“There is nothing new under the sun—there is nothing said or written but what has been said or written before”. So runs the old adage and it is a true one. The reader who has had the patience to peruse this little volume thus far will, insofar as it at least is concerned, hasten to agree with this old saying, and he will wonder why such a book ever came to be written. It is easy to write the story of a successful man or a successful enterprise; it is not so easy to write the story of a once prosperous community which now only retains a shadow of its former activity. “Ichabod! Ichabod! thy glory is departed.” It is said to be bad literary taste either to explain or apologize for what one has written, but in a narrative that makes no pretentions at all to literary taste or expression such a rule is easily broken.

It has had as its primary object, then, as stated in a previous chapter, the preservation of the memory of a few of the earliest pioneers in the author’s native township and the recognition, in part at least, of the debt owed them by their descendants. We would be the sorriest sort of ingrates were we not conscious of that debt, and ingratitude is of all sins about the hardest to forgive.

“I have talked with many great men in my time” said Abraham Lincoln shortly before his death, “and I have found them much the same as ordinary men in almost everything.” The time is coming when values will be duly appraised, the wheat winnowed from the chaff, and Canada will then discover that the greatest among her sons are to be found among the pioneers, who were prepared to make the sacrifices without which her truly wonderful progress would never have been possible at all. To quote, with the alteration of but a single word, a great British poet, the hundreth anniversary of whose death was so fittingly observed in recent months:

“What want these pioneers that conquerors have
But History’s purchased page to call them great?
A wider space, an ornamented grave?
Their hopes were not less warm, their souls were full as brave.”

A secondary object has been the entering of a piea for the conservation of our national resources, and more particularly our forests. There is no country in the world, except it be the United States, that offers such frightful examples of the folly of waste as Canada does. She has suffered for it already, and will suffer even more in the future, if the warnings of reason and common sense are disregarded. We and our fathers robbed Nature of her forests and she in revenge robbed us of our streams, or left them pale ghosts of their former selves. Part of this was not waste of course. The forest had to be cleared before we could find a habitation at all. But in Sydenham a great area of land was denuded of timber that could grow nothing else in its place, and this kind of waste should never be suffered to happen again, neither her > or in any place where it is in our power to prevent it. At present there is only one country in the world where the annual growth of timber exceeds the national consumption, and that country is Russia. If that is one ol the curses of a communistic form of government we should pray for a small portion of the curse. Above all, the movement known as “Save the Forests—Prevent Fires”, should receive the support of every good citizen who has any regard for our posterity at all.

The third object may be very briefly told. It is best expressed in a verse by Burns:

“Some write a neighbor’s name to lash,
Some write (vain thought!) for needfu’ cash,
Some write to court the country clash And raise a din;
For me, my aim I never fash.
I write for fun.”

In short, it was written for the pleasure derived from its writing. It takes considerable pleasure to offset the prediction of a friend, and our own expectation, that its circulation will not exceed eighty or one hundred copies.

The hyper-sensitive critic, should he ever pick it up, will be horrified to discover a thousand violations of syntax and every other conceivable rule of grammar in its pages. He is welcome to whatever degree of satisfaction he may extract from the fact. One cannot drive engine lathes, planers and boring mills for thirty years and then suddenly pick up a fountain pen and expect to drive it in turn through several score pages of faultless diction.

One or two lessons have been learned in its writing, however, which have made the experience gained worth the labor. On is that a work of this kind should never be attempted except by some one who has been an actual participant in the events sought to be described. In proceeding with the work many difficulties were encountered which had not been foreseen. In fact, at one time it seemed the part of discretion to abandon the venture altogether. As far as is known there is nobody now living in North Sydenham who arrived there prior to 1848. The memories of those who came to, or were born there, in the following ten or fifteen years, are not now as good as they have been and are not always reliable; this is particularly true in the matter of dates. Our first pioneers have passed from the scene and with them they have taken a vast fund of facts and reminiscences which would have been of the keenest interest, if not of value, to the present generation. As an old friend and neighbor recently assured us,—“Son, you have started this thing about ten or fifteen years too late.”

