It seemed that one’s ability to identify a joke was being tested when one was asked to set down something of what one had seen of the development of Canada during forty years of railway experience. The work I have been doing since coming to Canada in 1882 is the same kind of service that has been well rendered by thousands of men. How could there be anything of public interest in a career that has had only an average share of incident and romance, and more than an average of exacting toil?

But it has been said that the commonplace is the greatest romance of all; and that it often requires the lapse of years for an apparently ordinary event to acquire its true perspective in the things which impart the liveliest interest to life. After all, one was very closely associated with the growth of a great railway system from a feeble and unpromising beginning; and one saw the most extraordinary change from private enterprise to Government ownership that has taken place in the history of transportation. Nine millions of Canadian people are financially interested in the effects of that transformation, and it may help some of them to appreciate the significance of their unexpected proprietorship if one tries to throw a little light upon the evolution of Canada, as it has been affected by four decades of rapidly changing transportation conditions—forty years in which every sensation of success and disappointment has been known to the most fascinating country in the world.

One must find the romance of the commonplace in harking back—it cannot be done by looking forward. There is no joy in the anticipation of a certainty. No surer way of discounting pleasures has ever been invented than to describe them in advance. Everybody knows the bore who ruins any good story he proffers by his assurance that it is very funny indeed. Turnings in our personal roads which have no special interest when they are taken, years afterwards disclose themselves as the most fateful passages in our lives. Sometimes when we have wanted to turn aside from a beaten path, and have been foiled, we have not known how much was bound up with keeping awhile longer the even tenor of what was then a commonplace way indeed.

Perhaps I am alone in viewing, without regret, a turn which was missed in my teens, and which would have taken me to Asia, far indeed from the rigours of Manitoba winters, and from politicians who would assist railway management on lines that have grown hoary with age, and disgraceful in their inefficiency. While working at Stobcross station in Glasgow I answered an advertisement for a clerk on a plantation in Ceylon. No reply to the application reached me, though I anxiously watched for it. Years afterwards, just before coming to Canada, it was told me that an answer to the application did arrive from the Glasgow firm who had the business in hand. The family knew of the matter, and one of them intercepted a letter which was addressed to me, and asked me to come to Glasgow, as it was thought I might be the most suitable applicant for the situation. The letter was concealed, I believe, with the connivance of my excellent mother; otherwise, I might now be curing tea for Sir Thomas Lipton. About that time, by the way, the first of the Lipton shops was opened in Glasgow, and the astounding sight was witnessed of a provision retailer advertising his bacon by weekly cartoons of Irish pigs on the hoardings—for bacon, and not tea, was the early Lipton specialty.

One often envies the Canadian-born—even one’s own children—their fortune in being natives of this land. But occasionally one meets Canadians whose envies are of the reverse order. They say that it must be fine to have spent a youth amidst the historical treasures of the Old Lands; and fine also to have had the experience of finding in Canada an entirely New Land—to have chosen it for oneself, and to have had so much direct control over one’s own destiny; and the destinies of one’s offspring, to remote generations. Immigration is a romance of the commonplace, perhaps; though there isn’t much glamour in the outlook of a poor wight who has left all his kindred, is facing an unknown country, and is finding the ocean a bottomless woe, on which nothing stays where it is put.

“What made you come to Canada?” is a frequent question, to which the answer usually is, “To better my condition.” It is my own story, though oddly enough, I came to Montreal to work for the Grand Trunk at a smaller salary than I was getting in Glasgow as a clerk on the Caledonian. Was that Scottish-like—was it wise or otherwise? If an answer be desired, it can perhaps be found in a sketch of the Scotland I came from—the Scotland of an average industrious family that owed everything to labour and nothing to fortune—the sort of family that has been supplying Canada with people ever since immigration hither ceased to be a purely French process.

One speaks about one’s early years primarily because it affords an opportunity to say a word for upbuilders of Canada who never saw Canada, but who gave to Canada what she has most needed and still needs—people, sound of body and of mind, and grounded in a faith that may be stern, but has at least been steadfast, and has given its followers the vitalities of character and success.

