Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 765
But the system has already worn thin. Unrequited service is easy to enlist but hard to keep at drill; and at times it is hard to distinguish between patriotic citizens and busybodies. A new provincial statute will set up something else.
The truth is that the theory of government by commission is a fallacy, or at best a half-truth. It is no good without the proper spirit in those who operate it. A crook with a long term of office is just as crooked as a crook with a short and is crooked longer. A crooked man with large responsibility can steal more than a crook with less. A crooked rich man is not as good as an honest poor one. Plebiscites of all the citizens are admirable if the citizens know what they are plebisciting about; but in technological questions of power and light and transport how can they?
There is a deeper trouble still, an unsolved problem for Montreal and other cities. There is no doubt that municipal government is the dead end, the blind alley of democracy. In early days, in little towns, it could enlist the same devoted interest and unselfish service as can national government in a decent nation. In national politics, the function of government involves the real issues, life-and-death issues, of a nation and not just the dollars and cents spent in making a city sewer. A quite different set of motives enter in. Some, perhaps many politicians, in the national sphere, steal or get rich by happy accident. But others don’t; for them there is in public life a tremendous temptation to be honest, not only honest but ostentatiously honest, conspicuously poor. One thinks of the conspicuous poverty of Daniel Webster, living in majestic debt; of our own Joe Howe of Nova Scotia whose friends had to pay his fare across the Atlantic; of such men as Sir John Macdonald, of Laurier, of Fielding, who “never had a cent.” Incidentally, the politician who “never has a cent” seems to have just about everything else in the world except a cent, but that’s another matter.
There is no remedy for these things in Montreal or elsewhere that can be marked out with a rule and compass, framed in the four corners of a statute, or even achieved by the threat of the penitentiary. Civic interest won’t do. In the complicated technique of city services today, full civic interest would leave no time for anything else. You will find in Montreal, no doubt elsewhere, many doctors, lawyers, professors, and professional men, leading citizens, who in thirty years have taken no interest in the City Hall except to swear at it. Quite rightly. Their work lies elsewhere. All they can do is to ask some honest men of special knowledge whether a light, heat, and power, or a tramways contract is fair and honest and vote accordingly. There is, in short, no remedy but in righteousness, no virtue in democracy of any sort unless it carries with it the spirit of righteousness. All government comes to that.
The position of dominance of Montreal in the economic life of the Dominion during this era was accentuated by the fact that it was not only a great shipping and manufacturing center, but also had become the center of finance. It was at once Liverpool and Lombard Street, Pittsburgh and Wall Street. This had come about as the natural and deserved result of the institution in the old days of Lower Canada of the sound banking system based on Scottish tradition that came with the foundation of the Bank of Montreal. The banking system set up in the province of Canada developed into the system of chartered banks with branches organized under the Dominion of Canada and a conspicuous success. The branch system naturally meant centralized finance as the head offices of banks in the chief cities, such as the Bank of Montreal and the Molsons Bank in Montreal, added to metropolitan dominance but made for security and mutual support.
With banking had arisen the Montreal Stock Exchange. Even before Confederation shares in the Bank of Montreal and the other banks of the period, together with shares in the new railway companies, etc., were traded back and forth and offered by newspaper advertisement. This led to the formation of a (unincorporated) group of traders, first associated as the Board of Brokers in 1863. The traders met daily, at first in a private office, then in a rented room in the old Board of Trade Building. They were incorporated by a provincial act as the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1874. At that time they were dealing in sixty-three different issues, including the shares of twenty-one banks, in nine government and municipal issues, in the stock of four railways, ten industrial stocks, and minor securities. It is notable that in those days mining shares only represented three issues out of a total sixty-three. There was a daily average turnover of eight hundred shares.
Business grew rapidly. In 1901 sales ran to seven thousand a day. There were forty-five members: the value of a seat had risen from $2500 in 1876 to $12,000. The exchange in 1904 built its own building on St. François Xavier Street on land that changed hands for the first time since the Sulpicians received their fief in 1663. When the Great War broke out membership in the exchange had reached seventy-five and the turnover ran to ten thousand.
The fortunes of the stock exchange after that point belong rather to technical monetary history than to the present work. Its eclipse during the Great War was followed by a spectacular revival in the decade of the 1920s. The press of extramural trading led to the formation of the Montreal Curb Exchange in 1926. The activities of the two culminated in the trading mania of 1929 when in a single day (October 29) the combined turnover reached 730,195 shares. The price of seats had risen with the volume of business; it stood at $27,000 in 1921 and increased about ten times to its high mark of $225,000 in 1929. Then followed the slump, the spasmodic recoveries and falls, and then the new eclipse of the present war. Trading, though under the Foreign Exchange Control and a multitude of regulations, is not suspended by law, but merely by fact. The Stock Exchange sits in the ashes. Later, like the phoenix, it will rise from there: indeed, many of its younger adherents and offspring are in the air already.