Another thing we have learned, is the need in Sydenham township of a pioneers’, or old settlers’ association, of some kind. Once an interest were thoroughly aroused in such an object, the organization of such a society would be a comparatively easy matter. It would then be found that what involves great labor and more or less expense for one. could easily and far more effectually be performed by fifteen or twenty of its members; in brief, many hands would make light work. The scanty reminiscences we have collected here would be augmented to four or fivefold their volume, and a survey of the whole township would be compiled which would not only be intensely interesting but of genuine historical appraisement. Our own experience has been that very little in the way of re—240— liable records is available, and only a minute portion of even these have fallen into our hands. Such a society, however, with its members working independently and at their leisure, could gradually accumulate practically every fact of importance in the history of the early settlement of the township. (This suggestion is thrown out with only a faint hope it will be acted upon.) Something in the nature of a general reunion might be held in the summer months of each year, when the people of the entire township would have the opportunity of getting acquainted with one another, and of getting acquainted, too, with the earliest days of Sydenham’s existence as a municipality. This commendable custom prevails in many of the townships and counties of the States comprising the American Union, as the writer has had the opportunity of observing at first hand, and as a promotive of genuine patriotism its effect can hardly be over-estimated. The loyalty of a man who knows little or nothing of the history of his birthplace or his native country is a loyalty of small real value, and one that can easily be imposed upon. It lacks the first requisite of knowing what it is loyal to, and what its possessor should be prepared to make sacrifices for. Such a loyalty is satisfied with flag waving, fireworks, and the singing of the national anthem. In reality it is not loyalty at all, but a blind and misguided jingoism. It is only when we become thoroughly conversant with the facts concerning the struggles by which constitutional government was secured for us and for our posterity, the shaping of our institutions in the earliest times and their gradual evolution up until the present moment, that we become capable of an intelligent patriotism, which can give some reason for the faith that is in it. Such a study is not long pursued until one becomes conscious of what we owe to those brave men who first planted these institutions in the wilderness; as the past recedes and men and events begin to assume their true perspective we see more and more clearly that these were the real makers of Canada and the men whom, as possessing the true spirit of patriotism, it should be our privilege and delight to honor. Their station in life was a humble one, their daily toil was hard and their lot obscure but the time has arrived when justice must be done them and free acknowledgement made that these men were greater than they themselves knw. It is almost certain that when Lincoln gave utterance to the expression quoted above, he was entirely unconscious that the time would come when he would be regarded as the greatest American of the nineteenth century, and one of the four greatest men of his time. It has been well said of moral greatness that it has too much simplicity, is too unostentatious, too self-subsistent, and enters into others’ interests with too much heartiness, to live for an hour for what the able yet self-seeking soldier or statesman always lives, to make himself the theme and gaze and wonder of a dazzled nation. So it was with Lincoln and so, too, with our pioneers. They builded better than they knew, and since we have organizations for almost every purpose under the sun, why should not Sydenham have one for the perpetuation of the remembrance of the early days of the township and the men who first came to make their homes there?

There are light and dark shades in every picture, and no painting which is true to life would be of much value did the dark shades not appear. The honest reader will object to the personal sketches appearing in the previous chapter as being too much in the nature of obituary notices. They extol, these readers will say, the virtues of these men but are silent as to their faults. The criticism is a just one ; it would be folly indeed to claim these men did not have their full share of the frailties and shortcomings inherent in human nature. Apart entirely from the disputed question as to its inspiration, the Old Testament will always stand as the most wonderful book of its kind because of its absolute honesty. It tells all and conceals nothing; in the modern sporting phrase it plays no favorites. We know exactly the best and the worst of the mighty men of old who flourished in the times of which it is the chronicler; we know that King David was guilty of crimes for which men are now given life sentences in the penitentiary, and that Solomon, for all his wisdom, died as the fool dieth. Coming down to later times, we have in the New Testament the story of the only perfect Man ever appearing in the world, and His life was such a reproach to the hyprocrites around Him that they took Him out on top of a mountain and crucified Him between two thieves. Pilate said he could find no fault in him; that was precisely what was the matter. Men’s very faults are often their preservation. A perfect man, or even one who professed to be perfect would be simply intolerable.

