The town did not grow much at first, and during the War of 1812 it was twice captured by the Americans, but they could not hold it long. As the back country was settled and lake navigation afterwards developed, however, the harbor became of importance and the city grew, being finally incorporated as Toronto. Then it got a great impetus and became known as the "Queen City," its geographical advantages as a centre of railway as well as water routes attracting a large immigration, so that it has grown to be the second city in Canada, and its people hope it may outstrip Montreal and become the first. It has achieved a high rank commercially, and in religion and education, so that there are substantial grounds for the claim, often made, that it is the "Boston of Canada." It contains a church for about every thousand inhabitants, Sunday is observed with great strictness, and it has in the University of Toronto the chief educational foundation in the Dominion, and in the _Toronto Globe_ the leading organ of Canadian Liberalism. The city spreads for eight miles along the lake shore; the streets are laid out at right angles, and there are many fine buildings. Yonge Street, dividing the city, stretches northward from the harbor forty miles inland to the shore of Lake Simcoe. There are attractive residential streets, with many ornate dwellings in tasteful gardens. St. James' Cathedral, near Yonge Street, is a fine Early English structure, with a noble clock and a grand spire rising three hundred and sixteen feet. There is a new City Hall, an enormous Romanesque building with an impressive tower, and Osgoode Hall, the seat of the Ontario Superior Courts, in Italian Renaissance, its name being given from the first Chief Justice of Upper Canada. In Queen's Park are the massive Grecian buildings of the Provincial Parliament, finished in 1892 at a cost of $1,500,000. This Park contains a bronze statue of George Brown, long a leading Canadian statesman, and a monument erected in memory of the men who fell in repelling the Fenian invasion of 1866.