There was once upon a time, namely about thirty years ago, a McGill professor who was called away to another chair and who shook the dust of Montreal off his cap and gown with the bitter denunciation, “an oppressive and plutocratic atmosphere.” There was something in it. The accumulation and concentration of wealth in Montreal had been made all the more evident and conspicuous by the fact that most of the superrich lived in one and the same residential quarter. It was an area of unsurpassed beauty, undisturbed, from the very nature of its situation, by the noise of traffic or by the passage of the passer-by. This is the district that we recall as lying just at the foot of the mountain, unoccupied under the French Regime and comprising in early British days the beautiful farms and the stone manor houses of the McGills, the McTavishes, and such that reached all the way from what is now Fletcher’s Field to the Côte des Neiges Road, covering all the river face of the mountain slope.
For this area McGill University presently formed one boundary. The rest was laid out into spacious side streets running up the hill from Sherbrooke Street till they could run no further. Each street was thus blind with that happy blindness that spells peace. Nature aided man. The elms that grow so easily on Montreal Island, thus left in secluded growth, fashioned each street to a Gothic cathedral. Here in generous grounds arose the mansions of the rich. Where nature’s utmost effort ended art took up the task with lawns and shrubberies and flower beds gay from the earliest glowing of the crocus till the last drooping beauty of the aster. Great glass conservatories turned even winter into a vision of tropical beauty. Nor did art stop here: for the private picture galleries collected in Montreal and housed in this happy area became known throughout the world. Every social group acquires its particular habits and hobbies. People in villages keep bees; people at the seaside collect shells. The superrich in the Montreal of forty years ago collected pictures. It is the easiest and simplest of all collecting hobbies: the price tells you exactly what you are getting; you have only to look on the back of the picture to appreciate it.
These circumstances gave to society in Montreal, in the pre-war days that are never likely to come again, the peculiar, the distinctive complexion described by the professor. We are speaking here of society at what is called its top end, not at its bottom end, the base of the pyramid, the long rows of tawdry houses and the tumbled slums of Griffintown, among people who wouldn’t know a Correggio from a Colorado Claro. The rich in Montreal had too much. They got in the way. They annexed the art of the painter and they stole the history of the professor; for a man who buys a whole room full of early Canadiana, with signatures of Montcalm and Wolfe, must surely know more history than one who merely talks about them; and the man who can buy Japanese mezzotints must have a finer sense of art than the man who wishes he had the money to spend on something else. The rich annexed these things, it is true, rather as patrons than as partners. It is true, also, that the love of art in some of its rich patrons was very genuine, and genuine in proportion as it talked least. It is true also that many of the superrich men who “made Montreal” as heads of banks and railways and captains of industry were very fine men, and that some of them asked nothing better than to enjoy their own society undisturbed, paying out generously right and left to colleges, churches, and charities with never a thought of interference. Those of us who remember the era can think of one such, richest of all perhaps, whose simple evenings were spent alone, reading the evening newspaper under a droplight, smokeless, for he knew too much about it, drinkless for he didn’t care for it, and speechless for he seldom had much to say, except “yes” for another million.
Yet the fact remains that the rich in Montreal enjoyed a prestige in that era that not even the rich deserve.
In any case the “oppressive and plutocratic society” is all gone now. The war swept over it and set up newer and better values in soldiers and patriots. Then came the depression and cast down the mighty from their seats, mingled the old rich with the new poor, and left the fairyland of this Plutoria under the elms, a wreckage of mortgages, a placard of “sales,” with many of its mansions empty and others gone and vanished under “demolition.” There are many rich in Montreal now, but not gathered and focused as they were.
“They say,” says Omar Khayyám, “the lion and the leopard keep their court where Jansed gloried and drank deep.” Call the lion and the leopard the income-tax inspector and the property-tax assessor, and Persepolis has nothing on Montreal.
Montreal shared in the movement for expansion and the annexation of outside municipalities which came as a general tendency all over the United States and Canada in connection with the electrical age. The development of rapid transport and the introduction of the motorcar brought with them the “commuter” of the new suburban district.
The cities all expected larger population, one and one making three, and an expanded retail market. The movement ran apace, even more so in the “advanced” province of Ontario than in conservative Quebec. Cities annexed towns, towns annexed villages, and villages annexed the back street. No one foresaw the future. Repentance, for the smaller areas absorbed, came later. It then appeared that annexation meant taxes. Country properties that had known no higher burden than those imposed in a township rate and a school-section school tax now rose to the full honor of participation, at high rates, in urban facilities that reached them only in name. But there was no way out. The footsteps of annexation led into the metropolitan lion’s den. None out.
