Category: News Article Page 2 of 11

By Gregory Clark, October 4, 1924.

Pranks, Politics and Scraps Made Up Boyhood of Ontario’s First Son – Whenever He Can He Goes Home to His Folks at Morrisburg – Aims at Restoring Responsibility in Province’s Schools – Forswore Big Salary and Life of Ease Because He Is a Fighter

G. Howard Ferguson¹ sat in the wood shed.

His father and mother sat in earnest talk in the office of the big stone house.

“He is going from bad to worse,” said Mrs., Ferguson. “You are away at the sessions of parliament a great deal, and you don’t know what is going on.”

“Hmph!” said Dr. Ferguson. “Don’t I!”

“This time,” continued Mrs. Ferguson, “the principal of the high school says he does not see he is going to take Howard back. It was serious offense against the discipline of the school. He put gunpowder into the stove, which blew off the lid and a kettle for distilling moisture into the class room air…”

Dr. Ferguson, M.P., stood up.

“There is one thing we mustn’t forget. It takes brains to think up mischief. It takes spirit to carry it through. I prefer a young rascal to a mollycoddle. If we can only control him until the serious affairs of life begin to interest him, I am certain Howard will be a success, for he is filled with vigor and ardor. Why, he may some day be premier!”

And with a chuckle the doctor walked out wards the wood shed. For his sly reference to Howard and the premiership would settle Mrs. Ferguson. She was born of a political family, and here she was the wife of a politician, and doing her best to raise a family of politicians.

G. Howard Ferguson continued to sit in the wood shed, his chin sunk in his hands, gloomily pondering the mysteries of existence, until his grave parent entered, and read him a stern and final ultimatum with respect to his future conduct.

All this was forty years ago. It would have by now been forgotten if a little girl, devoted worshiper of the wicked Howard, had not lain cuddled in her crib in the next room, listening intently to the ominous conversation of her parents.

What Does Kemptville Say?

I went down to Kemptville, near Ottawa, to try and obtain a “line” on the premier of Ontario. In The Star library, where files are put on all public men, there is a fat file labeled Furguson. But in those papers and photographs there is not one picture of the premier except in the political aspect, and not one printed line but is political.

Since his announcement of the temperance plebiscite the whole province is sharply curious as to the human aspect of the Hon. G. Howard Ferguson. Politics reveals most men. Politics has clothed the premier in a voluminous garment. What is he like, with the toga off? What’s his sport, his hobby, his life?

Kemptville holds the answer, entire.

Because Kemptville knows so much about Premier Ferguson, the rest of Ontario knows little.

By a boiling process, I could reduce my adventures down to a few paragraphs in estimate of the man.

But we won’t boil. Come on with me.

I landed into Kemptville before seven o’clock of a bright and frosty morning. A gentleman in whiskers, representing a large implement firm, was the only other passenger besides myself to be deposited at Allen’s Hotel.

A boy of fourteen was sweeping the sidewalk in front of a neighboring store.

“Where does the premier live?” I asked him.

“Just up the street there. But he ain’t here now. He’s in Toronto.”

“I just came up to get some information about him.”

“Oh? Well, you came to the right place.”

“What sort of a man is he?” I asked.

The boy studied me curiously.

“Say, he’s the best… Say, do you know, he gives orders to the schools to issue out ice cream tickets to us, every fair time, and this year I got three. Howard’s the best man in the world. He never walked past me in his life. You ask anybody.”

A sound within the store set the boy vigorously sweeping again. So I went into the hotel. Mr. Allen greeted me. I told him my business.

“Anybody,” said Mr. Allen, “can tell you something about Howard. But you must be sure to see Mrs. Dr. Storey – that’s his sister – and you must pay a visit to the ‘board of trade.'”

He smiled and showed me through the window a little grey shop across the road from the hotel.

Sitting There for 25 Years

“That’s Bill Hyland’s shoe repairing shop. But it is better known hereabouts as the ‘board of trade.’ That’s where the boys sit. You will find some of them there at any hour of the day. When Howard is home, he sits in there, too. They know Howard. He’s been sitting in there for twenty-five years.”

Already I began to have an inkling of the situation – and an inkling of the Hon. G. Howard Ferguson. So, to see how far this thing was going to go, I resolved to ask everybody about the premier. I got Alf. Little to drive me around in his ancient Ford. Alf. is older than the premier, but went to school with him.

“What kind of a man is he? What was he like when he was a kid?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” said Alf. “He was only so high. But he could lick you to a standstill. Next minute, he would lick anybody that touched you. As far as I can remember, he didn’t do anything but fight. But he was the most popular kid in the town. He’s never changed. Still fighting, all the time, still licking bullies, still befriending everybody, still the most popular kid in town.”

When the sun came up and shone fair down into the main street of Kemptville, there began to be signs of life. Merchants opened up their doors and let down the awnings. Boys swept off the pavement. And then appeared a few elderly gentlemen who marched leisurely, from different directions, halting for brief chats with all who were out, but converging definitely upon Bill Hyland’s cobbler shop.

So I went in, too. Bill Hyland is one of those lean, gentle, genial men who beam behind spectacles. His shop is the typical cobbler’s shop, littered with old boots and leather, the walls covered with cards and papers, the air reeking with the pungent, friendly smell of leather. Grouped about the little den, on chairs without backs, sat three members of the board of trade.

“The premier comes in here, when he’s in, town?” I asked.

“When he’s home,” corrected Bill Hyland. “He sits right there, on that box by the window, with his legs crossed, smoking and leaning his head back.”

“What does he talk about?”

“Whatever there is to talk about. He’s been sitting there for years. I don’t know how many. He’s one of the bunch. The only difference his being premier has made is to keep him away from home.”

“He’s closed his law office,” I said.

“Yes, but not his home. His farm is still going strong. He comes home whenever he can, and sets to work on his farm and comes in here to talk with the boys, the same as ever.”

“I guess he is pretty popular in Kemptville.”

“Why shouldn’t he be? He’s lived here all his life. We’ve known him since he was a kid. He’s a friend to everybody. And he has made good. And he still lives in Kemptville.”

He is a Small-Town Man

In this quiet town, Howard Ferguson was born and raised. Back to it he came, after seven years’ exposure to the charms of the big city during his university and law courses. From it he came to Toronto as member of the legislature and cabinet minister and premier. But back to it he still comes whenever the increasing responsibilities of Toronto permit.

And here we have the reason he is not known, as other public men come to be known, to the big city. Because he is a small-town man. Unlike Whitney and Hearst², he has not transferred his interests and his home to Toronto when big politics called. It is a character hunt we are on, and hero we have the first clue: when he can, he goes home to his folks.

The board of trade was a little bit stand-offish with me, for there is dynamite in politics, and who knew but that I might be an enemy within the lines?

“They tell me Howard was a live wire, as a young fellow,” I suggested to the meeting, by way of setting loose the anecdotes. The boys exchanged smiling glances.

“You see Mrs. Dr. Storey,” said Bill Hyland, tapping at his last. “She will have it right.”

So at last I came to the big stone house where, the premier’s sister lives. She was the same little girl who lay curled in her crib listening to the fateful words of her parents the night G. Howard Ferguson sat alone in the wood shed.

“The premier’s success in politics,” I said to her, “comes, as such things come, from character and not from chance. Are we right in regarding him as a fighter, a man of high spirit and energy, to whom politics is second nature, whose hobby is politics, whose fun is politics, whose life is politics?”

Raised in Political Atmosphere

“It would have been a great wonder,” replied Mrs. Storey, “if Howard had not gone into politics and made a success of politics. For he was born and raised in an atmosphere thick with politics.

“When he was three years old, his father, Dr. Ferguson, entered the Federal house for the first time, and remained a member of parliament for twenty-five years. So, for the formative years of his life, Howard lived in the thick of it, when politics was a greater game than it is to-day.

“This house had three spare bedrooms, always kept in readiness for the political guest. There were guests to dinner nearly every night, and politics was the talk at table.

“Howard’s mother was even more interested in politics than his father, for it may fairly be said that she did a great deal to organize and plan the doctor’s campaigns, and she had much to do with the success of his career.

“So you may see Howard should be pretty well grounded in the current history of politics. What a boy listens to at the table, every day of his life, is likely to influence him.

“Then, the practical side of politics, the manual labor of the game, has been familiar to him from childhood. By the time he was ten years of age, he was out driving through the country distributing campaign literature, posting up notices, and accompanying his father on canvassing trips, learning the art of political discussion and of soliciting a vote. These things were not chores to him. They were manly stuff, and he took the most ardent interest in the whole game. I recall him coming home to dinner with the latest political gossip he had picked up sitting around the stores with the men of the town. And I remember his goings and comings on winter nights near election time, when he was driving through the country in a cutter, going messages for his father, delivering literature or arranging the practical details of meetings.

“Of course, character was being formed during these adventures, but the practical lessons in politics which he learned in boyhood seem to have been invaluable to him, and to have had some influence in directing his steps.”

Was Forever into Mischief

I turned Mrs. Storey’s memory towards his character as a boy. Was he a fighter?

She laughed.

“I regret to say, he was forever into mischief. He was so eager a disposition, so full of energy and vitality. I imagine he could not be content with the ordinary outlets offered to boys. It must be confessed that he was frequently suspended and expelled from school, because of his mischief. Fred Napp, of roller boat fame³, wore two gold teeth in front, as the result of a shinny argument with Howard. I remember him coming home with black eyes, and other wounds, which only endeared him to me the more.

“He used to go with other boys back to the gipsy camp and play cards with the gipsies. When he was attending high school, one of his favorite games was to attend auction sales in the town and when any well-known town, skinflint began to bid for something. Howard would bid too, running bids up to much more than the other had hoped to pay, and when Howard felt he had gone as far as was safe, he would drop out.

“Only one time, if I remember, did he get caught. He bid against a certain character in town for a lot of old railroad lamps, an old gun and a broken carpet sweeper. And the other dropped out, leaving Howard the winner of the contest at $8.35. This was one of the two times that Howard got a switching from his father. For father had to pay the money for the junk.

“It was after the escapade of the powder in the stove at school that his father sent Howard down to the shanties for a week to work at hauling out railway ties.

“He was not a success at school, because of his mischief. He had his ups and his downs. But his father was not alarmed, for he said that if this energy, and invention could be turned to the serious affairs of life in due time, the boy would be a success. And that has proved true.”

The Fights in Harding’s Mill

Not Mrs. Storey, but Jim Hagen and a couple of the other old schoolmates of the premier told of the fights in Harding’s flour mill. Old man Harding would put up coppers for the boys to fight for. On the big bare mill floor the boys would gather after school and, paired off, would fight till “nuff” was called, the winner taking the one cent stakes.

