Sketches in Canada, and rambles among the red menJameson, Mrs. (Anna)
History
Sketches in Canada, and rambles among the red men
Jameson, Mrs. (Anna)
Indians of North America -- Canada; Ontario -- Description and travel
The population consists principally of artisans--as blacksmiths,
carpenters, builders, all flourishing. There is, I fear, a good deal of
drunkenness and profligacy; for though the people have work and wealth,
they have neither education nor amusements. Besides the seven taverns,
there is a number of little grocery stores, which are, in fact, drinking
houses. And though a law exists, which forbids the sale of spirituous
liquors in small quantities by any but licensed publicans, they easily
contrive to elude the law; as thus:--a customer enters the shop, and
asks for two or three pennyworth of nuts, or cakes, and he receives a
few nuts, and a large glass of whisky. The whisky, you observe, is
given, not sold, and no one can swear to the contrary. In the same
manner, the severe law against selling intoxicating liquors to the poor
Indians is continually eluded or violated, and there is no redress for
the injured, no punishment to reach the guilty. It appears to me that
the Government should be more careful in the choice of the
district-magistrates. While I was in London, a person who acted in this
capacity was carried from the pavement dead drunk.
WOMEN IN CANADA.
Here, as everywhere else, I find the women of the better class lamenting
over the want of all society, except of the lowest grade in manners and
morals. For those who have recently emigrated, and are settled more in
the interior, there is absolutely no social intercourse whatever; it is
quite out of the question. They seem to me perishing of _ennui_, or from
the want of sympathy which they cannot obtain, and, what is worse, which
they cannot feel: for being in general unfitted for out-door
occupations, unable to comprehend or enter into the interests around
them, and all their earliest prejudices and ideas of the fitness of
things continually outraged in a manner exceedingly unpleasant, they may
be said to live in a perpetual state of inward passive discord and
fretful endurance--
"All too timid and reserved
For onset, for resistance too inert--
Too weak for suffering, and for hope too tame."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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