Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of OntarioScadding, Henry
History
Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario
Scadding, Henry
Toronto (Ont.) -- Description and travel; Toronto (Ont.) -- History
It is a study to observe how frequently, at an early stage of Upper
Canadian society, a mutual antipathy manifested itself between visitors
from the transatlantic world, tourists and settlers (intending and
actual), and the first occupants of such places of trust and emolument
as then existed. It was a feeling that grew partly out of personal
considerations, and partly out of difference of opinion in regard to
public policy. A gulf thus began at an early period to open between two
sections of the community, which widened painfully for a time in after
years;--a fissure, which, at its first appearance, a little philosophy
on both sides would have closed up. Men of intelligence, who had risen
to position and acquired all their experience in a remote, diminutive
settlement, might have been quite sure that their grasp of great
imperial and human questions, when they arose, would be very imperfect;
they might, therefore, rationally have rejoiced at the accession of new
minds and additional light to help them in the day of necessity. And on
the other hand, the fresh immigrant or casual visitor, trained to
maturity amidst the combinations of an old society, and possessing a
knowledge of its past, might have comprehended thoroughly the exact
condition of thought and feeling in a community such as that which he
was approaching, and so might have regarded its ideas with charity, and
spoken of them in a tone conciliatory and delicate. On both sides, the
maxim _Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_ would have had a salutary
and composing effect, "for," as the author of Realmah well says, "in
truth, one would never be angry with anybody, if one understood him or
her thoroughly."
We regret that we cannot recover two small "paper pellets of the brain,"
of this period, arising out of the discussions connected with the
appointment of an outsider (Mr. Justice Willis) to the Bench of Upper
Canada. They would have been illustrative of the times. They were in the
shape of two advertisements, one in reply to the other, in a local
Paper: one was the elaborate title-page of a pamphlet "shortly to
appear," on the existing system of Jurisprudence in Upper Canada; with
the motto "Meliora sperans;" the other was an exact counterpart of the
first, only in reversed terms, and bearing the motto "Deteriora timens."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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