Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 769
In the case of passenger vessels the distinction between an ocean liner and a river steamer would be obvious even to the eye of an Idaho miner — without coming up to look. The river steamer has developed lines of artistic beauty far more attractive to the untrained eye of the land than are the mixed superstructures, the humps, gaps, and derricks of most ocean steamers. The ocean boat never recaptures its lines till it reaches the superior tonnage of a duchess. But to the nautical eye the river steamer is all wrong; it carries its center of buoyancy too far up in its chest. It is liable to “turn turtle,” as did even the ocean ships in the period when the designers first struggled with the problem of carrying heavy guns on the upper decks of iron ships; as witness the loss of H.M.S. Captain in 1870; or when designers went too far in carrying weight of superstructure — the probable cause of the mysterious loss of the Waratah in 1909 — vanished with all hands. But the river steamer in the ocean would not only be liable to upset but certain to, in upsetting weather. It could only cross the ocean if the ocean stayed quiet enough. But for its own line of work, it can carry more passengers in less space for less cost than is possible for an ocean vessel.
Discussion centers around the cargo boats. “The lake freighters,” writes the naval architect, Herbert C. Sadler, “are the last word in a type of vessel especially developed to do the business of carrying bulk commodities, such as iron ore, coal, etc., in the most economical way between the lake ports. Their business is on the lakes, not on the ocean. To alter the design to allow them to go to sea would be suicidal.”
Ocean boats are essentially stronger and deeper. Stress is laid on stability in navigation, but for the lake boat on rapidity and mechanical cheapness in loading and unloading. An average of ten modern Upper Lake freighters shows a length of 535 feet to a beam of 58 feet and a draft of 27½, along with 303 horsepower. The corresponding ocean freighter has a length of 427 feet to a beam of 55 and a draft of 32 with a horsepower of 533. The lake freighter’s hatches are in a continuous series on 24-foot centers, the ocean boat quite diversified. The lake boat is loaded and unloaded by gear on the dock, the ocean boat by gear on the deck.
The highly specialized appearance of the lake freighter in its extreme form leaps, as the French say, to the eye. Here is the great wheat carrier Gleneagles, 582 feet long but throughout nearly its whole length presenting nothing but a flat deck, all battened down, not even a chair to sit on; the only superstructures are the tiers of little deck houses four stories high, away up in the bow, and a group of others rising behind the funnel away at the stern. The boat has a beam of sixty feet, a molded depth of thirty-two feet, and a draft of twenty-one. But thus fashioned for one purpose the Gleneagles can carry 445,000 bushels of wheat.
Yet a part of this argument is not so sound as the other part. Granted the difference in gear and hatches, it may be that these differences are a consequence, not a cause. They may exist because the Welland Canal has a depth of twenty-five feet and not of thirty-six; and other boats may owe something of their shape to the limitations of the fourteen feet of Lachine and the canal system of the St. Lawrence above it.
One limit, however, is permanent. It is not possible to deepen the ship canal below Montreal to a depth to accommodate the world’s great ships. Digging a canal is one thing; digging and blasting rock for two hundred miles is another. Some of the world’s ships never will, never can, come up the seaway. How many are shut out? Here we may take the evidence presented in the Brookings Institution Report of 1929, very generally regarded as perhaps the best and most unbiased summary of the economic side of the case. It has to be admitted that the report makes out a bad case. We must remember that a twenty-seven-foot channel doesn’t float a twenty-seven-foot draft ship. It can’t scrape the bottom. You must give it, in salt water which floats it best, two and a half feet under the bottom, and in fresh water, three feet.
The tables cited in the report endeavor to show what proportion of existing ocean shipping could enter a seaway according to the depth of channel offered. Thus a twenty-five-foot St. Lawrence Great Lakes channel would only permit the passage of ships with an ocean draft of twenty-two feet, six inches. But if you take the cargo ships in the U.S. foreign trade as illustrating the traffic that the seaway would be supposed to bring up the river, you find that 88½ per cent of them are of deeper draft than twenty-two feet, six inches. These figures are those of 1926, but as ships tend to grow bigger rather than smaller they apply as well, or better, today. Hence it is argued that a twenty-five-foot canal “would exclude all important ocean shipping.” A twenty-seven-foot channel as favored by the Canadian section of the Joint Board of Engineers (1926) would admit ships with an ocean draft of twenty-four feet, six inches. Even this, the report argues, would greatly restrict the availability of the seaway. Of the passenger cargo ships now in the U.S. foreign trade, this would admit only 37 of the total 277. Of cargo ships it would admit only 1504 out of a total 3103. Even of the tonnage operating (at the time of the report) on a regular schedule out of Montreal and Quebec, in all 82 steamers of which 59 were British, only 13 per cent could go on up the seaway with a twenty-seven-foot channel. Similarly a twenty-seven-foot channel would exclude 60 per cent of the tramp grain ships that come to Montreal from using the seaway above and 81 per cent of the cargo vessels and the tankers engaged in the intercoastal trade. The report argues that a channel depth of thirty-three feet is the minimum that could serve the supposed purpose of the seaway. Even that would exclude — a quite obvious fact — the great luxury liners.