A friend has a habit of saying that his mother is one of the greatest Canadians, though she has never lived for a single month ten miles from her birthplace in the south of England. On the day this is written he tells me she is keeping her ninety-eighth birthday, and that, to date, she has given sixty-five children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to Canada. For fifty-five years she has been writing letters to, and getting letters from, Canada. Her stake in the country has been infinitely more precious than that of the millionaire who dies without seed.

Most theatre-goers have seen “Bunty Pulls the Strings”, Moffatt’s verra Scotch play. The piece is developed around Bunty, the managing daughter of a typically Presbyterian house. It is really a depiction of life near Glasgow—some people think, of an extinct species of existence. Its religious aspects are incomprehensible to a generation that knows not its Shorter Catechism, as they are serious to the participants, and homelike to many people in Canada scarcely past middle life.

One of the characters speaks of going to Thornliebank. The father of the playwright was William Moffatt, well known as an elocutionist in Scotland fifty years ago, who used to give readings from the “Reciter” of his own compilation. He was a frequent visitor to Thornliebank. For nearly twenty-four years I never lived anywhere else.

“Bunty” is a transcript from southern Scottish life, as I knew it, within an hour’s walk of Glasgow. The church scenes, including the presence of the collie among the worshippers and the deposits of copper on the collection plate outside the door, before the spiritual food has been dispensed, are as true to fact as a Canadian winter is true to Jack Frost.

The Thornliebank folk as I knew them, and as I was one of them, are reproduced in “Bunty” with a fidelity that shows how dramatic the commonplace can be. Thornliebank was and is a village almost entirely of one industry. The Crum Print Works employed several hundred people. The Crums were among the first manufacturers to recognize that they owed to their employes more than the smallest wages that they would consent to work for. The influence of Robert Owen, the socialistic employer of New Lanark, had spread to our locality. The Crums furnished certain institutional services for the village. They were circumscribed enough, in comparison with what has been done by the Cadburys at Bournville and the Levers at Port Sunlight, but were considerable advances on the average standard of industrial amenities in the mid-nineteenth century. They were the heralds and examples which, in due time, produced the Bournvilles and Port Sunlights, the Garden Cities and the town planners.

Roundabout, Thornliebank was known as the model village, because of the Crums’ commonsense philanthropies. There was a commodious village club, the facilities of which, and especially the library, were greater than the membership fees. Sport was not the feature of country life that it has since become everywhere—perhaps because that was still the era when Shanks’s pony was the steed on which people put their odds. It was also the era of mutual improvement expressed in musical and literary endeavour. In the Literary Society my sphere was humble enough, though I recall the labour with which I set forth the fruit of researches on such subjects as the history of railways.

The Thornliebank Choral Union was nothing extraordinary, of course, except perhaps that its daring members constituted me their treasurer, and managed to renew their courage when the annual meeting recurred. But Thornliebank’s chief musical fame was derived from its brass band, into the glories of which I was never initiated. It had (speaking from memory) twenty-four pieces; and was in much demand for excursions and celebrations over a pretty wide territory. The pay for a long day’s activity wouldn’t be more than twenty-five or thirty dollars—think of that, ye who inhibit musicians from playing with a Pageant Chorus, because of a union punctilio.

A long day’s activity? Many a Saturday morning have I been wakened at five o’clock by the band playing itself through the village on the way to Glasgow, there, at seven, to lead its employing multitude to a boat for a journey down the Clyde. The band walked the five miles to Glasgow, and played most of the way. Practice in daylight maybe saved the cost of candle-light.

Some little time before I left Scotland there came to Thornliebank a designer for the Crum Mills, who had a very fine tenor voice. He was a little unlike some of our native singers, such as John Semple, whose bass was one of the most sonorous I have ever heard; who gave to his solo work a genius of interpretation I have never known excelled, but who couldn’t read a note, and relied entirely on his unfailing, memorial ear.

Our tenor was a technician, with a passion for the science of melody, and a determination to excel in the professional world—which he has since done in two continents. He is George Neil, conductor of the Toronto Scottish Chorus, one of the sweetest lyric tenors you could wish to hear, and a relentless worker in the cause of perpetuating Scottish songs.