Howard was the top boy in his class in this fighting. Jim Hagen remembers him fighting ten fights in succession, and taking boys a good deal bigger than himself in order to compete in the copper stakes.

“He became a mighty skilful scrapper,” said Jim Hagen, “but mind you, it was only for sport.”

Howard got into trouble once, though. The system of initiation into the high school war known as “blocking.” It is nowadays known as the “royal bumps.” The novices are taken by head and feet and bumped against a brick wall.

Howard was one of the four lads who undertook to give the bumps to a big lad named Brown. It was a rule that each new boy had to step up himself and take the bumps, for if he backed down, heaven help him. Brown had to be seized by force to take his initiation. And in giving him the bumps, he was injured. The father had the case up before the magistrate. and Howard was fined $8.

“He announced, at that time,” said one of the chums who also was fined, “that he was going to enter the profession of law. And he did.”

G. Howard Ferguson sat in a little bedroom in the house at 191 McCaul street, Toronto. On the floor lay his carpet bag, unopened.

Here he was, in the midst of the great city the world before him. The principal of the school had finally and irrevocably decided that he could no longer countenance Howard’s mischief and infraction of the discipline of the school.

And here was Howard, not a matriculant, sent up to Toronto by his father, to try to matriculate in the university at the Toronto examinations.

He was lonely and alone. He had reported at the Y. M. C. A. and at the registrar’s office. Not a soul had spoken to him. He had registered. And there on the floor of this strange room, so far from merry Kemptville, lay his carpet bag unopened.

Would He Head for the West?

Would he stick it? Or would he grab his bag and disappear – go out west where all the youth and adventure of that day were heading?

At that moment, there came a rap on the door, and a big fellow by the name of Jack Ferguson walked in.

He was a third year student at the university.

“I happened to notice your name on the roll,” said the stranger, “and my name being Ferguson, I thought we Fergusons should stand together.”

The older fellow took young Howard in tow, introduced him into the life of the university, got him into the football club, and Howard gave up all dreams of going west, and sailed into his matriculation with his usual vigor.

He settled down to seven years of college in Toronto, to his degree in law.

Character: a distinctly independent nature, with the ingenuity to devise mischief and the spirit to see it through, even to the extent of being, finally, sent up alone to face matriculation in the big strange city. He was no compromiser.

The comic coincidence of the thing is that the very day I was learning all these mischievous exploits of the boy the man was giving to the press of the province the details of the great educational reform which he, as minister of education, as well as prime minister, has devised.

When I got home from Kemptville, I got an appointment with the premier and told him I had been down to the old town and had dug up some great tales of his boyhood.

“Go ahead,” said he. “Our sins will find us out.”

“But,” said I, “isn’t it odd that these things should be told just at the moment you announce your educational reforms?”

“I have in mind,” said the premier, “some of the things that happened to me as a boy, when I make the changes I have suggested. Responsibility is the thing! It was want of responsibility that made me a mischief. So I advised responsibility of my own.

“Don’t imagine for a minute that my schoolmasters did not leave impressions on me that have lasted all my life. A man to whom I owe as much as to anybody in the world was a schoolmaster whom I met after I had left school, but who taught me this philosophy: Never worry and never lose your temper.

“But responsibility is a good philosophy, of which we have almost lost sight of in recent times, so religiously have we sought, with infinite organization and regulation, to take all responsibility off teachers and children and mankind as a whole. My desire, in the reforms I have outlined, is to restore responsibility to teachers and children. I want to bring back the old personal contact between teacher and pupil which you will find amongst the best memories of the older men. The legendary schoolmaster who left the imprint of his character on his pupils.

“I have cut the book of official regulations which bind and tie the teachers and pupils of this province from two and a half inches thick to one inch. I hope to do more. Set them free. A boy isn’t a pail in which to pour facts. He is a material to inspire with life, to galvanize into glorious life. If you hold him, he will wriggle — Thank heaven!

“Go ahead with your stories if you want to. They will be no different to the stories that could be told of every schoolboy in the country.”

Tied Knots in the Bell Rope

Aye. Howard, of the time you tied the knots in the bell rope so that the lame teacher couldn’t reach it (and went and visited and ministered unto him when he was ill,) and of upsetting the bell so that it wouldn’t ring (and only one boy bold enough to climb the roof and set it right,) of unscrewing all the seats and desks from the floor the day the inspector called, and the vast hullaballoo and confusion when the pupils came in and sat down with a crashing and smashing under the grave inspector’s outraged eye, (and you suspended, no questions asked, but just the teacher saying weakly: “Howard! Leave the room!”) and so on and so on.

When he came back from College, and set up his shingle as a barrister and solicitor, his well remembered talent for raising heck did not work against him, for he at once obtained a good practice in the law which involves the interests of a small town: suits, mortgages, property law. What energy he had to spare from the establishing of a law practise he put into the town council, being a town councillor, reeve and a member of the school board. (His mind turns to education.) Then in 1902 he went up before the Conservative convention for nomination to the provincial house, but failed to get in. In 1905 he again went before the convention and went in when the Whitney government came to power.

This, of course, brought him into his stride. When he was invited into the cabinet he wired his mother, who was already on her death bed, of the realization of her dreams, this gifted lady who had been into politics all her days, and it was a great triumph for her.

Stuck to Home Folks

But he never abandoned the home folks. When he came into Bill Hyland’s place, as a cabinet minister, he took the same seat as ever, and they still called him Howard.

When he went back as prime minister, it was the same.

Kemptville has a beautiful big agricultural college and experimental farm now (since Howard’s accession to the cabinet) and a fine armories, (of, recent date). Why not? The big house he lives in he has had twenty years, with the farm. He was a success before he was a political success.

His farm makes him money. It has an orchard of five hundred trees, and he fattens hogs and steers. and grows corn and vegetables. He could live off his farm. Last season, he got the best price in the township for his hogs.

In 1920, when the Hearst government went down to defeat. Hon. Howard Ferguson announced to his colleagues and friends that he was through with politics. It was generally known that a very big industrial corporation were after him, and had offered him a salary of some thirty thousand dollars to look after their foreign interests.

It was a beautiful prospect, to spend his richest years – he was now fifty – with money and travel all over the world, with his wife for he has no children. It was the sort of goal a man dreams of. An end to all the responsibilities and burdens for polities is a master that lets a man not many paces from the door. An end to struggle and care – just to travel and deal in big, accustomed matters, from Norway to Japan, Paris, London, the world!

Howard Ferguson, the small-town man, had never traveled. Here, in 1920, before the vigorous, active man was a dream vista, ahead, down the years.

He Simply Couldn’t Quit

He was through. He told his colleagues, his constituents, his friends. His colleagues pleaded. His party begged. Big Tories came down from Ottawa to argue with him, to beg him. But he was going.

Then came the timber enquiry.

“You can’t go now!” his colleagues cried. “It would look as though you were running away.”

“Let them talk. It won’t hurt me. I have nothing to hide.”

“But It will damage the party if you quit,” they argued. “Even if you feel no hurt, it will hurt the party. Fight, Howard, fight!”

As the twig is bent…

He had his plans made. His affairs were more than half put in shape. He had accepted the big corporation’s offer. His wife and he had planned trips, voyages. They had spent nights and nights planning, reveling, scheming.

And then character began to function.

The fights in Harding’s mill, for Old Man Harding’s coppers, the politics around the table, the Party, the trips in the winter night stacking up dodgers on country cross-roads, the meetings, the argument, Bill Hyland’s “board of trade,” the home folks, fight, fight.

So the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho love and sung. Also, the capitals of Europe, calling, calling, ease, wealth, independence, an end to fighting, fighting-Howard stayed.

He walked the floor all one night. His wife had said: “We will stay!”

The next morning he came out with his famous, “nail-their-hides-to-the-fence.”

And he is premier.

When he announced to a contentious province the holding of a temperance vote, the province asks, sharply curious: “What manner of man is he, himself, apart from politics? What is his life? What does he play?”

Well, there you are!

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. Howard Ferguson was the 9th Premier of Ontario from 1923-1930. ↩︎
2. James Whitney was the 6th Premier of Ontario from 1905-1914. William Howard Hearst was the 7th Premier of Ontario from 1914-1919. ↩︎
3. The Knapp Roller Boat was a weird attempt to increase speed and reduce sea sickness. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, September 22, 1928.

“This court,” states Magistrate Robert J. Browne, “stands adjourned for one hour for lunch. It will continue if necessary until midnight.

“We will have no quick-lunch justice here!”

Quick-lunch justice!

Everything about the old Toronto police court calls for quick-lunch justice. Justice slid along the greasy counter. Justice slapped down on the plate. The dingy old court room shouts for it. The dark and dismal corridor outside the door where distressed mankind waits for all the world like a Hogarth¹ drawing of the Old Bailey – all shout for quick-lunch justice. For mercy’s sake, make it speedy.

Here is a court room that was built in 1899. In 1899, a buggy was the fastest thing on Toronto’s streets. In 1899 there were less than 200,000 people in Toronto. Booze provided only one or two problems – drunks, desertions. Now booze has become a complex thing, bootleggers, motorists, dives. In 1899 it was an honor and privilege to appear before Colonel Denison² in the beautiful spacious new court room..

But age withers.

The windows of the police court to-day have shrunk to slits that let in a gray light. The curtains are drab and faded. The woodwork seems stained by countless sinful vapors.

The roar of a great city forbids that windows be opened. The tumult of the gears which turn the wheels of justice in this old room make it sometimes impossible for the court to proceed. On one day recently, Magistrate Browne sat from ten o’clock in the morning until four-fifteen in the afternoon before the “morning” court was ended.

Five different police courts exist in Toronto, and except for a small committee-room next door to the main court room, the old police court has somehow to accommodate them all. The “drunk” court, now shrunken to a little formality of twenty minutes. Then the main criminal police court, which in the heyday of Colonel Denison, used to run from ten to twelve o’clock and which now runs on and on, sometimes into the late afternoon; the women’s court in the little crowded committee-room, the traffic court in the afternoon wherever it can be accommodated, and on certain days, the health court, which sandwiches itself wherever it can find a high desk and a fragment of silence.

In this one year, there will be one hundred and twenty-five thousand cases pass through these courts!

The Police Court Midway

What is guarding Toronto, then, from quick-lunch justice? From slap-stick justice?

