto. It’s because of him that I was one of the guests of the learned and influential gentlemen in the York Club and later in the Gold Club. I told them about Germany as they told me things about Canada. It was a fine opportunity to speak and to listen.
I realize immediately that I am a socialist set loose in a nest of conservatives. But everything goes well and, as we sit in a beautiful house with a view of Ontario, we all have a good time with each other.
Today, on the 27th of September, the liberal government is buried in a landslide, as it is picturesquely called, and the conservatives are on top. I’m now in the company of a kind, old man, who, in the new government, will now be offered one of the three top positions in the dominion. I might have pricked up my ears and paid attention, if I could have listened to the important question of reciprocity, or at least to the most definitive and authoritative opinions on the matter, so I could take them with me on my way through the seven weeks.
Instead of this, all I got were a pair of monologues, which left me in the fairly primitive standpoint of a preacher in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon. The Americans need the farm products of Canada, and the Americans would like to see their industrial products let loose in Canada. Through free trade, Canadians would like to be able to sit down to a less expensive breakfast in less expensive clothing. The American quarter is just as good as an English schilling; this is a famous saying of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. On the other hand, they are still an English dominion, united to the homeland by the Atlantic Ocean, whereas all that separates the states and the dominion is a dotted line. The English knife-sharpener looks at his Canadian consumers as brothers, but then has to peek over his shoulder at the country on the other side of the dotted line, which is cutting off his lifeline over the sea. What follows is that both halves of North America would have to be stuck together, etc.
I ask myself: what does it mean to humanity whether or not they’re reciprocal? Whatever interests one political party accepts, the other one rejects. Does the world take one step forward if the liberals stay at the rudder? Does it take a step back if the other fights them off? What does it give to the poor people, the poor women who prostitute themselves for bread, the poor children, the poor criminals and all the people slowly growing dumber on account of 250 churches at each train stop? Ha, the will of the people, the ancient lie of world history!
I’ve traveled over the border between Canada and the Union a couple of times. The mountains run across the boundary and seeds fly over it in the wind. The sunflowers don’t know about reciprocity and look neither to Sir Wilfrid nor Mr. Taft. Whereby this foolishness.
I endeavor to especially pay attention when one of my hosts asks me in all earnestness (it is the beginning of August and there’s still no word from Morocco): please, come out with it, does Germany want a war with England or not?
“Ha!” I say. “Ha! Who is this Germany that wants or doesn’t want? I believe you are referring to the German people. But the German people, like the people of other countries, want nothing more than a bank account and a checkbook. They’re not thinking about slaughtering Mr. Tommy Atkins or drilling a hole into the Dreadnought. You don’t want to confuse the German people with anyone who raises his voice whenever he says the word war.”
“Good,” the learned gentleman says and smiles. The influential man, who by now should be a high dignitary, says, “Good!” I enjoyed the shouting, which reminded me of the shouts you use to celebrate a boxing match when one young boy uppercuts another while in the ring.
Luckily, the politics don’t last long. Everyone starts talking about German literature. The history professor from the University of Toronto explains to me what I’ve already heard at Cornell, that Storm’s Immensee is the most read German book in the schools, and not only in the schools, but in all of America. As for classic books, Freytag’s Soll und Haben is the most popular. But among modern authors, Gustav Frenssen is the most read.
Then we started talking about Gerhart Hauptmann. It was getting late, and nobody talked anymore about war and reciprocity.