Part 11 (1/2)
For persons of this description (and there are such to be met with in the colonies), Canada is the worst country in the world. And I would urge any one, so unfitted by habit and inclination, under no consideration to cross the Atlantic; for miserable, and poor, and wretched they will become.
The emigrant, if he would succeed in this country, must possess the following qualities: perseverance, patience, industry, ingenuity, moderation, self-denial; and if he be a gentleman, a small income is almost indispensable; a good one is still more desirable.
The outlay for buying and clearing land, building, buying stock, and maintaining a family, paying servants' wages, with many other unavoidable expenses, cannot be done without some pecuniary means; and as the return from the land is but little for the first two or three years, it would be advisable for a settler to bring out some hundreds to enable him to carry on the farm and clear the above-mentioned expenses, or he will soon find himself involved in great difficulties.
Now, to your third query, ”What will be the most profitable way of employing money, if a settler brought out capital more than was required for his own expenditure?”
On this head, I am not of course competent to give advice. My husband and friends, conversant with the affairs of the colonies, say, lend it on mortgage, on good landed securities, and at a high rate of interest.
The purchase of land is often a good speculation, but not always so certain as mortgage, as it pays no interest; and though it may at some future time make great returns, it is not always so easy to dispose of it to an advantage when you happen to need it. A man possessing many thousand acres in different towns.h.i.+ps, may be distressed for twenty pounds if suddenly called upon for it when he is unprepared, if he invests all his capital in property of this kind.
It would be difficult for me to enumerate the many opportunities of turning ready money to account. There is so little money in circulation that those persons who are fortunate enough to have it at command can do almost any thing with it they please.
”What are the most useful articles for a settler to bring out?”
Tools, a good stock of wearing-apparel, and shoes, good bedding, especially warm blankets; as you pay high for them here, and they are not so good as you would supply yourself with at a much lower rate at home. A selection of good garden-seeds, as those you buy at the stores are sad trash; moreover, they are pasted up in packets not to be opened till paid for, and you may, as we have done, pay for little better than chaff, and empty husks, or old and worm-eaten seeds. This, I am sorry to say, is a Yankee trick; though I doubt not but John Bull would do the same if he had the opportunity, as there are rogues in all countries under the sun.
With respect to furniture and heavy goods of any kind, I would recommend little to be brought. Articles of hardware are not much more expensive here than at home, if at all, and often of a kind more suitable to the country than those you are at the trouble of bringing; besides, all land-carriage is dear.
We lost a large package of tools that have never been recovered from the forwarders, though their carriage was paid beforehand to Prescott. It is safest and best to ensure your goods, when the forwarders are accountable for them.
You ask, ”If groceries and articles of household consumption are dear or cheap?”
They vary according to circ.u.mstances and situation. In towns situated in old cleared parts of the country, and near the rivers and navigable waters, they are cheaper than at home; but in newly-settled towns.h.i.+ps, where the water-communication is distant, and where the roads are bad, and the transport of goods difficult, they are nearly double the price.
Where the supply of produce is inadequate to the demand owing to the influx of emigrants in thinly-settled places, or other causes, then all articles of provisions are sold at a high price, and not to be procured without difficulty; but these are merely temporary evils, which soon cease.
Compet.i.tion is lowering prices in Canadian towns, as it does in British ones, and you may now buy goods of all kinds nearly as cheap as in England.
Where prices depend on local circ.u.mstances, it is impossible to give any just standard; as what may do for one town would not for another, and a continual change is going on in all the unsettled or half-settled towns.h.i.+ps. In like manner the prices of cattle vary: they are cheaper in old settled towns.h.i.+ps, and still more so on the American side the river or lakes, than in the Canadas*.
[* The duties on goods imported to the Canadas are exceedingly small, which will explain the circ.u.mstance of many articles of consumption being cheaper in places where there are facilities of transit than at home; while in the Backwoods, where roads are scarcely yet formed, there must be taken into the account the cost of carriage, and increased number of agents; the greater value of capital, and consequent increased rate of local profit, &c.--items which will diminish in amount as the country becomes settled and cleared.--Ed.]