The corridor is like a midway. Toughs and gentle women witnesses; babies in arms, thundering policemen, sick people, broken-hearted people, grim accusers, sly, shifty ones – the human midway, the corridor of the Toronto police court.

Toronto’s court has no witness rooms, no counsel’s rooms, no privacy whatsoever. The law of the land is that the court room shall be public. Whoever gets there first gets a seat in the court room, and the rest are herded into the corridor, to listen and strain amidst the shadowy din to their names called. Lawyers must consult their clients in this public highway. Witnesses, tragic or cold, gentle or rough, must all sit together and take away a nightmare with them when they go.

Common human sympathy urges everybody to hurry, to get the thing over and done with.

But Toronto’s five magistrates live in fear. They live in fear of being influenced by physical conditions around them. They do not know from one hour to the next which court room they will be in. Nothing is ordered or orderly. They live in a kind of pandemonium, but they will not err in the direction of speed.

“There will be no quick-lunch justice here,” says Magistrate Browne.

“Lewis Harris,” cries the clerk of the court.

“Lewis Harris,” echoes the constable of the dock.

At the back, the public is wedged in tight in the benches. In all the standing room, constables and detectives, witnesses and officials are packed in. The dock is filled with a row of midway spectacles, who look like the men who sing, in a Balieff ballet³, the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”⁴ One of them, Lewis Harris, rises and stands forth.

Between him and Magistrate Browne on his high bench, are the lawyers, privileged characters, who rise and sit, bend and scuffle, talk and wave documents, come and go. Over all this scene there quivers a tumult of sound and movement.

But away up against the high panelled wall, alone and aloof, in black coat and wing collar, sits the young magistrate. He is handsome in the Greek way. His eyes are intense blue and very wide and quiet. He has a broad, strong mouth, which turns down in a faint sardonic smile when the rumpus of his court reaches one of the panics of physical congestion.

He is at rest. None of the excitement seems to reach him. His head is framed against the high panels, and you think the gray hair on his temples is blonde hair, so peaceful is his face.

“Lewis Harris!” cries the clerk of the court. In triumph, as if proud to produce anybody at all amidst all this whirligig.

No Off-Hand Judgment

Harris is an old man, bowed, white-haired, with spectacles down on his nose like a collector of coins.

We are all sympathy at once for Lewis Harris. What crime can be juggled up against so quaint and helpless an old man as this?

Maybe, we thought, he has no home and has come to the end of the long, long tether.

“Pickpocket,” says a voice, amidst the countless whispering, murmuring voices.

It seems that at the Exhibition, two visitors caught Lewis Harris with his hand entering one of their pockets. They held him and a detective arrived.

What an absurdity! Pickpockets are young and nimble and foreign. This man is old and gentle and far from nimble.

A lawyer is standing up, leaning forward and stretching up his arms in gesticulation to Magistrate Browne.

“Sixty-eight years old,” exclaims the lawyer. “It is admitted he tried to pick the pocket. But he is so old, your worship. Deport him. Send him back to the States where he came from. Fell for a momentary temptation.”

But another lawyer is on his feet, a rugby player of a lawyer. He is the crown prosecutor and he holds in his hand a very large sheet of foolscap.

“A record, your worship.” he says in a man’s voice that cuts through the fog, “dating back to 1894. Philadelphia, 1894; Boston, 1896; Chicago, 1899; San Francisco, 1904; Portland, Oregon, 1906; San Antonio, Texas, 1907; Detroit, 1913: Toledo, 1916; Omaha, 1918; Atlanta, Georgia, 1922…”

Why Lewis Harris is no poor old man! He is an adventurer, a world traveller! A man who has seen the world.

“All,” says the prosecutor with the man’s voice, “for picking pockets.”

“Sixty-eight years old!” pleads the lawyer. “He is not long for this world. Deport him, your worship. Send him back to where he belongs.”

The magistrate’s wide blue eyes are staring at the old bent figure below him.

No quick-lunch justice here.

“We can only feel sympathy,” says the magistrate, “for this old man at the end of his life. But the interests of the community must be served. We cannot deport him. That would only create the impression amongst American crooks that they can come up here with impunity, take their chance, and if caught, all their punishment would amount to would be to be sent back home at no expense to themselves. Nine months in the reformatory, and to be deported at the conclusion of his term.”

Thinking Down His Sympathy

The next case is a boy.

He is young and clean and slim. There is a delicate look about him. If we felt sympathy for a sinful old man, we feel even more sympathy for this straight youth of nineteen. He has the face of a poet, and this is no company for poets.

A poor woman hobbles in and sits beside the lawyers at the witness bench.

The boy, it seems, is charged with criminal negligence. He drove a truck and struck down this woman. All the evidence comes out, a doctor concluding with detailed technical description of the injuries. The woman with three little children got off a street car under the Queen St. subway and along out of the gloom came this truck and hurled her to the ground.

The boy walks nervously to the witness box and stands up close to Magistrate Browne. They talk face to face.

“Have you a driver’s license?” asks the magistrate.

“No, sir. I am studying music….”

“He won,” says the boy’s lawyer, “the governor-general’s prize for violin two years ago.”

“I am on my holidays,” continues the boy. “And I was helping my brother. I thought I would help him, so I drove this truck from the repair shop to our home.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen. I got along all right, but coming through the Queen St. subway, it was dim, and I was following the street car. I did not know street cars stopped in the subway. Suddenly. I found myself rushing beside the street car. It was all a whirl. I had struck the woman before I knew anything. It was all over…”

What kind of justice will we get here?

Surely a young man with only a little gray at his temples will feel a great sympathy for this boy and his violin, who suddenly in the dimness found himself rushing past the street car and all his life tumbling about his head.

Do students of the violin go to jail?

“There is nothing in your favor,” says the magistrate, slowly. Let the court beg for hurry. Let anxious fists hammer at the gates. “Nothing in your favor. You are young. You have no license to drive. You are not accustomed to driving. Yet you take a death-dealing machine through the streets of this city. And only the mercy of God prevented you from, killing a woman and two of her three children. This is a dangerous age.”

An almost silence has come on the court and the lawyer stands with jaw fallen. The magistrate is staring with calm eyes at the boy, thinking down his sympathy, thinking it down.

“You will go to the reformatory for one year.”

The student of the violin does not seem to understand. He has not been used to paying. Others pay. He plays.

Will he take his violin to the prison, I wonder?

World is More Complex

Thieves, embezzlers. forgers, thugs, sneaks, they get their time and their share.

Five different men charged with reckless driving, or being drunk in charge of cars, go down to jail.

All one man did was crash into the rear of a truck. He went to jail for ten days. He had had “half a glass of beer” earlier in the day.

“I wish,” says Magistrate Browne, “the press would give greater prominence to the sentences imposed on reckless and negligent drivers. There is no mercy here for men who drive motors negligently and recklessly or when under the influence of liquor in the slightest degree.”

The hours drag on.

Already the traffic court cases for the afternoon are gathering out in the corridor and the confusion and rumpus seems to be on the increase.

Order! Order! Order! The magistrate demands it, sardonically. He has an inspector in the court room whose sole duty is to preserve order and decorum in the court. There are ten or a dozen constables and officials to back him up.

And because the magistrate was once a soldier he gets order, even out of what is clearly inevitable.

But what can you expect of an old and sin-blown court room that dates back to 99. when the fastest thing in Toronto’s streets was a buggy and the only problem booze gave us was drunkenness, to be dealt with in the quick-lunch way, with humorous jests from the bench and comic items in the daily press?

We’ve come a long way. The world is stranger, more complex than in 99.

“Yet,” says Magistrate Browne, “we’ll have no quick-lunch justice here!”

---

Editor’s Notes: (There was a section of this story that I deleted as it was racist to immigrants).

1. William Hogarth was an 18th century English artist. ↩︎
2. George Taylor Denison was a Canadian lawyer, military officer and writer. ↩︎
3. Nikita F. Balieff was a Russian Armenian born vaudevillian, stage performer, and director. He is best known as the creator and master of ceremonies of La Chauve-Souris theater group. ↩︎
4. The “Song of the Volga Boatmen” is a well-known traditional Russian song. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, September 8, 1923.

Roaring Bunch of Men Go From East Every Summer Seeking Adventure, Find None, and, Without Price of Return Ticket, Stay West and Make Good.

Harvesters going west are like troops going to war in more respects than one.

There is the same noise and abandon. The primitive colonist sleeper cars bear the same crowded and forbidding look. And both harvesters and soldiers are full to the brim with the expectation of high adventure.

And adventure doesn’t come.

Just as the soldier landed with a chilling flop into the drab and unfruitful and uneventful round of spit and polish and drill and the stupid eternity of the trenches, so the harvester, ready for big doings in the wide romantic west, finds a hay fork in his hand, or about twenty square miles of new-cut wheat to be stooked before dark, or a thousand bushels of grain to be heaved by brute force into the separator, amidst a smother of dust and chaff, before the boss calls it a day and lets the cook sound his whistle.

A harvesters’ excursion is spoken of in the east here as something picturesque and outward bound. So it is. Eight hundred men all in a roaring bunch constitute a picture.

But when a harvesters’ excursion hits the west and is smashed by the impact into countless little squads and sections and troops of four or ten or seventeen men, dumped all forlorn off the train at some little packing box way station in middle of a limitless prairie, the romance goes out of it.

Eighty per cent. of the men who leave the east on a harvesters’ excursion hope never to return. They have visions of the Big Chance which life so far has denied them.

And eighty per cent. of that eighty per cent. are broke when they leave the east.

And what are the rewards of a harvester?

In Manitoba, this year, the wage per day ran round $3.50. Out further west it ran to $4 and In seme places as high, as $4.50¹. The harvester paid strictly by the day. If it rains and there no cutting or stooking or threshing, there is no pay. If it blows up rain about noon there is half a day’s pay, and no more. Sundays, no pay. At four dollars a day, working at most twenty-four days in the one month’s work the harvester must put in before he can use the return stub of his cheap fare, he can earn $96.

He has had to pay $15 plus half a cent a mile beyond Winnipeg to come out west. It will cost him half a cent a mile to Winnipeg and twenty dollars from there heme. If he smokes cigarets and has any other expensive habits the likelihood is he will return to the hard and undemonstrative east as broke as he left it. In fact, many of them are so broke they can’t pay their fare home and have to stay west.

In Brandon I talked with one old chap in the livery business who said that that was how he came to settle in the west – came out harvesting and couldn’t pay his way home. And blamed if he didn’t think the west was largely populated with people in the same predicament.