It is with nations as it often is with men—the greater the nation the greater are its vices. The French are accused ,and rightly, of a cold, sneering cynicism, which scoffs at all we deem sacred ; their birth rate is stationary because home life is to them almost an unknown quantity, particularly in their great cities. The Germans are accused, and rightly, of a heartless cruelty and callousness to suffering that in time of war turns the sympathy of neutral nations against them, and which we can never condone, unless they chance to be fighting as our ally. The hypocrisy of the English has passed into a proverb, and historical instances of it are so numerous it is almost incredible how foreign nations are still deceived by it. The Americans, coming by this Anglo Saxon vice honestly at least, have so crystallized and refined it that it deceives even themselves—and of all forms of deceit self deception is the most dangerous. One fault they all have in common. They never acknowledge their transgression —their sin is never before them. The Frenchman protests that of all men he is the most truly religious and has the deepest reverence for things sacred. The German swears that he has been cruelly misrepresented by his enemies, and that a babe in arms is not more tender hearted or merciful than he. The Englishman solemnly avows his disinterestedness and calls Heaven to witness the honesty of his intentions, and the American goes him one better and says that the honesty and simplicity of his own nature are such that, in his dealings with other nations, he is as defenceless as a lamb among ravening wolves. And the cold fact still remains that, each with its vice to the contrary notwithstanding, these four nations have done more for civilization, progress and enlightenment than all the rest of the world put together. Man must take his fellow man as he finds him, and not as he would like to have him. It is a pretty poor sort of patriotism, after all, which seeks to arrogate to itself all the beneficent qualities of human nature and charge its enemies up with all the bad ones. “My country, right or wrong” is neither the motto of a wise man or a truly patriotic man. All the great nations have at some time in their history been wrong—sometimes desperately wrong.

It was not entirely by accident that these worthy men, the sketches of whose lives have been given, all belonged to the same political party, and the reader who is at all familiar with the history of party politics in Sydenham does not need to be told which one of the two great political parties of fifty years ago in Canada it was. They took their religion from the Bible and their politics from the Toronto Globe. On their arrival in Canada they gravitated to the Reform party as naturally as a duck to water, and this will not surprise anyone who has studied the trend of Scottish political thought in the last hundred years. That trend has in that time always been strongly toward an extreme liberalism, amounting almost to radicalism, until today we see Scotland practically in the hands of the Labor party of Great Britain, which, however strenuously it may disavow revolutionary tendencies, is entirely too radical to suit the great majority of the titled aristocracy there. This brings us to a strange anomaly in the Scottish character, which was vastly more marked fifty and sixty years ago than today, however. It brings us as well to the besetting vice of the Scottish people, considered as a whole, and that the Scottish pioneers of North Sydenham were free from it it need hardly be expected.

The largest and most important fact in the hist or v of the Scottish people, since the time of the Protestant Reformation at least, has been the fact that with the greatest liberality in politics they have united a narrow illiberality in religion. It has colored their whole existence and, as nothing happens by chance, there is an historical reason for it which has been clearly set forth by the eminent English historian, Henry Thomas Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England. Few things will repay the impartial student more than an earnest perusal of the third volume of this remarkable work, even while he may not agree at times with either its premises or conclusions. Of course it will need no introduction to at least some of our readers, and these will be the first to admit the author’s cogency of reasoning and lucidity of style. It was a Scottish poet who prayed,

“Oh wad some power the giftie gae us
To see oorsels as ithers see us.”

and it will be of interest to Scottish readers and the Canadian descendants of our Scottish pioneers to see the Scot of sixty five years ago as Buckle saw him. The following extract is taken from the last chapter of the History referred to above:

“Even in the capital of Scotland, in that centre of intelligence which once boasted of being the modern Athens, a whisper will quickly circulate that such an one is to be avoided, for that he is a free thinker; as if free thinking were a crime, or as if it were not better to be a free thinker than a slavish thinker. In other parts, that is, in Scotland generally, the state of things is far worse. I speak not on vague rumor, but from what I know as existing at the present time and for the accuracy of which I vouch and hold myself responsible. I challenge anyone to contradict my assertion when I say that, even at this moment, nearly all over Scotland, the finger of scorn is pointed at the man who in the exercise of his free and inalienable right of free judgement refuses to acquiesce in those religious notions and to practise those religious customs which time, indeed, has consecrated, but many of which are repulsive to the eye of reason, though to all of them, however irrational they may be, the people adhere with sullen and inflexible obstinacy. Knowing that these words will be widely read and circulated in Scotland, and averse as I am naturally to bringing on myself the hostility of a nation for whose many sterling and valuable qualities I entertain sincere respect, I do, nevertheless, deliberately affirm that in no civilized country is toleration so little understood and that in none is the spirit of bigotry and of persecution so extensively diffused. Nor can anyone wonder that such should be the case who observes what is going on there. The churches are crowded as they were in the Middle Ages with devout and ignorant worshippers who flock together to listen to opinions of which the Middle Ages alone were worthy. These opinions they treasure up, and when they return to their homes or enter into the daily business of life they put them in force. And the result is there runs through the country a sour and fanatical spirit, an aversion to innocent gaiety, a disposition to limit the enjoyment of others, and a love of enquiring into the opinions of others and of interfering with them such as is hardly anywhere else to be found; while in the midst of this there flourishes a creed gloomy and austere to the last degree, a creed which is full of forebodings and threats and horrors of every sort, and which rejoices in proclaiming to mankind how wretched they are, how small a portion of them can be saved, and what an overwhelming majority is necessarily reserved for excrutiating, unspeakable and eternal agony.”

This is Scotland as Buckle saw it sixty-five years ago. It will be generally contended that the picture, even in that time, was exaggerated. It was Edmund Burke who said that you could not indict a nation. Yet this is precisely what the English historian has tried to do, and while Buckle elicited great admiration from his contemporaries because of his perspicacity and could probably see farther into the intricacies of the human mind than any of them, the indictment he attempted, in spite of Burke’s dictum, is entirely too sweeping. But that there is a great deal of truth in it there is no use in attempting to deny. He laid his finger on the besetting weakness of a people whose views on every matter save religion are as liberal as will be found anywhere, and entirely too liberal for that class of hide-bound reactionaries who are born into the world a half century behind their time and to whom a new innovation is always a device of the devil. The more thoughtful among the Scottish people know that the accusation is a true one, although they may never admit its truth, except when among themselves. There are others among their countrymen, on the other hand, who insist that toleration in religious matters is as second nature to them, and one of their shining virtues. They can see no blemish or defect in their national character, or, if they can see it, think it is the part of patriotism to conceal it.

This is certainly a very foolish spirit and one which, when carried to the extreme, has caused a great deal of harm in the world. It should never be forgotten that birth is purely an accident, and something over which none of us has any control. If a man had had a preexistence and had determined upon being born as one of the Scottish people, then he might justly claim credit for their many sterling qualities as being due to his own wisdom in making such a choice. But, born as he is, it is surely foolishness for him to hope to escape censure for those defects which have justly been charged against them.

There is no fault for which men have suffered more than for this one of an exaggerated nationalism, and the lesson of its dreadful consequences is lost, because the evil is growing instead of abating. It presupposes the fact that we were born as members of a nation which, in some mysterious fashion, is more enlightened, brave and generous than any other around it. When the Civil War broke out in the United States, men were enlisted by the thousand in the armies of the North for ninety days, as it was confidently expected there the insurrection would be crushed in that time. The South despised the North and the North nourished a feeling of contemptuous superiority toward the South. But the war steadily grew, both in years and proportions, until the land was filled with bloodshed and mourning and the hills of the South were whitened by the bones of thousands in both armies who had been taught the lesson, but taught it too late, that their opponents were at least as brave as themselves. The same thing happened in the Great War. We went in with the confident expectation that inside of a year Germany would be beaten into helpless submission, and the Germans went in in the firm belief that inside two months they would be dictating terms of peace in Paris. The Germans have been frightfully disillusioned and we have learned the truth of the Duke of Wellington’s saying, that the next saddest thing to a defeat is a victory.