Montreal shared in this. As between the beginning of the movement, with the annexation of Hochelaga (down the river from the main port) in 1883, until the outbreak of the Great War it annexed twenty-seven municipalities, a total area of 22,000 acres and a population at the time of union of 124,000. Inside what may be called the city itself there was the annexation of St. Henri with 21,000 and St. Cunégonde with 11,000 in 1905. The annexation of St. Louis brought in 35,000 in 1910. The same year saw the rich prize of Notre Dame de Grace, its population only 4000 but a favored district, clean and bright as the morning, with nothing to live down, like Verdun, nothing to unmake like Griffintown, destined for obvious growth. Just at the back of the mountain Montreal took over in its sleep the little village of Côte des Neiges, hitherto only explored by snowshoe clubs and a point of pilgrimage to Lumkin’s Tavern. The city reached out across the island, picking up the old settlement of St. Laurent on the way and reached the back river with Bordeaux and Sault au Recollet as part of the city of Montreal. Nor did the process stop with the war. Maisonneuve and other towns came in. But the process slackened and then halted. Not all the municipalities wanted to come in, and after the exposure in 1909 of the corruption of city government in Montreal the shadow of the twenty-three aldermen fell cold on the threatened areas. Hence it is that the topography of Montreal shows a number of municipalities not forming part of it but included in its borders and entirely surrounded by it — what they call “enclaves” in European diplomacy. Here belong the town of Mount Royal, the tunnel town mentioned above, the city of Verdun (with sixty thousand people), the cities of Outremont and Westmount, and the greatest of these is Westmount.
Just to the west of Mount Royal, to the left of it as you see it from downtown, is a smaller mountain, separated from it by the miniature mountain pass called the Côte des Neiges Road. The slope of the West Mountain, the Little Mountain, is the site of Westmount, which descends its sides till it meets Montreal at the bottom of the slope, just below the Canadian Pacific Railway. Montreal thus entirely surrounds Westmount.
Westmount has a place all its own in the make-up of Greater Montreal. Its history is, in a sense, older than that of Montreal. Excavation shows that the site of Westmount was an ancient Indian burial ground, so old that the remains are not recognizable, from the method of burial, as those of Hurons but are those of antecedent dwellers, possibly the Flatheads of the Lower Mississippi Valley. But there is a gap in the history of Westmount as between the Flathead and its present population. It had no share in the sorrows and the glory of New France and practically none in British Montreal till yesterday. On the country road, the Côte St. Antoine, that runs on a westward slant out of Montreal, rising as it goes, certain of the fur traders of the Beaver Hall days — Holliwell and Clarke and others — built substantial country houses. Other Montrealers — the Honorable John Young was one — bought near-by farms and set up country seats. The locality was originally part of the Parish of St. Henri. But it was sufficiently settled to be incorporated in 1874 as the village of St. Antoine. Then in 1890 the village, still in deep seclusion but with a population of 1850, became the town of Côte St. Antoine. Then the age of expansion reached out for it. The main thoroughfare of Sherbrooke Street was extended to meet the Côte St. Antoine. The electric cars found it in 1894 and electrified it into rapid settlement and into the farseeing town-planning that has made it the charming place it is; neither urban nor rural, neither straight nor crooked, embowered in trees, shopless (except for the lower area, too far gone to save) and saloonless, too rich for the poor but too poor for the superrich, and throughout clean and beautiful.
As such it needed no saint to look after it. It took to the plain title of the town of Westmount in 1895. Its population passed ten thousand with the outgoing century and the year 1908 saw it made the city of Westmount. Since then it has lived and flourished, multiplying its good works in its schools (the “Westmount High” is second to nothing in Canada), in its public parks, playgrounds, and conservatories, its public library, its Victoria Hall, and the sheltering arm of its public welfare. The population of the city is at present twenty-five thousand; it is 88 per cent English speaking, over 70 per cent of British origin. It is small enough for civic pride and devoted civic service in office; too young to steal, too wise to be led into the lion’s den of Montreal — except to get a drink. For Westmount doesn’t tolerate intemperance. It voted heavily for prohibition. It has no licenses, no bars, no “bogus night clubs.” You can get anything you want in Westmount, except a drink: if you sink to that you must go down into Montreal. There is no doubt on all sides that Westmount, thus included in Montreal, is an oasis of something in something else: people differ only on the question of what in what. On the other hand, Toronto visitors pay the high compliment to Westmount of saying that it is just like a piece of Toronto.
At least Westmount is clean and honest in its government. To realize that, you need only open the annual report that the Secretary-Treasurer lays at the feet of the Mayor and aldermen of Westmount every thirty-first of December, a report in print as neat and symmetrical as a Westmount garden, bound in an orange cover fit for Belfast. There you may see it all, every figure, nothing concealed, money from taxes so much, from licenses so much — not liquor licenses, of course, but licenses for dogs, bicycles, bakers, knife grinders, and musicians — all the revenue and expenditure set down in a plain, understandable way, and every addition correct.