Thousands of the harvesters don’t get regular jobs helping a farmer for a steady month or six weeks. Only a few lucky ones get taken on with “outfits” – which are threshing gangs that travel from farm to farm. Most of them get a few days’ work at stooking, and then get tired and move over a few miles to some I place they’ve heard about where there are better jobs going begging.

“The trouble with harvesters is this,” said a Manitoba wheat rancher, “the tough ones that can do the hard manual labor of harvesting are a restless crew, either finding fault with the grub or getting into fights or moving on for the sheer love of moving on. The quiet, conscientious fellows are usually those not accustomed to hard manual labor. They will stay on the job, but they can’t handle the work.”

So this army of fifty thousand men dumped into the west every August spreads thin or thick over the map, restless, hard-worked, disillusioned, most of them making just barely enough money to pay their passage back to the east at the end of four to six weeks.

But like old soldiers, who will keep on going to wars no matter how sour the last one turned, there are old harvesters who keep on going west every autumn, moved by the expectation of adventure which is so elusive a jade in this workaday world.

The harvesters’ special from the east, with a three to four day weary jam of passengers, usually pulls into Winnipeg at night. I don’t know whether Winnipeg has arranged that or not. But at any rate the great majority of harvesters never see Winnipeg at all.

Their train pulls in in the dead of night.

As they break, gasping with relief, out of the train that has imprisoned them for four days, into the Winnipeg freight yards, they find themselves being lined up before a small wicketed office under arc lights, where representatives of the Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta government employment bureaus are waiting to inform them where harvesters are required.

The expeditionary nature of the excursion goes out of the harvesters’ special right there in Winnipeg.

“Have you any place in mind?” asks the agent.

“No,” replies the harvester.

“How about Lethbridge?” says the agent. “Twenty-five men wanted there at once by farmers not ten miles out.”

“Done.”

“Have you the fare?”

Then the harvester walks over to the ticket booths and gets his half cent a mile fare to Lethbridge.

“A train for Lethbridge leaves from here in two hours,” says the ticket man.

It is three o’clock in the morning. Winnipeg lies cold and asleep without. The harvester goes out to see Winnipeg, walks a deserted block, rambles back to the station to sit till his train is ready in the dawn. Gets aboard, pounds westward another few hundred miles in a colonist sleeper, and wakes up to be debarked in Lethbridge.

Farmers are waiting at the employment bureaus in the station. The harvester is hailed by the farmer.

“How much a day?”

“Four dollars, sleep in the house, home cooking.”

The great majority go to no such town as Lethbridge for the jumping off place. They find themselves unloaded, amid the cheerful hoots of fellow passengers, at a little packing case station, without a human habitation in sight for all the miles and miles of bronzed fields on every side. Half a dozen farmers are waiting, with motor cars and flat wagons, to snaffle such men as are getting off at that point.

Thefts of good men occur. When the train stops at one of these little jerkwater stations, and ten men debark for fifteen farmers waiting, the farmers will jump aboard the train, swiftly scan the cars, and make take-it-or-leave-it offers to the best looking men in the car. That is, men booked through to further points.

Or they will run along the open windows of the car, calling:

“Any good men in there want four dollars a day and six weeks steady work?”

“I want five old hands.”

“Two men wanted – have you had any experience? Hop out. Four a day.”

Many of the farmers won’t take pot luck in the men sent. They prefer to board the train and pick out the men they want on appearance, offering them half a dollar a day extra for a bribe. In this way they get the men they want.

In nearly all the farms, which run from a half section of 320 acres to a section of 640 acres, the harvesters are taken right into the home of the farmer and eat at the family board. On the big wheat ranches of one and two or more sections, the farmer has a bunk house built within the tree enclosure in which his homestead stands and which is used for accommodating harvesters only. He hires a cook for the season. The food is always plentiful and plain.

But it is with an “outfit” that the harvester comes nearest adventure.

An outfit consists of a tractor, a threshing separator and a caboose. The tractor drags the threshing machine and the caboose from farm to farm and runs the separator at threshing. From eight to fifteen men constitute the crew of an outfit.

As soon as the grain is in the shock, the outfit sets forth on the rounds which it has planned during the summer. From ranch to ranch it goes, snorting and steaming. The caboose is cut off in a shady spot – if possible – and the thresher is set up in the middle of a field. The farmer, with rented and borrowed teams, totes the shocks of grain to the roaring maw of the separator. No bringing in the sheaves to the barn in the West. They just thresh right in the field. When they have cleaned up one square mile, they move the outfit to another part of the prairie and thresh all the wheat within range. The threshed grain is either stored in little granary sheds or is carted into the barns.

Great heaps of straw and chaff, as big as city houses, are thus left dotting the stubble fields, like slag heaps around Hill 70².

Passing from Winnipeg. I saw three huge columns of smoke ascending in the air to the north.

“Forest fires, eh?” I remarked to the passenger beside me. He chuckled.

“Ain’t no forests in these parts, mister. Them’s straw stacks burning.”

“How would that happen?” I asked, from the east where straw is so much per so much.

“Well, a farmer jest throwed a match into it, I guess.”

They burn their mountains of straw in the West.

No greenhorn can get aboard one of these “outfits.” They are prize workers. The owner of the outfit gets so many cents a bushel for the threshing, and it is in his interests so get the job done in record time. He hires men with some pride in their shoulders. They work like demons. They work all hours, from dawn to dark. They take joy in beating the last day’s record, the record of former crews. They go to their caboose at the end of the day dead beat, hardly able to sit up and sing after their huge if unornamental meal.

But it is the nearest thing to adventure there is in harvesting.

The ordinary harvester bends his back at stooking, at teaming sheaves to the threshers, at bucketing grain into the granaries, at all the simple, ancient acts of agriculture which have changed little in ten thousand years. It is uneventful, healthy, heartbreaking work, the kind of work a man can easily pass up when the spirt moves him.

The railroad officials figure that 20 per cent. of the return ticket stubs they issue are not used each year. Twenty per cent. of fifty thousand men is ten thousand. That is draining the east and populating the west at a pretty good rate.

But the west is a large and roomy and hospitable place, for all its cold and its bleak wastes of prairie (how an Englishman from the green rolling hills of ‘ome must pine!) and somehow the thousands who stay either stranded or by choice in the west as the result of their harvest excursion, shake down.

That cheery, hail spirit of the adventurous trainload of irresponsibles somehow sticks to the westerner. If you whoop on the main street of an eastern city, a policeman will run you in or a space will be left about you in the traffic. Whoop at the main crossings in a western city and nobody pays the slightest attention, unless you look lonesome, and then a crowd will form around you in the traffic and take you home to supper.

In Winnipeg, I asked a man the time, and he took me home to dinner. In Brandon, I enquired the location of the railroad station, and my informant turned out to be a cousin. In Dauphin, I picked up a man’s hat the wind blew off and he introduced me to a member of parliament, a judge, the local chairman of the newly formed license commission, and the leading Presbyterian divine, right there and then on the street.

And by special interrogation, I found that each and every one of these cheery informants was originally a harvester who came west, went broke, settled and made good.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. $4 in 1923 would be $70 in 2024. ↩︎
2. The Battle of Hill 70 was a World War One battle. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, September 2, 1922.

On the Midway, everybody is a moron.

A moron, according to the psychologists, is “a high grade imbecile, with the mental age of a child of eleven years.”

Aside from the fact that this is a dirty crack at boys and girls of eleven, it is a pretty good description of the Midway.

Mind you, we are not asseverating (quaint Victorian word) that everyone who goes into the Midway is a moron. Our point is that as soon as he enters the Midway he becomes a moron – a high grade imbecile with a mental age of eleven.

Is it the bright paint, the gaudy canvas, the barking barkers, the primitive music that throws a spell over us and reduces us to morons? Or is it the psychic effect of a mob, whose massed personality overwhelms the individual personality, and reduces all for the moment to a common level of intelligence?

There is something decidedly spooky about the Midway.

Observe what happens to this large, thick, masterful looking man. He is the president and general manager of a flourishing manufacturing business. He is an officer of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association. His golf handicap is four. His poker handicap is nil. He has a hundred and thirty cases in his cellar and is practically a teetotaller. In a word, he is a successful man.

Yet, look at him.

He is the bear cat of a party of four – his wife, another thick gentleman and wife. No young ‘uns in the party.

His collar is wilted. He has just consumed. a hot dog in three bites, and is hollering “C’mon, c’mon!” to the others, and is pointing to the Ferris wheel.

His face is red. There is a dab of mustard on his coat. His shoes are dusty, his clothes awry. Little would you think that to-morrow morning, with a flirt of his pen, he can close a factory employing four hundred men, or raise the price of washing machines. He acts like a boy of eleven. He looks like a high grade imbecile. He is, temporarily, a moron.

Or this lady, here, with the attractive white hair and the eyes the color of polished mahogany. Would you think she was one of the eight intellectual women of Toronto? Would you suspect that she has raised a family of three already prominent lawyers and is the vice-president of nineteen women’s organizations?

Her specialty to-day is freaks. She has been into every side show from the glass blowers to the wild west show. But her passion is freaks. She has had her fortune told by means of a paper out of a glass tube, but she has been in to see the gen-oo-wine Siamese twins three times. She goes in no spirit of mockery, but with the idea of getting an eye-full in those hot brown eyes, as thrilled as any girl of eleven. As a matter of fact, she is eleven. She is a moron.

Here is a boy scout in mufti who has wheedled his dad to the shooting gallery. The boy has fired two full rounds – fifty cents. Then a peculiar expression overspreads dad’s face, as he picks up the rifle.

I’ll shoot a few,” he says.

Dong, clatter, pink, go the targets as dad unlimbers.

“Give me another dozen,” says dad.

And another, and another.

“Hey, dad, what about me?” cries the boy scout in mufti, forgetting for the moment the creed of the scout.

Dad looks at his son as if he had never seen him before. Then a look of puzzled recognition comes into his face. He pays for another dozen each.

“I’ll shoot the top row, you take the bottom,” says dad to his son. “Bet I can beat you.”

Boy against man? Not at all. They are evenly matched, Dad has become a moron. He is only eleven.

But enough of individual cases.

Look at the swarm. They are all morons – we are all morons. Our mouths are slightly open. Our eyes shine. We move about erratically, irresolutely, aimlessly. We are children of eleven. Morons.

But no! Alone, aloof, there in the crush go a few superior bodies, ill as ease, marking us with amazement, a mild contempt.

Poor creatures, they are fixed forever at the age of forty or fifty, or whatever their age is.

Of your charity, pity them that cannot become morons for a day!

By Gregory Clark, August 26, 1933.