“War is always an aggravation—never a solution” said Lord Beaconsfield. Was there ever any real reason for believing while it was in progress that the Great War was any different from the wars that had preceded it? There are men who have been born into the world with a love of fighting for fighting’s sake. They are like the corsairs of the Mediterranean,

“That for itself could woo the approaching fight
And turn what some deem danger to delight.”

and such men are dangerous, even if their number is small. The vast majority of men want to pursue their way in peace and quietness and if left to themselves, and undisturbed by the war-makers, would find some more effectual way of settling their differences than by destroying one another. It is to be hoped they will speedily find a way, and that the lessons of the Great War will not be lost, as others were before it. If they fail in this, it seems to the ordinary man simply incalculable why so many brave men should have died in vain.

Returning from this digression, it is evident to the most casual observer that a mighty liberalizing force has been at work in the Presbyterian Church in the past forty or fifty years. Without entering into the merits of the question at all, or passing any judgment, the very fact that the movement known as Church Union in Canada is not only seriously proposed but, at this writing, seems likely of consummation, with the said Church as an accessory thereto, is the best evidence of the new spirit of tolerance which has come over the spirit of its dream. Another movement which has gained great headway among its members ,and seems destined to spread still further, is what was once known as Higher Criticism, or, more recently, Modernism. It is gratifying to notice that the believers in the old orthodoxy are, in general, (there are exceptions of course) willing to admit that the men of the new thought are not only as clever, but as sincere and conscientious as themselves. One is appalled to think of what would have happened the Presbyterian Modernists had they lifted their heads seventy-five years ago. They would have been thrown neck and crop out of the church and ostracized as cruelly as though they had been lepers.

Another weakness that has been charged against the Scottish people is that of family pride. That it existed in the Old Land, and that many of the first settlers in Sydenham brought it with them, is undeniable.. There is no country in the world where the gradations in society are so fine, yet so distinctly drawn, as in the British Isles. Sixty and seventy years ago, when these men left Scotland, this condition was far worse. From royalty down to the lowest strata of agricultural labor each class looked down on the class beneath it, (and the number of classes passes comprehension) with an assumption of frozen dignity and aloofness that was at once both silly and amusing. Thackeray, who understood his countrymen pretty well, said there was only one more contemptible object in the world than an English snob and that was a Scotch snob, “than whom” he said, “there is no more contemptible creature breathing.” It still persists there, though in a greatly modified form. The Scottish settlers in Canada soon found out, however, that this sort of thing worked very badly in a new land. They found it a land where Jack was as good as his master, ate at the same table with him and shared freely in the general conversation. And it is to their credit that, once they had become accustomed to the change, they saw the silliness of the old order and welcomed the new one. Democracy makes queer converts. One hundred years ago a democrat in England was a pariah and a demagogue dangerous to the state; the contemptuous ridicule we heap upon the head of the communist today falls far short of what the English democrat had to endure in the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign even. Today England rather prides herself upon her democracy.

The fact is that the British Isles, in the first half of the nineteenth century ,and more particularly Scotland, was about the best country in Europe to get away from. The proof of this is seen in the tide of emigration which, about the end of the Napoleonic wars, began to set in from there to America and Canada. The patience of the Scottish peasantry with what they had to endure surpasses human comprehension. One of these worthies whose life we have sketched was wont to tell his children, after coming to Canada, which he did after having reached middle life, that in the parish of Roxburghshire where he had lived he had known personally of eleven deaths by starvation, in the twelve years he had stayed there. The money which would have saved their lives was at the same time in the hands of the Established Church clergymen, who administered it under the Poor Law. The estates of the Duke of Buccleugh covered the greater part of the county; that is, the part really worth having. That was bonny Scotland with a vengeance—bonny for the Duke but perdition for the poor.

