Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 824
I have written a description of the Toronto of those earlier days in a book of mine on Canada, which was distributed as a private gift book and did not reach the hands of the public and from which therefore I may fittingly quote in these pages:
“In Upper Canada, henceforth Ontario, Toronto was a commodious capital city of 60,000 inhabitants. Its streets were embowered in leaves above which rose the many spires of the churches. Its wooden slum district was herded into the centre and, like poverty itself, forgotten. Where the leaves ended a sort of park land began and in it stood the University of Toronto, secular and scientific, but housed in Norman architecture of beauty unsurpassed. To the west, more rural but less beautiful with earthly beauty, was Trinity College, founded in protest against the existence of secular Toronto. But down below, along the water front, was a business district, built like a bit of London, all of a skyline and with cobblestones rattling with cabs. The new railways sliced off, as everywhere in Ontario, the shore line, vilified with ash heaps and refuse. All over Canada, between the vanishing beauty of nature and the later beauty of civic adornment, there extended this belt of tin cans and litter.
“Just above the railway lines rose the red brick Parliament buildings, the red brick Government House flew its flag, and over the way the red brick Upper Canada College set itself to make scholars and gentlemen as good as real ones. Guarding the harbour entrance was the Old Fort, its frame barracks of the same old pattern and roof slope that had already gone round the Empire, its ramparts crumbling but its ponderous old guns in embrasures still looking feebly dangerous. The tone of society was English at the top, but the barbershops spoke American. There was profound peace and order, and on Sunday all bells and Sunday-best. It seems, as most places do, a pleasant place in retrospect. At least it was cheap. The chair at Toronto that Professor Huxley tried in vain to get carried a salary of £400 and meant an ample living.
“From the business district the shops ran for half a mile up Yonge Street and, beyond that, Yonge Street ran thirty-five miles to Holland Landing where water communication began. It had a tavern to every mile and plenty of grain wagons to keep them busy. The main railway ran through from Montreal to Sarnia-Chicago. But from the half dozen little railway stations of the Toronto of early Confederation days, there radiated, like the fingers of a hand, half a dozen little railways with various gauges, reaching out north to the lumber woods — Huntsville, Coboconk, Haliburton — and north and west to the lake ports of Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay. Along the stations of these railway lines the horse and buggy and the lumber wagon took up the traffic. General stores, each a post office, with a near-by blacksmith shop, arose at the crossroads, and if there was also a river with a waterfall, there appeared a sawmill and a gristmill, and presently, as the farms multiplied, a village. Then the village became a little town, with not one but rival stores, a drugstore, a local paper, and a cricket club. In it were four churches and three taverns. One church was of the Church of England, one Presbyterian, while the Roman Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists divided the other two. On the map of Ontario, Protestantism was everywhere, but Roman Catholicism ran in zigzags. The three taverns were one Grit, and one Tory, and one neither. Many things in Ontario ran like that in threes, with the post office and the mail stage alternating as the prize of victory in elections. The cricket club is now just a memory, gone long ago. Thus the little Ontario town grew till the maples planted in its streets overtopped it and it fell asleep and grew no more. It is strange this, and peculiar to our country, the aspect of a town grown from infancy to old age within a human lifetime.”
Upper Canada College, to describe it more narrowly, occupied all the space lying along King Street and extending from Simcoe Street to John Street and backward to Adelaide Street. I have no idea how many acres this meant, but there seemed lots of it: room for spacious gardens and big chestnut trees and such in front, the school building, a large square red brick structure of three stories with ample windows, occupying the centre and flanked right and left with the masters’ houses (square, separate, comfortable houses, with one at the left end of the row of buildings more commodious and with a large fenced-in garden beside it which constituted the principal’s residence). Some of the boys at that time were housed in masters’ houses, but the bulk of them were in a building that stood farther still to the left — the Boardinghouse, red brick, two stories high, shaped like the letter T, but with much more crosspiece to the T than the upright. One end of the crosspiece was the Old Wing, made up of rooms each holding four boys — the Nurseries, they called them. The other end, still called the New Wing and only about ten years old, was cut into rooms holding two boys each. In the Old Wing there lived two resident masters with the boys, one on each floor. Each had a comfortable sitting room and a bedroom and the services of a waiter to serve his evening supper. These, of course, were junior unmarried masters with position adequate and comfortable to that status. It had grown to be the custom that young men held this position after graduation in arts and studied medicine while active as resident masters. A number of men who were later among the distinguished medical men of Ontario served this apprenticeship to aid them in their medical course.
The senior boys lived in the New Wing under the care of the senior resident master, who occupied a permanent position, had a suite of rooms, a waiter of his own, and lived in what seemed to us, as schoolboys, magnificent luxury. This was the position held for a whole generation by “Gentle” John Marland, M.A., Oxon., famous in the history of the school. The upright of the T was filled with a large dining room and, over it, a large night study. There was a smaller dining room across the far end of the New Wing, but it was used only for midday dinner, when a certain number of day boys took their dinner at school and the space in the main dining room was insufficient. All the boys from the Nurseries went into night study from seven to nine (I think it was), but the senior boys studied in their rooms.