The editor of The Star Weekly was hurrying up Yonge St. at noon to keep a luncheon engagement. The hot, dusty downtown was crowded with the armies of noon.

Tired people. Hot people. Undefeated but without hope of victory. Past the same stores and the same windows. Going the same path, at the same time.

The editor walks quickly. He sees the colors of yellow dresses, of dark shine in windows, the blur of a bright blue car passing, but suddenly his heart stands still and he stops in his tracks to pretend to look in a window.

Coming down Yonge St. is a young telegraph messenger boy, his cap tilted. Beside the boy walks a slim bit of a girl, brown hair blowing about her face, pink frock, some parcels in her hands. And high by his shoulder, as if to ride above all the multitude, the messenger boy is carrying a baby.

A tiny baby.

If you should suddenly see a garden of flowers marching down Yonge St., you could not be more arrested. Here in the midst of the incomprehensible city walked Joy!

All unaware of the world around them, this telegraph messenger, this girl, this baby, moved with a strange nimbus around them, a cloud, a bright sheen of happiness. The newspaper editor for no reason felt tears coming into his eyes as he stood to watch them pass. He saw others start and turn. He saw men halt and look back at these three children walking with joy. Men who, after gazing, seemed to wake.

The editor went on to luncheon. But he could not get the picture of that messenger boy, the girl and the baby out of his eyes.

He came back to the office. He sent for his art editor and his writing men. He described the scene to them.

“We’ve got to find them,” said he. “Are they married? Is that their baby? The tiniest baby I ever saw downtown. How do they get along? He’s a messenger boy, and she was so young! Why do they look so happy? Happiness isn’t so plentiful nowadays. Yet here are two children, already launched on the adventures of life, in a stormy time like this, and if ever I saw joy, I saw it on Yonge St. at noon to-day.”

So we went out and found them.

We visited them in their little apartment. surrounded by everything they have bought themselves.

Boy and girl.

“In these days,” we explained to them, “tens of thousands of people are afraid to get married, wondering how they would get along, until you find any number of people near thirty who still can’t make up their mind, work up their courage. Tell us about you, won’t you? It would interest all young people. And old people.”

“All right,” they laughed, sitting on their chesterfield, side by side, a little bewildered at having an old weasel of a newspaperman, without coat or vest, sitting under their bridge lamp on the low chair, drinking their lemonade in the hot summer night.

Harry Watson lost his job at the metal stamping works, so he decided to go with a chum up to Bathurst and Bloor and take in a movie.

That is the way youth meets Fate.

Not having any money to spare, he left his chum outside on Bloor and he stepped into an ice cream parlor for a cold drink.

He sat at the marble counter. Facing him was a large mirror in which youth could see the cubicles along the other side, in which girls preferred to sit.

Clara Callicott was in one of the cubicles treating her young cousin to ice cream. Clara could afford to treat young cousins because she was a business girl. She wrapped parcels in one of the big department stores.

“Clara,” said the young cousin, “there’s a fellow looking at you in the mirror. He’s staring.”

“Tell me when he looks away,” said Clara. “He is looking away now,” said the cousin. But at the moment Clara looked, so did Harry.

And Harry couldn’t help but smile. And before she knew it, so did Clara.

Harry Watson sat there, eking out his drink as long as possible. But a drink is only so long. And before he could get another smile in, he had to go.

“There goes your boy friend,” said the young cousin.

But when Clara came out, there was the boy friend standing very casually on the sidewalk.

Clara walked up Bathurst.

“Let’s lead him a chase,” said Clara. They walked as fast as they could, laughing, up Bathurst St., in the night.

But Harry kept up with them, and when they slowed down, Harry walked past, and then had to stop and kneel down and tie his shoe lace. And this old scheme, as old as shoe laces anyway, worked.

“Hello,” said Harry.

I suppose it is something about a man kneeling that stirs a girl’s heart.

“Hello,” said Clara.

As Harry lived in Parkdale, and Clara lived on Davenport, it was only Sundays that they could see each other. And as Clara had a Sunday School class, it was after four.

But they used to walk up to Cedarvale, and then, after a reasonable period of being out of work, Harry Watson got his job as telegraph messenger. In the downtown district.

You get 3 cents a message. In a sense, you are on commission when you are a telegraph messenger. The snappier you are, the more you make. If you get down early, and get into your uniform without undue delay and so on, you can get a bunch of night letters to deliver. That brings up your average.

Harry liked his job. And worked at it. He had an idea.

He had known Clara for quite a time and was satisfied in his mind that she was the only girl in the world. He saw her a great deal oftener than on Sunday afternoon for a walk in Cedarvale. He could see her in her noon hour.

“Here comes Romeo,” the other girls used to say in Clara’s department in the big store when the familiar figure of Harry in his jaunty cap and gray shirt and army breeches appeared at noon.

So one Sunday in Cedarvale, Harry asked Clara to marry him.

“Are you crazy?” asked Clara.

Harry assured Clara he was not crazy.

“We have been going together now for some time,” he said. (Now you know what young people are saying in Cedarvale on June Sunday afternoons.) “We are sure we like each other. I’ve got a good steady job. Two can live cheaper than one.”

Clara still thought Harry was crazy. But it was nice walking home from Cedarvale in the evening and knowing that the boy beside you was a man who had asked you to be his wife.

She said she would think about it. And sure enough next week, Clara had thought about it long enough to say yes. Clara lived at home with her father and grandmother. She does not ever remember her own mother. She had been working two years and at sixteen was more independent in her spirit than most girls.

“All right,” she said to Harry.

And they proceeded to plan to get married.

“How much money did you have?” I asked Harry.

“Next week’s pay, when I got it,” laughed Harry.

“Why didn’t you save first and then get married?” I asked.

“No,” said Clara, “that’s what everybody else does, and they take so long saving up that they never do seem to get married. So we decided to get married first and then we would have to save. And we were right.”

The wedding supper consisted of ice cream soda in a handsome Yonge St. fountain. All around them in the bright evening moved the workaday world through with work. All the people afraid of romance, all the people walking cautiously around the rims of life. And here sat the bride and the bridegroom, with the last step taken first, and the unheard, invisible theme song of the moment being “So what?”

“By the way,” I asked, “how much money did you save by this time?”

“Still next week’s pay,” said Harry. “You see, a fellow feels kind of proud of getting things for his wife. The first couple of pay days after we were married, I bought things for Clara. Not presents, you see. But dresses and things she was entitled to.”

“So the saving?” I suggested.

“Yes, that’s how the saving went.”

For a month the young couple considered the next step in their adventure.

“A honeymoon!” exclaimed Harry. “We’ve got to have a honeymoon.”

He had friends in Detroit, a young married couple in their middle twenties. Harry wrote them. In early October, Harry and Clara, with their marriage certificate with them in case of questions at the border, went to a movie and then to the Union Station and got the 1 a.m. train for Detroit.

They had four days in Detroit, and if the average middle-aged honeymooner, who stalks with dignity in and out of vast hotel dining rooms, and waddles solemnly around Detroit or New York department stores showing his bride a big time, would like to know about less pompous honeymoons, Harry and Clara will tell him that they went to movies, they ran laughing up strange dark residential streets in Detroit, they got on any old street car going anywhere, and for a car fare, journeyed a thousand miles on the road of mystery and happiness. Their friends treated them wonderfully. Drove them all over in their car. Left them alone. Jollied them.

“We sat up all night in the day coach from Toronto to Detroit,” said Clara. “And when we got to Detroit, to our friend’s apartment, I was a sight. But the way they took us to their hearts, you would think we were angels. Oh, we had a wonderful honeymoon.” And so home.

Their Home of Joy

They got in early in the morning. They both went to work as usual (Clara hadn’t told her employers she was married) and got there on time. They were living in furnished rooms on Howland Ave., near Dupont, with an elderly couple who were rejoiced to have two such young people for their tenants. Bed-sitting room, kitchenette and sunroom, $20 a month¹.

“The first meal I cooked,” said Clara, “well, first of all, I had on an apron. I cooked sausages, creamed mashed potatoes, cake and coffee.”

The first piece of furniture they possessed was the walnut smoker’s stand Clara gave Harry for his birthday.

The second piece of furniture was one of those blue enamelled kitchen receptacles you open with your foot on a pedal which was given by one of Clara’s girl friends.

In one of the banks where he delivered telegrams Harry saw a small booklet on budgeting. He took one home and Clara and he devised a budget. They have stayed on it ever since.

The evening I visited them I found them in a pretty apartment, consisting of four rooms. The living room has a beautiful chesterfield suite, attractive curtains made and hung by Clara herself. Pictures and ornaments few and tasteful, chosen with all the reserve of people of thirty or forty. A fine radio softly playing.

“You hadn’t much experience of housekeeping?” I suggested.

“No, but it comes very naturally to girls,” said Clara. Her kitchen is enamelled white, and everything is spotless. Over the kitchen cabinet hangs a small white framed picture – you know the kind – showing a bouncing baby lying on its back, with its bare toes in the air, and it smiling out at you.

“When I knew I was going to have a baby,” said Clara, “Harry bought me that picture.”

All the autumn and winter the two young ones sailed along and then in March Clara knew the blessed event was to occur next fall. That meant, of course, the end of the business-girl part of her life.

“One of the girls in the baby’s wear department was away and I managed to get her job for a few weeks,” said Clara. “I had a wonderful time then. There I was in the loveliest department of the store. And every parcel I did up I imagined it was for me!”

Don’t imagine, Mrs. Reader, that I, the poor recorder of this story, made up that last sentence.

It was in April that Clara decided to give up her work. So she, with a whimsical appreciation of womanhood, brought down her marriage license and displayed it individually and collectively to the girls in the department.

“I suspected it all along,” the girls said. “We have been whispering for months, because one of the girls in another department saw a telegraph messenger buying a ring.”

But that was another telegraph messenger. Because they had been married months before.

Sunshine Goes With Them

“So one source of income was stopped?” I said.

“Yes, and don’t imagine it has all been plain sailing,” said Clara, “as far as money was concerned. We have had some pretty close figuring to do. But when you must, you can do remarkable things. We budget everything.”

The baby boy was born in the Women’s College Hospital. Clara stayed twelve days there and then came home, and the great test of bathing the baby she passed with flying colors.

“Were you frightened of your responsibility those first few weeks?” I asked.

“I think when people are happy, their babies are happy,” said Clara. “My baby has been wonderful from the beginning. He weighed eight pounds. He never cries. He is just bubbling with joy all the time.”