Discussing, the other evening, the musical associations of the region we both knew so well, George and I agreed that the Pageant Chorus, which has opened a new chapter in the great story of the Canadian National Exhibition, is a measurable, modernized, Canadianized expansion of the Tannahill concerts on Gleniffer Braes, to which, with myriads more, Thornliebank used to flock on a summer Saturday afternoon, to hear anywhere up to a thousand voices, drawn from city and country choirs, commemorate a Scottish poet who thus received a tribute unequalled, I think, by anything that has annually been dedicated to his master Burns.

Tannahill was the son of a Paisley handloom weaver. He was put to the shuttle as a boy, but studied the poetry of Burns, Fergusson and Ramsay till he developed an intense ambition to emulate them. He fused his muse with the music of his loom, and tuned his metres with his shuttle. At thirty-three he took the advice of those who noted the local popularity of his poetry and published a volume of 175 songs and lyrics that enabled him to bank twenty pounds. But at thirty-six, when Constable refused to publish a corrected edition, his heart broke and he was found drowned.

One of his best pieces is “The Braes of Gleniffer”; and it was in a natural amphitheatre, on the braes of Gleniffer, visible from Thornliebank, that the yearly commemorative concert was held. The braes were five miles from home; but nothing was thought of walking the distance. The Tannahill concerts were known all over the south of Scotland; and for several decades it was a distinction to be a singer in them.

My father was a foreman in the Crum mills, and did his bit in religious and social service. He was a highly Calvinistic Presbyterian, of a sect which has no perpetuation in Canada. My mother, a Blair of Barrhead, was also of his kirk—the kirk of Original Seceders it was formally called, after a certain process of union had been consummated.

There was no church of the Original Seceders at Thornliebank, so we worshipped at Pollokshaws, the town that lay between Thornliebank and Glasgow, and is now incorporated with the great city. My father was the precentor for the Original Seceders, who would as soon think of having a box of whistles to lead the praise in God’s house as they would of praying to the accompaniment of fife and drum. Old associates of his son in Portage la Prairie might not have been astonished at the accountant of the Manitoba and North Western Railway venturing on the perilous seas of choir-leading at the Presbyterian church, had they seen Precentor Hanna at the Original Seceders in Pollokshaws, standing up when the psalm was called, striking his tuning fork, bending his ear to it, sounding the note in harmony, and then leading off with “Duke Street” or “Martyrdom”.

The Original Seceders are a survival and a combination of several schisms in the Presbyterian church in Scotland. The rigid qualities of the Covenanters caused some of them to resist all innovations, and to keep themselves separate from such as yielded to new-fangled fashions in worship and belief. The settlement of William and Mary, as sovereigns of Scotland as well as of the rest of the British Isles, imposed an oath on ministers which some refused to take, so that there was a secession of Burghers, as they were called. These, in their turn, had a split of their own, resulting in churches of Anti-Burghers. In opposition to the advancing tide of more liberal ideas and less severe practices, the Auld Lichts also set up a new identity among the folds of Christ’s Presbyterian flock.

To any of these divisions of the church militant may be ascribed the overworked story of the good soul who, lamenting the decay of faith, as indicated by the true kirk of the truly faithful having dwindled to the minister and herself, said: “And I’m no’ so sure of the meenister.”

At all events, the Anti-Burghers, the Auld Lichts and the Covenanters gathered themselves together in the Original Seceders, of whom there were not more than a baker’s dozen of churches in all Scotland. Our family belonged to the church at Pollokshaws, where we walked every Sunday, rain, snow or shine, and where father led the psalmody. We were never taught, in so many words, that it was impossible to praise God in any other metres or melodies, than the versions of the psalms that belong to the period of the Westminster Confession, and the tunes which were venerably associated with various of them. The idea of a predestinated psalmody which was of the essence of our Sabbath meat and drink was as much a part of our religious make-up as the day of judgment itself. Hymns were taboo. Somehow, they didn’t fit in with the true doctrine of the survival of the fittest; not even such dournesses as

At Pollokshaws certain tunes were so associated with certain psalms that when my father attempted the innovation of singing “I waited for the Lord my God” to some other tune than “Balerma”[1] there was almost a godly riot, and his religious experience was critically sounded for the graver symptoms of heresy. The sentiment engendered by my father’s endeavour to vary a tune has had no parallel in my experience, I think, except in the astonishment with which some politicians in the maritime provinces regarded the amazing doctrine that the job of a section man should not be dependent upon his vote at the last general election.