The opinion of what are called Montreal “interests” are strongly against the seaway. By “interests” we mean people affected in dollars and cents by the project, either directly as shipping men or indirectly as shareholders. Naturally, since “interests” are as human as the rest of us, they cannot help seeing the project from their own point of view — through the bottom of an empty pocket. The Port of Montreal, they say, and indirectly much of the city, lives on the transshipment of cargo, ocean to lakes, lakes to ocean. The seaway, if successful and in proportion to its success, would substitute passage-through for transshipment. It would do to Montreal what Montreal did to Quebec. Hence the bigger the success made in Toronto and Duluth, the less in Montreal. If, on the other hand, the seaway failed, it would leave a vast burden of taxes for no tangible benefit.
Thus having been as thoroughly damned as the rapids themselves, as badly scraggled as the Jackdaw of Rheims, it is pleasant to know that the seaway plan is to go right ahead. As agreed in the Pacts of 1941 it calls for a twenty-seven-foot channel through the St. Lawrence and the lakes and the connecting waters. The heaviest work to be done will be in the international section of the St. Lawrence between Lake St. Francis and Lake Ontario. Here the proposal involves great physical changes; the heavy dam needed to get the twenty-seven feet of depth will flood out many islands and half islands in the river all the way from Cornwall to Cardinal (about 40 miles), drown out a long stretch of the existing highway, and even of the track of the Canadian National Railway.
A unique part of the plan, a queer example of the romance of engineering, will be the arresting of some of the rivers that now flow north to James Bay and recalling them to the St. Lawrence watershed, to guarantee a sufficient head of water. This indeed is already being done by the diversion of Long Lac, which hitherto drained into the Albany River, into Lake Superior and the diversion of the Ogoki, a tributary of the Albany into Lake Nipigon and thus to the St. Lawrence watershed. The estimate of cost made by the Joint Board of Engineers (1926) was $427,000,000. In the light of the war finance of the hour this seems a mere bubble.
The truth is that arguments against the seaway never reached home, as compared with the vast and obvious general truth of the physical utility of water connection halfway across the continent. It has been seen that the power objection has vanished into mist. The rest will go also. We must look at the long run, not the short. The life of a ship is little more than a generation. In forty years a new set of ships will sail the seas anyway. The existence of the seaway will alter all conditions. It may place such a premium on ships of a twenty-two-foot draft as to alter the world’s shipbuilding. It may be that even with transshipment at Montreal a new era would open for larger vessels out of the great inland cities with other and more varied cargoes than grain and ore and such single dead weight. Even the passenger trade will have its surprises. Large liners may move on lazily past Montreal all the way to Chicago, with a new set of passengers taking a lake cruise with the music and luxury of the supership. Compare the cruises “New York to Montreal” via ocean liner which no one foresaw. And finally the construction and extension of the seaway may afford exactly the kind of postwar activity needed for the out-of-work millions of veterans and ex-munition makers.
FOOTNOTES:
R. O. Campney, special article, Canada Year Book, 1940.
CHAPTER XIII. French and English
How French Is Montreal? First and Second Impressions. Statistics of Racial Origin. The French Language in Montreal. As Good French as the English Is Good English — Old French and New. Extent of Bilingualism. Separation of the Races. Division of Education, Family, and Social Life. The Two Universities. French and English Street Names.
AN APOLOGY, OR at least an explanation, is needed for the use of “English” at the head of this chapter. This generalized use of “English” and “England” has become a matter of great sensitiveness. Time was when world-famous books could be written under such titles as The Expansion of England, The English Constitution, England in Egypt, and the Government of England, with no outcry from Wales or protest from the Isle of Man. A poet could write that the “sands of the desert are sodden red . . . and England far and honour a name,” without being asked the distance from Glasgow or Dublin. The words “England” and “America” are both used in senses quite wrong, and exactly right.
The trouble was that the United States never had an adjective; hence “American” and therefore “America.” The mother country didn’t have a single name; all the various terms meant too much or too little. “Great Britain” left out Ireland. “Britain” left out the “British Empire.” The British Empire took in India, and the “United Kingdom” is a law term. “Britain” was, till very recently, a poetic term. Forty years ago a person would no more think of taking a trip to Britain than he would to Caledonia or Erin. Only poets went there. Nor has “Britain” any fully competent adjective, since “British” won’t translate and is especially unsuitable for Montreal as the French cannot say “les Britanniques” and must say “les Anglais.”
The usage in Montreal has always been for English people to say “the French and the English.” French people used also to say “les Canadiens” to mean themselves, but seldom now, and the English never. “British” is used only for the special distinction of British race as opposed to English speech.
Montreal is overwhelmingly a French city by racial origin as compared with British and by a heavy majority even when we include among the “English” (English speaking), the Europeans, other than French, the Jews, the four or five thousand Asiatics and the handful — if one thousand makes a handful — of Negroes. The latest classified census returns show the city as 64 per cent French, 22 per cent British, 5 per cent Jewish, and 9 per cent something else.