Boys were not allowed to leave the school grounds except on Saturday and Sunday, but there was a little tuckshop called The Taffy on the street behind the school (Adelaide Street) to which leave was given every afternoon. The boys went over half a dozen at a time, for twenty minutes, according to lists drawn up by the drill sergeant. One could do oneself very well with five cents a trip — three cents for pop drink out of the bottle and two cents for two doughnuts or cakes or such things.
The school at that time was at the height of its reputation and popularity. There were very few private schools of any size in the province except the once-famous school of Dr. Tassie in Galt, and the only “rival” school in a real sense was Trinity College School, Port Hope. This had been founded, in the interest of the Church of England, with a special view to educating the sons of its clergy and the sons of members of the church who distrusted the “godlessness” that they saw spreading over education in Toronto. All who know the city will recall its long story of friction as between various degrees of godliness and godlessness. Governor Simcoe and his aristocratic settlement at Muddy York were all for the Church of England. But the members of the Church of Scotland and the Scottish churches couldn’t be ignored; nor, presently, the Methodists and the Baptists. Hence it was hard to find a way, even if one granted full freedom of worship, of reconciling the claims of the different Protestant sects and varieties. This applied especially to the division of the vast area of public land (one eighth of it) originally set aside, when the province was created (1791), for the support of the Protestant clergy.
The difficulty applied also to all creation of public education, notably that of a university. Make it a part of the Church of England and half the province would be against it. Make it suit all the Protestants at once and you got it so broad that to the true churchman it appeared flat, trampled to the ground. Thus it was that when the provincial university was at last put on a wide basis as the University of Toronto, a seceding body headed by the vigorous Bishop Strachan, heir to the Simcoe tradition, founded Trinity University. Upper Canada College, all through its early years, in fact till 1891, was financially, and by its endowments, united with the University of Toronto. Hence came the formation of Trinity College School, Port Hope, to offset this connection with ungodliness. It was at the time the only rival. Ridley College (separating low-church godlessness from high-church godliness) came later, as did also St. Andrews, separating I forget what from what, except perhaps the crude ugliness of the Upper Canada College of 1891 from its own rural beauty — a school built by people who knew what a school was as compared with people who just took a guess — starting from a deaf-and-dumb asylum or a penitentiary.
So the school on King Street was, I say, at the height of its reputation and prosperity in 1882. There were about one hundred boarders and over one hundred day boys, but of course the boarders were, and thought themselves, the school. They had never introduced the division of play hours and work hours specially adapted for Warden, as in British schools, with playtime in the best of the afternoon and school and study time in the worst. School ended at three, and all the day boys went home and the boarders had the afternoon to play till teatime. But this division was not specially made for the sake of the day boys but by the custom of the country. People forget anyway that darkness falls on autumn and winter playgrounds far earlier in Great Britain than in the more southerly latitude of Toronto.
The old school, as I see it, was a fine, decent place, with no great moral parade about it, no moral hypocrisy, but a fundamental background of decent tradition. I have elsewhere described what I have called the struggle of the school to make us gentlemen — or even Christian gentlemen — with the conclusion that it couldn’t be done. We always looked on it as a false hope ourselves. I think it must have been Dr. Arnold of Rugby who first said that it didn’t matter whether the school was a school of one hundred boys or of one boy but it must be a school of Christian gentlemen. Since then all headmasters of boarding schools have made that announcement in the Assembly Hall, but they fail to put it over. Certainly it failed with us at Upper Canada: we knew it was well meant but outside the realm of practical life. But the moral tone was good. There was little, indeed none, of that hideous bullying which has been the curse of many English schools; nothing, that I ever saw or knew about, of that brutal beating, flogging of boys by masters just one layer short of criminal insanity. There was none of the “fagging” of little boys as servants for the seniors, in which many British people seem to exult as a rare feature of school life but which I personally have never been able to understand. Church and religious service there was, but not too much of it, and the little there was was formal and impersonal. We had Sunday school each Sunday morning, consisting (for Church of England boys) of reciting the collect for the day. But by the time the master had read an opening prayer and heard all the collects, then, I think, Sunday was “all” and he read a benediction. All boys went to church, according to their parents’ preferences. The Church of England boys, the majority, needed two churches — St. George’s near by, up John Street, and the Cathedral along King Street. There was a master in charge, but they didn’t go in a flock. Presbyterians went to St. Andrew’s and Methodists went somewhere else. Among all the wonders there were only three or four Roman Catholics.
But the morality of the school lay in the ideas that guided it, being, of course, the ideas of decent families from which we came. We didn’t lie, except in the sort of neutral zone where lying didn’t count, such as in making up a list for leave to go to The Taffy (the tuckshop). There was no stealing and indeed very little to steal. Pocket money was recommended as twenty-five cents a week for junior boys, fifty cents for seniors. The era of “new rich,” of schoolboy luxury, of ostentatious parents, had not yet come.