”What are necessary qualifications of a settler's wife; and the usual occupations of the female part of a settler's family?” are your next questions.
To the first clause, I reply, a settler's wife should be active, industrious, ingenious, cheerful, not above putting her hand to whatever is necessary to be done in her household, nor too proud to profit by the advice and experience of older portions of the community, from whom she may learn many excellent lessons of practical wisdom.
Like that pattern of all good housewives described by the prudent mother of King Lemuel, it should be said of the emigrant's wife, ”She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.” ”She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.” ”She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.”
Nothing argues a greater degree of good sense and good feeling than a cheerful conformity to circ.u.mstances, adverse though they be compared with a former lot; surely none that felt as they ought to feel, would ever despise a woman, however delicately brought up, for doing her duty in the state of life unto which it may have pleased G.o.d to call her.
Since I came to this country, I have seen the accomplished daughters and wives of men holding no inconsiderable rank as officers, both naval and military, milking their own cows, making their own b.u.t.ter, and performing tasks of household work that few of our farmers' wives would now condescend to take part in. Instead of despising these useful arts, an emigrant's family rather pride themselves on their skill in these matters. The less silly pride and the more practical knowledge the female emigrant brings out with her, so much greater is the chance for domestic happiness and prosperity.
I am sorry to observe, that in many cases the women that come hither give way to melancholy regrets, and destroy the harmony of their fire- side, and deaden the energies of their husbands and brothers by constant and useless repining. Having once made up their minds to follow their husbands or friends to this country, it would be wiser and better to conform with a good grace, and do their part to make the burden of emigration more bearable.
One poor woman that was lamenting the miseries of this country was obliged to acknowledge that her prospects were far better than they ever had or could have been at home. What, then, was the cause of her continual regrets and discontent? I could hardly forbear smiling, when she replied, ”She could not go to shop of a Sat.u.r.day night to lay out her husband's earnings, and have a little chat with her _naibors_, while the shopman was serving the customers,--_for why?_ there were no shops in the bush, and she was just dead-alive. If Mrs. Such-a-one (with whom, by the way, she was always quarrelling when they lived under the same roof) was near her she might not feel quite so lonesome.” And so for the sake of a dish of gossip, while lolling her elbows on the counter of a village-shop, this foolish woman would have forgone the advantages, real solid advantages, of having land and cattle, and poultry and food, and firing and clothing, and all for a few years' hard work, which, her husband wisely observed, must have been exerted at home, with no other end in view than an old age of poverty or a refuge from starvation in a parish workhouse.
The female of the middling or better cla.s.s, in her turn, pines for the society of the circle of friends she has quitted, probably for ever. She sighs for those little domestic comforts, that display of the refinements and elegancies of life, that she had been accustomed to see around her. She has little time now for those pursuits that were ever her business as well as amus.e.m.e.nt. The accomplishments she has now to acquire are of a different order: she must become skilled in the arts of sugar-boiling, candle and soap making, the making and baking of huge loaves, cooked in the bake-kettle, unless she be the fortunate mistress of a stone or clay oven. She must know how to manufacture _hop-rising_ or _salt-rising_ for leavening her bread; salting meat and fish, knitting stockings and mittens and comforters, spinning yarn in the big wheel (the French Canadian spinning-wheel), and dyeing the yarn when spun to have manufactured into cloth and coloured flannels, to clothe her husband and children, making clothes for herself, her husband and children;--for there are no tailors nor mantua-makers in the bush.
The management of poultry and the dairy must not be omitted; for in this country most persons adopt the Irish and Scotch method, that of churning the _milk_, a practice that in our part of England was not known. For my own part I am inclined to prefer the b.u.t.ter churned from cream, as being most economical, unless you chance to have Irish or Scotch servants who prefer b.u.t.termilk to new or sweet skimmed milk.