Canada and the British immigrantWeaver, Emily P. (Emily Poynton)
History
Canada and the British immigrant
Weaver, Emily P. (Emily Poynton)
Canada -- Description and travel; Canada -- Economic conditions
The Townships have an agent at Quebec to meet incoming steamers and to
help new arrivals on their way; and within the last few years some five
thousand British immigrants have settled in the district. Some have
found work in the shops and mills of the towns, but most have gone to
the farms, and here and there amongst the prosperous farmers of the
district is one who could tell an interesting story of his arrival at
Quebec with scarcely a penny and of his gradual climb up the ladder to a
position of comfort.
By the way, there are plenty of churches of different denominations and
schools and other social advantages which make life pleasant in the
Townships, and probably for English-speaking people, especially for
those who are Protestants, this part of Quebec will prove more homelike
than any of the counties where the population is almost entirely
French-speaking and Roman Catholic.
To return to the province in general, though it has still too many
illiterates, there has been progress during the last few years in
educational matters, and within seven years the government grant for
this purpose was much more than doubled. Owing to the marked religious
differences, there are two classes of public schools—the regular public
schools and the “separate” schools of the minority, which may be
Protestant in one district and Roman Catholic in another. The Roman
Catholic and Protestant schools are represented, in the department of
education, by French and English secretaries or deputy-heads, under the
general “Superintendent of Public Instruction.” In the different
localities, school affairs are regulated by “commissioners” representing
the religious majority, and “trustees” representing the minority. These
are elected by the ratepayers, who pay school rates to the school board
of their own religious faith.
Recently new technical schools have been opened in Quebec and Montreal,
and the latter city now has a “School of Higher Commercial Studies.”
There are also Provincial Forestry and Veterinary Schools. Finally,
there is the great Roman Catholic University of Laval, with branches in
Quebec and Montreal, which is the outgrowth of a seminary founded in the
seventeenth century by the first bishop of Canada; and the non-sectarian
McGill University, which owes its foundation in 1814 to the bequest of a
wealthy merchant of Montreal, but has since been enriched by
benefactions from Lord Strathcona and others. It is said, indeed, to be
the wealthiest of Canadian universities. It has a large number of
departments, and is well equipped for research work in medicine,
physics, engineering, and so forth. Women are admitted to its courses on
equal terms with men. This university, by the way, owes much to the
famous Nova Scotian geologist, Sir William Dawson, who was its principal
for thirty-eight years, and during that time saw the number of its
undergraduates increase from eighty to over a thousand.
[Illustration: MONTMORENCY FALLS, QUEBEC PROVINCE.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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