Canada -- Social life and customs; Ontario -- Description and travel
Guide books of travel, published both in America and Europe, for travel
in Canada, send the tourist invariably from New York City up the Hudson
by steamer to Albany; then by the New York Central Railway to Niagara
Falls. They do admit that the Falls are worth seeing. Then they send the
tourist by steamer to Toronto, and tell him to take the Richelieu
steamers, down the St. Lawrence from there, and run the rapids to
Montreal. From Montreal he is to take the night boat for Quebec and come
back again to Montreal by the day boat, and then go south to Lake
George, and this is all the tourist is to see of Canada. Thousands of
American and British tourists form their opinions of us from what they
see on this water tour through Canada. Of course, going down Lake
Ontario they see next to nothing of us or our country, because the lake
is too big to see much on the shore. Entering the St. Lawrence, they
view shores studded with rocks, and have not the faintest idea of our
fertile lands and rich farms, which give to Ontario its wealth. The
wealth of Ontario is certainly in her comfortable homesteads and fertile
fields. Of this the tourist knows nothing, and he goes down to Quebec
city to see, as best he may in America to-day, the best example of a
city in the eighteenth century style; and he passes out of our borders,
having come almost wholly in contact with our French population, and
goes away considering our land a land of stones peopled by Frenchmen.
The tourist travels too quickly to get proper impressions of a country,
I think I hear many readers say. Granted, but still many impressions are
got of countries by tourists by such rapid travelling, and we cannot
help the fact. The only way we can help the matter appears to me to be
for our railways to join and offer a general tourist ticket, taking the
tourist all over our country at a reasonable rate, and allowing him to
stop off when and where he will. Such tickets ought to be advertised in
Great Britain and the United States, and be on sale there. If once
bought they would be used. While using such tickets the tourist could
scarcely fail to get considerable knowledge of us and of our country.
Tourists, as a rule, are persons of means and of influence at home. Many
of them might thus be induced to bring capital to our country and make
it their home, to our and their advantage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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