“Do you ever wish you were a girl in the big store again, with no cares, no responsibilities.”

Clara gave me a funny look, and getting up suddenly, she walked into the other room where the baby boy, in the humid evening, was still talking to himself and you could hear his little fists thumping a tune on the little iron cot.

Back she came with her boy. He was in his nappy and a flimsy shirt. His little. sturdy body gleamed in the soft light of the stand lamp. He put his head on one side and smiled at me. The girl mother walked once around the quiet, sweet room with its blue curtains, low-toned furniture. Just once around that room, with her boy husband sitting watching them with a sort of stillness on him, and then, with a look at me that was all the answer in the world to my question, she walked out of the room and put the baby back in his little bed.

There are some questions, it seems, you do not need to answer with words.

What fun do they have? They go to a movie once a week. Daddy Callicott comes and minds the baby boy. They have their radio. It is all the entertainment they need to divert the joy of being at home together, with their plans, their budgets, their little boy.

On fine days, Clara takes the baby as far as Sunnyside. On the street car, she can see people nudging each other and debating whether she is the mother or the big sister or the nurse girl.

At Sunnyside, elderly ladies come and sit beside the two of them and get into conversation, and come roundabout and twisty to the question, is Clara the mother or the sister of the little boy in the sunsuit?

Oh, it’s great fun.

Perhaps only two in a million could dare the risk of doing what these two have done. They have never had a quarrel. They have the same sweet, honest attitude toward life. They are happy. Hard working. Devoted. But it is not for children we have told their story. It is for the older folk. The ones who come at life so practically and methodically, as if life were a cold pool, and they were prowling timidly or cautiously about its edge.

He is a telegraph messenger.

She is still a girl.

And they are on September 3rd two years hand in hand along the main road of life.

And where they walk, the sun shines.

---

Editor’s Notes: This story is also considered a classic of Greg’s writing during the Great Depression.

1. $20 in 1933 would be $455 in 2024. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, August 6, 1927.

The test of civilization, is whether you can get from your house to your berth in the Montreal flyer¹ without getting wet.

At Birdseye Centre, Hamilton, Orillia, Waubashene, if it is raining, you get wet.

You know at once that you are not in a metropolis. For you have to stand out on the station platform and let her rain.

One thing that could be said about the Old Union Station² is that it was metropolitan. From your side drive to your berth in the sleeper you enjoyed the full fruits of civilization. You kept dry.

The tragical announcement that we are now working up to is that for the next couple of years Toronto is not going to be a metropolis. Waubashene, Myrtle, Petrolia can all give Toronto the merry laugh of sisterhood.

For with the final switch-over from the Old to the New Union Station Toronto is going to find itself standing out on the platform in the good old-fashioned way.

Raincoats, fur coats, umbrellas and mufflers will now be the essential tools for catching a train. There are winter nights ahead when Toronto will sigh for the good Old Union Station with its roof.

This is bad news for Toronto, we know. After all the years of waiting, after all the official openings of the New Station by Mr. Church and Mayor Foster and everybody that wanted their names inscribed in enduring stone, it will be a shame to discover that the New Union Station. for quite a while at any rate, will be just a magnificent waiting-room. For all practical purposes, such as catching trains, you will go in one door out of the wet and out the other door into the wet.

Those of us who still think that we are going to have a station a la New York or London or Chicago, where you find the trains pulled up and waiting practically in the drawing-room, are going to be disappointed.

We’ll Be Out in the Open

The Old Union Station is not being torn down because we are about to move into the New Union Station. It is being destroyed because the viaduct is going to crash through it. We are going into the New Union Station only because we are losing the old one.

In other words, our move into the famous New Union Station is in the nature of a temporary expedient.

The viaduct is a vast elevated road of solid concrete about as wide as a ball park. On it, some day, the train tracks will be laid so that you and I may motor under it rather than constantly dispute the way with the trains. They have completed the viaduct back of the new station. But there are no tracks on it. It has been completed in this short block so that we won’t have to go back to the Old Union Station later when they wish to build the viaduct behind the New Union Station.

So for a couple of years, nobody knows how long, we will emerge from the back door of the New Union Station, walk across the wide cement viaduct, descend temporary steps to the same old ground level we are using to-day, and get on our trains from a temporary plank pavement, and from beneath narrow high roofs, also temporary, that are laid, like long arbors, between each set of tracks.

If you look eastward the next time you are out in the open at what used to be the Old Union Station, but is now a strange and unfamiliar pile of tattered old buildings, you will see the steps and stairways being built where we will walk out over the viaduct and down to the trains. Unquestionably, they will be covered steps. Unquestionably the plank platform amongst the tracks will be sheltered as best it can be with narrow temporary roofs. But it would only be quibbling with Coboconk³ and Port Hope to say that we will not be out in the open.

Furthermore, it will be a long haul for hand-baggage. There Bowmanville will have it on us. Because at Bowmanville you just drive up to the platform and there you are.

But the red caps will probably make a great killing during the years Toronto has to walk over its viaduct. From Front street, where you have to get out of your taxicab, to the far edge of the viaduct, where you commence the steps down to the train tracks, it will be twice as far as it is now, under the tunnel.

In the New Union Station – Toronto’s magnificent new waiting-room – you can get any number of things. You can get an eyefull. You can breathe. You can get lunch, have your hair cut, get a beauty treatment, buy books, a soda, drugs. In the dining-room you can dance. But you can’t get a train.

If It Rains We’ll Get Wet

They are nibbling the old station away.

The next time you go down to the station you won’t know the old place. And if it is raining, as it most likely will be, you will get wet..

Never more will you take the Montreal flyer from Track 3. Track 3 is only a parking place for coaches now.

The old roof – the one we bade good-by for the first time many a year ago, is gone. Suddenly, at last, it is gone. And several hundred outraged pigeons flutter about the ancient towers we never saw before, wondering what the dickens men keep putting things up for only to pull them down.

The towers that are revealed now – and soon they will be nibbled away – are surprisingly stately. We had no idea they were there. If we had known what a cathedral style the Old Union Station really had, perhaps we wouldn’t have. spoken so rudely of it, the last couple of generations. But the great canopies over the tracks hid the towers. Hid the station. It was the canopies we did not like, after all.

The viaduct is ready to be shoved through the old station. It is now right up against the east end of the doomed pile. When it starts to move it will smash right into the towers, right across Track 3 and crush to flinders that old staircase we used to wind down in a great hurry; and the old dim restaurant with its glass covered sandwiches.

So out beyond, far beyond old Track 6 which was the uttermost limits we had to go even when bound for North Bay, they have spread huge pavements of planks, and all over the place are signs directing you to Track 7, Track 8 and even Track 9!

These plank pavements run away to the eastward, in back of the New Union Station. You can see staircases being built up into space. You can see dinky little narrow shelters being erected all along the tracks, We know what it means.

The switch-over from the Old to the New is going to take place soon – before, they hope, the crush of homing holidayers and Exhibition visitors. They are working up to that peak now. The viaduct having marched right up to the eastern edge of the old station, three tracks, the first three, have had to be closed, and are now used for parking only. They have therefore taken some of the freight tracks from beyond the outermost of the old passenger tracks. When your train is on Track 9 you begin to think Toronto is getting to be a big girl now. Some of the older folks don’t like it, however.

“Track 9!” exclaimed an old lady with several bundles. “Good gracious, how far is that!”

“Just through the archway, lady, and across that platform.”

“Why on earth don’t they leave things alone? Always changing things, until a body hardly knows where to turn!” growled she.

A Theatre of Real Drama

When you tamper way so delicate an organization as a railway-terminal, there are bound to be consequences, like repairing a clock, and having a couple of wheels left over. But they are getting on very nicely. Perhaps the trains are not made up quite so early as they used to be. The result is, it is not the passengers but the mail, express and baggage lads who do the most worrying. Each of these departments has half a dozen truck loads of bags and boxes and trunks to rush aboard when the train pulls in. Maneuvering the trucks against each other and in the narrow lanes between the tracks – for borrowed freight tracks have not the space between them that regular passenger tracks have – it’s quite a job. All postmen think the mails are more important than express, and what the baggage men think about the urgency of baggage would warm the heart of a passenger. When your train is made up and you have a few minutes to spare stroll up forward and listen to the boys trying to adhere to that regulation of the railroads which reads that profane language on the part of employes will not be tolerated. Has his majesty’s mail right of way over the personal baggage of his majesty, the traveling citizen? And if express costs so much more than the carriage of either mail or baggage, should not express get priority, and so give its money’s worth?

The switch-over itself will take place without ostentation. The last train will be made up in the old station. The last passenger will hurry, staggering under his bags, down the dim underneath tunnel. The last “All aboard” will ring out mournfully in the upstairs waiting-room with its high reverberating ceiling. And from then on the taxis and the private cars will call at the handsome pillared main doorway of the New Union Station. All is being got in readiness. The ticket sellers will be in cages like bank tellers. The information girls and boys will be in their circle out in the middle of the vast floor of the new waiting-room. The telegraph desks, the lunch counters, all will be manned as if by magic. For the people who have the parts to play have been studying their parts and the scenery has been set for six years.

Everybody who wants to say good-by to the Old Union Station should do so without delay. There should be some ceremony of farewell. For all its shabbiness, the Old Station had tremendous sentimental significance. It was the first glimpse of home, the last glimpse of home. It is hallowed by a million farewells, a billion kisses of parting and of restoration. It has been the theatre of countless dramas, tragic and comic. In this tattered old theatre the boys said good-by for the South African war. Its walls rang with “Johnny Canuck” and the city thrilled as the train bearing two, three, four hundred heroes pulled slowly out. That was drama. But it was the same old theatre that heard no songs at all when hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, in endless trains, in trains running on priority orders, went steaming unromantically eastward again, and leaden footed girls and women and elderly men walked slowly out of the old station to go home and wait interminably for yellow telegrams which started “His Majesty regrets to inform you…”

The little boys who have carried their toy pails and sand shovels through the old station are grown to men who have carried their bags and despatch cases through the same old gate.

Young people who passed through it on the springing feet of youth have come back through it with failing steps or in boxes.

A theatre of the true drama of life, more than any other single building in the city, it has taken part in the happiest moments of the people. The setting forth to adventure, the coming home.

And one day, within the next few weeks, suddenly, in accordance with a notice fastened to its front, it will be left flat.