It has been a singularly fortunate thing for Canada that the foundation of Upper Canada College, and presently of other private schools on the same plan, has never created any disturbing division of education by a crosswise division of social classes such as vexes England now. As everybody knows, the problem of the “public” schools (Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and one hundred less-known others, apparently called public schools because that is the last word that any stretch of language could apply to them) rises on the horizon as one of the great postwar problems of England. Till yesterday, as it were, in spite of the successive advances of political rights, nominal political equality, England remained a country profoundly based on class and accepting it. Landed property, hereditary rights, social class, and the privileges and posts of government held in accordance with it, was the real basis of British Administration in spite of all the expansion of legal rights from the Reform Act of 1832 and onwards.
The public schools of England were a part of it, had grown up as a part of it, and can be thought of only in that light. Generations of people, not rich, but adhering to the class, gentlemen with a grip all the tighter for the forces tugging it away, clung to the idea of sending their boys to a public school, no matter what the sacrifice — a public school, the old school tie — and then off, if need be, for British Columbia or Matabeleland. There was often much in it that meant out of sight out of mind. Parents in an English rectory who said that “Jack was doing well in Manitoba” would have felt less sure of it if they could have seen Jack sleeping in straw as the ostler of a livery stable. But for others a little higher up or more fortunately connected, the “public schools” and the school tie presently meant the civil service, the foreign office, the vast administrative range reserved, not by law but by practice, for gentlemen.
All this is breaking up in England in the new world now shaping. All the wealth of the old hereditary classes available for endowed schools and pious foundations is just nothing as beside the national fund of public money available for buildings, apparatus, and equipment, et cetera, of public schools in the real sense. The lean kine have eaten up the fat. The penny-a-week national school of my Porchester days has grown to the vast science college of today, based on the people’s money and itself only a part, co-operating and competing with the state education of America and the outside world.
What then are they to do? Just have one set of schools in England, all maintained by the State? But if so, asks the country rector and the retired colonel, are you sure that you would turn out gentlemen? Leave it all alone to the open competition of pounds, shillings, and pence, people paying for what they want different from a state school or else going without it? But in that case few public schools could survive — Eton and Harrow and such, but the bulk, not. Certainly they could not survive if they tried to adapt their education to the new demands of practical science, engineering, aeronautics, without which any school is left behind mumbling Greek. The “classics” held their place as the equipment for a ruling class. That is all over. No class can rule that can’t understand the science that holds in its hands the life and death of the world.
Such is the English public-school problem, an included part of the problem of a classless society. Luckily for us, the problem is not ours. Give our people cash money enough and they will take a chance on what class you class them in.
So, as we say, it was a good thing that the foundation of Upper Canada College and its fellow private schools did not create a line of class division running through the schools of the province, as between schools for gentlemen and schools for other people. The reason lay in the difference of circumstance as between Upper Canada and England. In Upper Canada, from the days of the Loyalists on, all the sensible people were advocates of schools. Those who came from Massachusetts and New York knew what they had left behind, as did those who migrated from Scotland. Hence there grew up in the province an excellent system of public elementary and presently public high schools, and they got better and better as time went on, and then the high schools in the larger towns took on more equipment and a bigger staff and turned into collegiate institutes. As against this, in England, there was no public elementary education worthy of the name till the Act of 1870, and even after the system was set up by the fact that in the eyes of most people a board school was no place for a gentleman’s son.
But in Canada, gentlemen or not, people, even well-to-do people, living in the big towns mostly saw no reason why they shouldn’t send their sons to high school, where the teaching was excellent and the companionship corresponded pretty much to what they got themselves in their social life. The thing was true also the other way round. Many of the boys sent to Upper Canada were not sent there because they were specially rich or specially gentlemanly, but because, as in the case of my brothers and myself, they lived in out-of-the-way places and there was nothing else to do with them.
All this got truer and truer as time went on, as education became less and less classical, as science made greater and greater demands on public money for premises and apparatus. Then came the Great War, and the splendid record of boys from high-school and collegiate existence obliterated any surviving notion of the private schools as the home of an officer class. The case of the Royal Military College at Kingston, founded in 1876, stands by itself. It was, and is, a technical school devoted single-mindedly to the profession, with an esprit de corps and a pride of its own that in no way interferes with other affiliations and affections.
So then there remains only the question, Is a boarding school any good anyway, except for boys whose homes are isolated from day schools? Is there anything of value in the life and experience of a boarding school that a boy cannot get in a day school? It is a question that has been put to me hundreds of times. And I think that within proper limitations and understanding the answer is in favour of the boarding school. I say limitations and understandings. For I would never agree with the British people of the older type who think a boarding school (one made for gentlemen) so necessary that they would take a chance on sending their sons to a bad one than not to any at all. The harm of a bad boarding school, an immoral place, outweighs one hundred times all the shortcomings (after all only negative) of a day school. Parents should never send their boys to a boarding school unless they are assured of it on the side of a decent moral life. A rotten school does harm that nothing can ever remedy. So also, in a less vital sense, does a snobbish school, one whose aim is to take in money (from those who can pay it in potsful) and turn out gentlemen — as far as boys can be made so by expensive clothes, expensive habits, premature luxury, and exotic accents.