This great predominance of the French is entirely contrary to the first general impression of casual visitors and tourists. These visitors see only certain parts and certain aspects of Montreal — the railway stations, the steamship docks, the big hotels, the main shopping district, and, perhaps, McGill University. They can form no idea of how French the city really is. It seems an English-speaking city, except that a lot of the people speak a rather queer but not unattractive English. The true racial aspect of the population is concealed from casual visitors partly because they do not go into the specially French parts of the town, and also because the section of the population that is neither French nor British, which includes the large element brought by the European migration of this century, learns to speak English rather than French. To this is added the fact that the great bulk of the French are bilingual to a certain extent and use English in the current intercourse of shops and streets. The last classified census returns show that of the total French population of the province of Quebec, 71 per cent of the French speak French only; and even on the Island of Montreal 38 per cent of the French people speak French only. But this is partly because the island includes a large semirural area, and all French children under five are classified as not speaking any other language, which is just like statistics. These “children under five” represent one tenth of the whole population, or the equal of one third of the class in question. Count them out altogether and the 38 per cent changes to about 25.
On the other hand, many British people live and die in Montreal and make no attempt to learn to talk French, getting no further with it than the bilingual call of the streetcar conductor giving them a choice of Guy! and Ghee! Prinsse Árthur and Prinsse Arthúr.
We have also to realize that, as far as present vision can go, the French language in Montreal, as in French Canada, is there to stay. The mass of the people speak it as their mother tongue; it has behind it all that goes with a system of public education, covering eleven years of school, the four years of college, the law school, the graduate school, the medical clinic, and the laboratory of science, with French as the medium of instruction throughout. Add to this the French metropolitan press of Montreal with daily and weekly editions comparable to those of any great American city. To this is added the unending outpour of French that comes from the private radio stations speaking French and the government (C.B.C.— “Radio-Canada”), which is compelled to be bilingual at the peril of its life. By these combined good offices the Montreal taxi driver may hear as he drives the appealing accents of a chanson d’amour. This bilingualism, we say, is at the peril of the political life of Radio-Canada, because the French are intensely jealous of their language, insist on its use in street signs, traffic directions, and other wastes of paint. People in Montreal keep off the grass in two languages and are directed on their way by such signs, imbecile at first sight, as “Pont Victoria Bridge,” “Parc LaFontaine Park,” “School Zone École,” and so on. Insistence goes further and puts French needlessly on our paper dollars with a “CINQ” that looks like “One” — and acts like it; insists on it for railway stations and timetables where much of it is an amalgam of English and wears a suspicious look. A train in Montreal is marked up as due in English and dû in French, a thing unknown in France. But this distorted language is mostly forced by the exigencies of translation, not, as will be shown later, by the “badness” of French in Montreal.
But the main factor in the retention of French in Montreal is its rootage in the history of the country and its embodiment in the sacred offices of the church. “When a people lose their liberty,” says Alphonse Daudet, “as long as they keep their language it is as if they held the key to their prison.” For the French in Canada the doors of what was once their prison have long since been thrown wide open. But they keep the key.
A rough-and-ready, very rough and not quite ready, division of the area of Montreal shows the French on what is called the east side — east of St. Lawrence Main Street — and the English on the west side. The division came about as follows. As the old French town was more and more taken over by shops, business houses, and public institutions, the families moved out into the suburbs. The richer ones began building houses even beyond these original “faubourgs,” up the slope toward the mountain — the old Torrance House, Simon McTavish’s famous house (afterward haunted), and similar suburban manors. The English (in this case many of them Scottish), growing rich and controlling capital, bought up the beautiful farms that stretched away from the crown of Beaver Hall Hill to the very foot of the mountain — the McGill farm, the McTavish farm, and others, some once French, as seen in the City Map of 1836. The central and best part of this became the English residential district of the richer class already described. From this district English settlement spread west, taking the second best when the first was gone. The French, moving from the old town, of necessity, went further east, along Sherbrooke and up the beautiful road that became St. Denis, and so, eastward and northward, out over Logan’s Farm and down the river endlessly.
Yet this general division was broken by many exceptions. The French area was the first to extend to encircle the mountain so that, on its rearward side, Outremont and the Côte des Neiges village are French. Yet when settlement was further extended by the tunnel, Mount Royal was occupied by the English. The French also originally spread in St. Ann’s suburb beside what had been the river, St. Pierre, but the influx of Irish into Griffintown made an “enclave,” or whatever is Irish for it, among the French. Verdun and the factory area, as already seen, became mainly English-speaking but with many French intermixed. On the French side, the east side, the factory districts that grew up and the Canadian Pacific (Angus) Railway shops drove a wedge of English-speaking workers into what had been an entirely French area.
These general tendencies are illustrated statistically by the map of the municipal wards of Montreal and the areas of municipalities surrounded by Montreal, viz., the cities of Verdun, Westmount, Outremont, and the town of Mount Royal.