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Editor’s Notes:

1. The Montreal Flyer (also known as the Green Mountain Flyer), was regular train service between Montreal and the Northeast United States, with sections to New York City and Boston. It started in 1892, and was discontinued in 1953. ↩︎
2. This article is about the transition in the building of the third Union Station in Toronto. On the date of the article, although the station was incomplete, its building was complete and the station was opened by Prince Edward, Prince of Wales. Four days later, the track network was shifted from the second Union Station, while the new viaduct, concourse and train shed were under construction. Demolition of the second Union Station began almost immediately and was completed in 1928. The third Union Station project was not fully completed until 1930. ↩︎
3. Coboconk is a village in the Kawartha Lakes. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, May 15, 1926.

Toronto has no Bohemian colony, no Montmartre¹, no Greenwich Village, no Soho.

But the Bohemians are there, just the same, artists, art students, musicians, sculptors, stainers of glass, toolers of leather, batterers of brass, batikers of batik², designers of theatres, chapels, book covers, and writers of all the unprofitable branches of literature from sonnets and one-act plays to free verse, free in both senses.

Down in the basement of the Ontario College of Art, which is back of the new art gallery in Grange park, we talked to a crowd of smocked art students whose hands were all muddy with clay which they were piling up in shapeless masses that presently would emerge as symbolic figures.

“Is there a province of Bohemia in Toronto?”

“No. There are Bohemians, but they are not organized into a colony.”

“Where do most of them live? Is there no favored district?”

“Within walking distance of the college of art. That means anywhere from the Ward to the Humber or the Beach. And wherever rooms can be got cheapest, with a north light.”

“That’s vague.”

“Several have rooms over old-fashioned stables back of old-fashioned mansions.”

“That is better.”

“Many have attic rooms, and third floor backs, and hall bedrooms.”

“Bohemianer and Bohemianer!”

“Some move once a month or as often as the rent is due.”

“And is there a Bohemian restaurant, a popular cafe?”

“No. Eating…”

This art is a strange thing. It takes hold of men and maids, a passion transcending love. A large number of the parents of the younger art students feel that their offspring are addled. Everything founded on commonsense is sacrificed. There are girls studying art in Toronto today who are living on less than two dollars a week for their food. There are young men who have recently performed the miracle of existing the full eight months of the year’s course at art school on absolutely no income. Minimum of everything – food, furniture, clothing, comforts of the most elementary sort – is the rule.

Amongst the majority of the art students those students who have well-to-do parents back of them are referred to as the “Four Hundred.”

“What,” asked Arthur Lismer, who is vice-principal of the college, of one of the students who had several terms of experience, “is the very least you can get along with as living expenses?”

“Well, you can get a perfectly good room for little as two dollars a week, though three would be a more general minimum. It isn’t much of a room, of course, but it doesn’t need be does it?”

“Food?”

“Fifty or sixty cents a day will feed you nicely, that is, buying your meals. But of course, some of the girls can do it less than that by buying the raw materials and cooking their food. Some of them don’t even buy bread, but bake their own.”

Living on Nothing a Day

“So-and-so,” said Mr. Lismer, mentioning another student, “did it on less than that.”

“Ah yes, but he restricted himself to soda biscuits and milk. And then, of course, there Whatyoucallem” (and the clay-fisted students all grinned at the mention of the name), “who subsisted on the milk he used to pinch off doorsteps in his early morning foraging expeditions. Winter was a great hardship to him, when the early morning deliveries were cut off.”

“Tell us more about him!” we begged.

“There’s little enough. He was determined to study art and he had no means whatever. The only time the police nearly got him was when he broke into a cellar to steal a lump of coal for his grate and the police were called and he hid under the coal while they prodded around the cellar.”

“Why didn’t he work to put himself through?”

“How could he work?” retorted the students scornfully. “He worked at his art in the holidays.”

Adding all the conservatories of music, the art schools and other sources of instruction in the high arts, there are several hundred students of these what you might call unprofitable professions in Toronto, and a decided majority of them are the type who are smitten with that mysterious quest of an unnamable goal and who have back of them little or no financial support.

“A father,” said one girl student, “will help his son get an education to be a lawyer or engineer. But few fathers, other than wealthy and careless ones, will encourage their children in what they regard to be so crazy-headed and unprofitable an enterprise as art. Most of our relations are strained as a matter of fact.”

These students, whose Bohemianism is largely a blossom of youth, nevertheless swell the ranks of the graduate Bohemians of which Toronto is gradually collecting its quota.

“If a census were taken,” says Arthur Lismer, “of all the people who, in the secrecy of their rooms, are either painting pictures, designing in one of the crafts, writing poems or plays, or in some field of art seeking to express the mystery that is pressing from within, it would run into hundreds and hundreds.”

Few of the art students know what their goal is. They are making definite and practical sacrifices. They are living sparely, with conscious effort at economy. But few of them have any expectation of making even a moderate fortune out of their art. The student of engineering can suffer hardship with the vision before him of great rewards. But there are no examples of rich rewards in the arts around Toronto.

We asked about this from a group of students at the college.

“What do you expect to get out of it all?”

“It is hard to put a name to it. We are not at all painfully aware of restrictions or hardships of any sort. Sacrifice is part and parcel of the whole thing. You can’t imagine a fat and comfortable art student really getting ahead with his art.”

“And then,” put in another girl student in the group, “we have fun.”

Toronto’s Little Bohemian Club

They have fun. The art students’ ball last month was one of the most picturesque events of the social season. Masquerade, of the period of the Italian renaissance, original presentation of dramatic masque of Dante, directed by Roy Mitchell, and then the fox trot to one of the city’s smart orchestras on, on into morn, in costumes antedating the minuet by centuries. And the students were outnumbered, five to one, by Bohemians of all ages, from University professors to the pretty partners of bond salesmen whose experience of the plastic arts is lipstick – the partners, not the bond salesmen.

The college is open at nights. Where night classes are not going on, the students are free to work and to foregather. The Ontario College of Art is entirely co-educational. There is no segregating of sexes. And that is a very odd thing. Because the art school in Montreal, that city which is boasted to be so much freer in spirit than Toronto, segregates the men from the girls not merely in different wings of the school, but has different times of admitting and dismissing the two sexes – the men at 9 o’clock and the girls at 9.15 in the morning, and the same in the afternoon.

There are a number of little clubs of a Bohemian aspect in the city, the most active of which is the Theatre Arts Club, which actually puts on plays. These young people have their club in a quaint old building next door to the morgue on Lombard street, which formerly was a Catholic boys’ home. Some of the old churchy benches remain, and here they have erected a stage and prepared such properties as they can make with their own wits and hands entirely.

One thing about all the Bohemians, especially the younger students and practitioners of the arts, is that they want something else in their atmosphere besides air. There is an obvious approach, with self-conscious bravado, to those subjects which from time immemorial, but particularly within modern times, have belonged strictly to the arts. The Theatre Arts Club’s latest presentation, for example, was Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” Who amongst us does not remember having quivered all over to the luscious music of this brilliant steal from the Song of Solomon in our undergraduate days?

Atmosphere is Bohemia. It appears to be a fact that unlike cows, fat and contented artists seldom produce anything worth while. The bare and limited life that results in all the compromises and makeshifts that comfortable people call Bohemia is somehow stimulating to the spirit. It is as if the restriction of all human desires such as the desire for comfort and food and property and everything else average people desire were a means of conserving a spiritual fuel for the fires that create.

There is, however, the story of a girl who came to the collage from a mansion on the Hill – the sort of girl who showed no promise of anything, not even beauty, couldn’t play, couldn’t sing, cook, fish, garden, play golf. But in her was a queer streak which her family, utterly baffled, as the famille of artists often are, diagnosed rather fearfully as art. So they sent her in all the trappings of one of the negligible “Four Hundred,” to the college. In a few months, the whole thing had captured her, body and soul.

Not Many Have Arty Look

And right before all eyes there went on the astonishing process of this girl denuding herself of all the comforts her family had accustomed her to, reducing her needs, unconsciously, almost, to a minimum, sacrificing, glorying in being admitted into the sacrificial intimacy of the hardest working students, reducing her life to the bare terms, as far as material things were concerned, in which the spirit can live in understanding with the unnamable mystery of art and creation.

That is all Bohemia is – an atmosphere, artificial, as art is artificial, in which there is subjugation of a lot of desires to spare fuel for the big desire and to free the vision far enough away to get the perspective of truth that artists must have to make art. Perhaps those who are nearest God’s image, of all mankind, are artists, who have inherited from on high a little more than others the passion to create. And it, naturally, is a mystery, from within and without.

Our Bohemians are not the least eccentric in their clothing. The reason is – no colony. If they could live and dine together they would wear their badge with pride. Amongst the elder members of the artistic cult are few even with odd haircuts. Look at the group of seven! They look more like a staff of schoolmasters than like the popular conception of artists. The only one who wears a fancy coiffure says he does it to spare himself being mistaken in railway smokers for a traveling man. It spares him a lot of conversation of that sort. Roy Mitchell, head of the stagecraft department of the college, has always had an arty look, even back before he wore the mackintosh cape, and that was about the time Red Dixon used to play fullback. An artist gets the same internal kick out of certain externals that a soldier gets out of his uniform or a golfer out of his plus fours. But until Toronto acquires a Bohemian resort, it can look for few picturesque figures among the artists.

The musical circle of Toronto contains no outstanding salons of Bohemia. Literary groups show no tendency towards the unconventionalities of what Soho, Montmartre and Greenwich Village used to be before tea rooms invited the slummer in and the artists out. Most of the literary clubs look like church socials, and sound like them, too.

Commercial art offers a way out for those students who can no longer resist the temptation of comforts, home and wife. The others head on for the larger theatres of art, New York, London, Paris, Brussels. Toronto does not hold many of its visiting art students – and a very large number of them come from far places in Canada. One of the most promising of them all comes from British Columbia, and we visited him in his attic room, vivid with sketches on every wall, a saucepan of shaving water steaming on a gas stove, a cello in a corner, paints, fragments of art material scattered about. When he welcomed us, I noticed a cigaret butt, caught and dangling from the tail of his sweater coat.

We had called with Arthur Lismer, who wanted to consult him about another picture to add to what this student was already asked to show in the group of seven exhibition. This was a great honor – the first time a student had ever been asked to show with his masters. Immediately after greeting us, this student began hunting for his cigaret butt. While Mr. Lismer talked, the student kept prowling about the attic studio with a mystified air. He looked on table, stove, shelf, floor. He stared intently at the floor. But no cigaret butt.

“Give us that one with the children bathing in the blue water,” said Mr. Lismer.

“Well, I would,” said the student. “But it won’t fit my frame, I’ve got only the two frames, and it won’t fit.”