It was the men who were profoundly dissatisfied with such conditions and who saw no chance of ameliorating their lot in life there from whom Canada drew the pick of her pioneers. They knew well the hardships that waited them here, and they knew as well that the friends they were leaving they might never again see on this side of the grave, which to some of them must have seemed the hardest part of all. But they saw at the same time the opportunity of owning a piece of land in the country beyond the sea, and they had the courage to take a chance. In that day of slow and uncertain communication the acceptance of such a chance meant more to them than we can well realize in our own times.

These men have played their part and passed from the scene. The part they played, it seems to us, was something akin to that of the Pilgrim Fathers when they landed in New England, and set about the establishment of civilization in America. They laid the foundation strong and secure and nowhere more so than it was laid in North Sydenham.

“Raise high the monumental stone!
A nation’s fealty is theirs
And we are the rejoicing heirs,
The grateful sons of sires whose care
We take upon us unawares,
As freely as our own.”

There has been no attempt to gloss over their shortcomings. It would have been much pleasanter to have done so, but in the words of one of the wisest of the Scottish people “they never yet feared for the truth to be heard but they whom the truth would indict.”

We have compared them to the men of the Mayflower. In 1820 a vast gathering at Plymouth Rock commemorated the landing of the Fathers. The orator of the occasion was Daniel Webster; William Ewart Gladstone declared him to be the greatest orator of modern times. He delivered one of the three greatest orations of his life and its conclusion, embodying as it does our own conception of the purest and loftiest patriotism, has seemed peculiarly apposite to us in ending our own labors. In dilating upon the future of America he spoke as follows:

“Let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed in its light and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, and literary. Let us cherish these sentiments and extend their influence still more widely, in the full conviction that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceable spirit of Christianity.”

“The hours of this day are rapidly flying and this occasion will soon be past. Neither we nor our children can expect to behold its return. They are in the distant regions of futurity, they exist only in the all-creating power of God, who shall stand here, a hundred years hence, to trace through us their descent from the pilgrims and to survey, as we have now surveyed, the progress of their country through the lapse of a century. We would anticipate their concurrence with us in our sentiments of deep regard for our common ancestors. We would anticipate and partake the pleasure with which they will then recount the steps of our beloved country’s advancement. We would leave for the consideration of those who shall then occupy our places some proof that we hold the blessings transmitted from our fathers in just estimation; some proof of our attachment to the cause of good government and of civil and religious liberty; some proof of a sincere and ardent desire to promote everything which may enlarge the understandings and improve the hearts of men. And when from the long distance of a hundred years they shall look back upon us they shall know, at least, that we possessed affections which, running backward and warming with gratitude for what our ancestors have done for our happiness, run forward also to our posterity and meet them with cordial salutation ere yet they have arrived on the shore of Being.”

“Advance, then, ye future generations ! We would hail you as you rise in your long succession to fill the places which we now fill, and to taste the blessings of existence where we are passing, and soon shall have passed, our human duration. We bid you welcome to the pleasant land of the fathers. We bid you welcome to our healthful skies and verdant fields. We greet your accession to the great inheritance we have enjoyed. We welcome you to the blessings of good government and religious liberty. We welcome you to the treasures of science and the delights of learning. We welcome you to the transcendent sweets of domestic life, to the happiness of kindred and parents and children. We welcome you to the immeasurable blessings of rational existence, the immortal hope of Christianity, and the light of everlasting Truth!”

The orator has expressed very clearly the spirit in which this book has been written. It is offered as some proof to those who come after us that the people of North Sydenham were not wanting in gratitude and that, in the words of Webster, they held in just estimation the blessings transmitted to them by their fathers.

They are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work,
While the followers there in embryo wait behind
We today’s procession heading,
We the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

THE END.