The outward form of much of the Presbyterianism of Scotland in the sixties and seventies was hard, bare, unlovely to the modern eye. It grates upon our present sense of spiritual contentment. But it developed a fibre in the people who revelled in theological exactitude, for which we, their descendants, are seldom sufficiently grateful. It will be true of multitudes of other Canadians besides myself, who were brought up in the moral rigours of a most positive Puritanism, that their retrospect combines a little resentment against the overclouding of their youth by unnecessary prohibitions, with much thanksgiving for the immovable foundations on which character was built. We are none too worthy citizens of the state, as things are. Heaven alone knows what we might have been if we had not been told, with stern, but kindly repetition, “This is the way, walk ye in it.” Our grudge to our Presbyterian upbringing is infinitesimal. Our debt is infinite.

Sometimes one hears what sounds like ungrateful criticism of the thoroughness with which a theology that was sometimes confounded with religion was drilled into the children of the nineteenth century. A better attitude, surely, even for those who would not hold their children’s noses closely to the Calvinistic grindstone, is to appreciate the excellences which were so relentlessly pressed upon us. It may be well that, for us, the old days have gone for ever. But for family discipline, and the homage that was paid to the unseen, could anything be better than the attendance at church of the whole family every Sunday, at Pollokshaws, for services that lasted from eleven till a quarter to four, with an hour’s intermission for lunch; then Sunday school at five o’clock?

After a quiet evening there was the second family worship of the day, beginning at ten o’clock, when whoever happened to be in the house was not allowed to depart without sharing in the exercises—expounding of the Word and a somewhat lengthy prayer by father, and psalmody by all present. Religious duty was imperious duty—in private as well as in public. Except the precentor, in church we sat to sing, and we stood while the preacher prayed. The long prayer of an ordained Original Seceder would often continue for half an hour.

It is not of an Original Seceder, but of another branch of the Presbyterian church, that the story is told of a young probationer who was being heard with a view to an overture, and who, having been told that his prospective congregation very much liked very long supplications, thought to help himself out, when he was gravelled for matter, by saying to Deity: “And now, Lord, we will tell thee a little anecdote.”

Last summer I had the pleasure of taking a Toronto friend, Mr. A. J. Mitchell, a manager of Old St. Andrew’s, to the Original Seceders’ Church at Pollokshaws. We deemed it inadvisable to bring the taxi to the church door. As far as possible, we conformed ourselves to the prevailing spirit of the congregation and the service. To each of us the associations of the worship were different, indeed.

The interior, with its uncushioned pews, the precentor’s box and the pulpit, was what it had been fifty years ago. When the precentor pitched high the opening note of psalm or paraphrase, I was thinking of my father, long since gone. While the preacher was discoursing with all the old certainty, on the wrath to come, to me it was a voice remote, but oh, so near. Outside one met warm-hearted people who knew one’s name, and the family’s connection with the church, but were personal strangers. One could only establish contact with the living by recalling the dead. There is a sadness about returning to an old home after decades of absence that in some ways is more poignant than the feeling with which a youth leaves the roof that has sheltered him all his days, for a land across the sea.

But for a pillar of a Toronto Presbyterian church to find himself for the first time in the rarefied atmosphere of the Original Seceders; to join in praise that is entirely vocal; to see the solemn devotion that pervades a service singularly void of what to him hitherto has been appealing in worship, is something new; and, if one is not mistaken, something awful.

My friend comes of a family where the rigid practices of a fading Puritanism were rigidly honoured—no such desecrations, for instance, as cleaning shoes, or reading newspapers on the Sabbath day. He adorns a church where the music is fine, and the congregational singing notably hearty, where, indeed, the organist, Mr. Tattersall, is the son of a Thornliebank girl. He is of those who invited a Congregationalist to Presbyterian Old St. Andrew’s. He has delighted in the magnificence of the cathedral and the grandeur of the ritual at St. Giles’. He would not choose the severe and unornamented concentration of the old Seceders before the catholicity that he sees in the pending union. But—and this is what one would fain impress upon the kindly mind—my friend came from Pollokshaws with a deepened reverence for the wealth of character with which the old Puritanism has endowed the world. A sorry day, indeed, will it be, whereon we forget from whom and whence we came, even when we are most conscious of the liberalizing changes which time and fortune have wrought.