They argued this quaint question – show held up for the want of a frame – and then the cigaret butt fell from its hiding place on to that space of floor where the student had looked most intently.

He looked at the butt with amazement. He glanced quickly about, with the air of one on whom impa are playing tricks. There was something so innocent, so elfin, so warmly comic about that whole scene, the spirited conversation between master and student, about pictures and treasured picture frames, the cigaret butt so eagerly sought and in hiding on his cost tall, and in the mysterious restoration of it, that it stood a perfect piece of all that innocence and asceticism which is all the Bohemia Toronto has.

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Editor’s Note:

1. From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, Montmartre in Paris was where many artists lived, worked, or had studios. ↩︎
2. Batik is an Indonesian technique of wax-resist dyeing applied to cloth. There was an artist inspired craze in Europe and the Americas for Batik in the early 1920s. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, May 7, 1921.

Man is a lucky creature.

But isn’t he brutally ungrateful?

This spring, the newspapers and magazines are as full as ever of spring-cleaning jokes, poems and cartoons.

The same old line of bunk: father afraid to come home to his muddled household; hubby going golfing or staying down to business at night to escape the madness that has overcome his home.

Is it possible! – is it possible that men are still under the impression that spring cleaning is the old bogey it was in the nineteenth century? Is it possible that men are unaware of the greatest revolution in womenkind since Eve.

The beating of carpets is no longer to be heard in the land. The sight of husbands eating supper on the back steps is no more.

For all unheralded, greeted indeed ungrateful indifference, has come the modernization of spring cleaning, a reform amongst women which for economic importance far exceeds their capture of the vote or their right to sit on juries.

It has been a most sweeping reform. It has affected every male citizen of the community. Yet have the men recognized it, hailed it, acclaimed it? No. They still perpetrate the outmoded jokes and jests of a bygone age.

Twenty years ago, what was spring cleaning? Ah, let us grant that was a terror.

As soon as the last foul snow had fled from the yard corners, the womenfolk began to set the date for the big bee. Father, sons and all were formally warned to be on hand yet out of the way. Soap, new scrubbing brushes and yellow ochre were bought in large quantities. Carpet beaters, step-ladders and curtain-stretchers were brought forth out of the cellar. As the fated day drew nigh, the women could scarcely contain themselves.

Then like doom, the day broke.

Off came curtains, carpets, pictures from the whole house, attic to kitchen. Out came books, out came the contents of the drawers, out came furniture, out came the hidden treasures of clothes closets.

For they did it all at a swipe, a generation ago.

There was a mad orgy of washing curtains, scrubbing floors, woodwork; beating carpets, dusting books, pictures, furniture. The curtains were dipped in yellow ochre to give them that correct creamy color, and then were stretched on frames with millions of pins, out in the backyard sun.

It lasted from three days to a week. Father had to come home early to beat carpets, ate meals in the kitchen, slept in a damp room on a strange bed, in a bare, curtainless, disorganized universe. He knew his books were being mixed up beyond redemption, that his desk was in confusion and all his valuable papers and memoranda lost forever.

He had to carry, heave, lift, tear up, tack down, and risk his neck hanging pictures which never would be straight again.

Those were days-

But what of the present!

To-day, a man never knows spring cleaning is going on if his wife didn’t tell him to notice how nice and clean everything was.

It is the greatest revolution in domestic customs since man moved out of caves into shanties.

For they now do it room by room!

A room a day. After, the men are off in the morning, the women tackle one room, wash and iron the curtains, vacuum the rug, dust and polish the floor and woodwork, clean windows, and so on.

Thus in a week or ten days the house is “done” and nobody would know the ancient fury had struck the place except the neighbors across the road who, peering out in true neighborly fashion, observed the curtains off for a few hours.

Where are the curtain-stretchers of yesterday? The carpet-beaters, the furniture piled in hallways, the tacks in the feet, the damp floors, the fury, the unrest of it all?

Are we not as cleanly as the former generations?

A dear old lady, who has seen many changes since stage coaches used to leave King and Yonge streets, explained the revolution as follows:

“Twenty years ago, had you suggested to a good housewife that she do one room at a time, she would have been scandalized.

“And have the dirt fly from one room to another!” she would have cried.

“To-day, you have machines that inhale the dust, so to speak. Lace curtains of creamy color are no longer the fashion. Little curtains of to-day are easily and quickly washed and ironed.

“But the secret of this great reform is this.

“Twenty years ago, women had very few pleasures. The annual spring-cleaning jamboree was one of their few real athletic pastimes. They had one grand fling, and then contented themselves with the occasional euchre party for the rest of the year.

“To-day what have we? The movie, the motor car. Home is no longer the chief thing in life. It is merely a shelter in bad weather and a place to sleep at nights.

“Movies, motor-cars, tea-rooms, the Daughters of this and the Women’s Association of that are inventions of the last 20 years

“So spring-cleaning, as a pastime, has declined. And as a nuisance, it has been modified into the tame little thing it is to-day.”

The old lady picked up her crochet work again.

“Women do not change,” she said. “Only times do.”

By Gregory Clark, April 19, 1924.

Residential Streets Deserted These Evenings, While the Children Are Put to Bed and Dad Struggles With His Tax Forms – If You’re Puzzled Lots of Your Clever Friends Can Help You.

O to be in jail, now that April’s here! O, to be a bachelor, earning about eight hundred dollars a year!

Blessed are the poor, for they don’t know what income tax forms are.

Do you know why the dominion government set the last day of April as the date income tax forms have to be in?

To save population. If the tax forms had to be made out in the dismal month of November or in the heat of the summer, hundreds would be jumping out of upstairs windows or running amok in the streets screaming: “Four per cent, less allowance for normal tax, on dividends, plus amount of surtax forward from No. 35 (ii). OO-wah!”

The next few evenings you will notice the streets deserted. The little children will be banished to bed. There will be no ratepayers out gardening. No voters ring gladly underneath their cars in the side drive. Save for the song of the robins, the gorgeous April evenings will be desolate.

Papa is indoors struggling with his income tax forms.

It’s a pity the ratepayers’ associations haven’t Instituted evening classes in the public schools during April to have chartered accountants give a course in “Mathematics for Taxpayers.”

“For once set out on paper, the whole thing is very simple,” says Hugh D. Patterson, dominion inspector of taxation for Toronto district. “Like any rules, the tax regulations have a formidable look. Tell the public that we have a special staff of men put on for the sole purpose of explaining the regulations to them, and if they strike difficulties, to bring them to the tax office and we will make their forms out for them.”

Mr. Patterson, who is not an, aged, grizzled and fearsome official like a Roman governor, but a young man with black hair and black eyes and an awful understanding of the most obscure things, and who can calculate fractions of fractions with an ordinary pencil, has made out two samples for the guidance of the poor rich.

Here’s the Way to Do It

People with moderate incomes have no trouble. It is the people with incomes over five thousand who need sympathy.

“So here are two examples, worked out step by step. If everyone follows these diagrams, step by step, they will come out all right.”

And, gentlemen, get your scissors. these in your hats. Here they are:

“Remember this,” added the inspector.

“The surtax is figured on your total income, if it is over $5,000, regardless of the other tax, regardless of your family, or dependents. Marital status has nothing to do with the surtax. The trouble is, to keep these two taxes separate, in your mind. Work out the normal tax, as shown. Then work out the surtax as an entirely different proposition. Follow the diagram.”

Much of the trouble people have is in not knowing their exemptions. Single men, as a rule, don’t know that they are exempt the two thousand if they have a dependent parent, grandparent, sister or, if over twenty-one, a brother mentally or physically incapacitated and totally dependent.

A single man who has one child dependent on him is exempt only the $300. A widower with one child, is exempt as a married man, as well as for the child.

All speculation is exempt. If you lose five thousand dollars on a speculation in oil stocks, your regular business being a clerk in an office, you are not exempt for the loss. If you win five thousand, you don’t have to include that in your earnings for the year.

But if you win a million dollars selling the government some bonds – that isn’t speculation – that’s business. And you have to include it under the head of commissions earned.

The main thing is, don’t guess. Call up the income tax office or go in and see them.

One Toronto man, in clearing up his wife’s estate after her death, made the discovery that she had never rendered an income tax return. He could not get an order to distribute the estate until he had satisfied the tax department. He had then to make out tax returns for every year since 1917, pay penalties for each year she had failed to make a return, and from 1920 on had to pay ten per cent. tax on the estate, interest accruing, for her failure to declare.

That estate, a good one, paid a handsome sum into the government.

No earthly excuse will be accepted for failing to render your tax return on or before April. 30. If you go on May the first and tell them that yesterday you were knocked down by a street car and were unconscious the whole of April 30, they will take the greatest sympathetic interest in your story, but it won’t save you the five per cent. of the tax penalty which the law calls for.

No Excuse For Anyone

One Toronto man, wealthy, was in Florida and was having such a good time he forgot all about taxes. He paid a penalty that equalled the cost of his trip to Florida. Another man was at sea, on his way home, on April 30. He had to pay the penalty.

“No excuses are provided for in the act. Therefore no excuses exist, as far as the department is concerned,” said Mr. Patterson.

A man was in hospital for several weeks before and after April 30. He was undergoing operations and was near death’s door. Nobody thought about income tax returns. But he paid the penalty just the same as the careless man. Nobody gets away. Professional entertainers, the great musicians and artists who only come to Toronto for a visit of twenty-four hours pay taxes on the income of an hour’s singing. Massey Hall makes its return of money taken in and paid out. The government writes to the artist’s agent in New York – and to make future visits possible the artist comes across with her tax.

People who are leaving the country for good are usually Interviewed before their departure and taxes are collected. There are various ways the department gets word of their intended departure – often a letter from a neighbor.

The government has actually collected taxes from bootleggers, as such. That is, the department reads in the newspaper of a conviction of someone as a bootlegger. Looking up records, they note no income recorded. So they pay a visit to the convicted party and demand to see his bank books. They examine back records of the bank account. They demand a proper income return. And the bootlegger, alarmed at the possibilities of prosecution, renders returns on his ill-gotten gains.

“The policy of the department,” said Mr. Patterson, “is to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, as far as prosecution in the courts is concerned, until the act has been in force long enough for everyone to thoroughly understand it. We do come across many cases where returns have not properly been filed. All we do is secure the return and collect the money, with full penalties exacted., We do not often prosecute. But instructions are likely to be promulgated at any time for a tightening up of the regulations, and prosecutions will be in order.”

A final instruction is this: no one knows better how to make an income tax form than people who don’t have to make them out. If you have one of these amongst your friends, get him to make yours out.