One of these Irishmen had founded a retail store in the growing little city of Toronto. It thrived--tremendously. News of its success went back to the little north-of-Ireland village from whence its owner came.
"Timothy Eaton's doin' well in America," was the word that passed through his old county. Timothy Eaton and those who came after him took good care of their kith and kin. For the Eaton business did prosper. Today the firm has two great stores--one in Toronto and one in Winnipeg--and they are not only among the largest in North America but among the largest in the world.
This is but one instance of the way that Toronto has grown. And when, after sixty years of steady immigration there was little of kith and kin left to come from Ireland, there began a migration from the other side of the Irish channel, a new chapter in the growth of Toronto was opened.
No one seems to know just how the tide of English emigration started, but it is a fact that it had its beginning about the time of the end of the Boer war. It is no less a fact that within ten or fifteen years it has attained proportions comparable with the sixty years of Irish immigration. The agents of the Canadian government and of her railroads have shown that it pays to advertise.
There is good reason for this immigration--of course. Canada, with no little wisdom, has given great preference to the English as settlers. She has not wished to change her religions, her language or her customs. The English, in turn, have responded royally to the invitation to come to her broad acres and her great cities. The steamship piers, at Quebec and Montreal in the summer and at Halifax and St. Johns in the winter, are steadily thronged with the newcomers, and they do not speak the strange tongues that one hears at Ellis island in the city of New York. They bring no strange customs or strange religions to the growing young nation that prides herself upon her ability to combine conservatism and progress.
And just as Toronto once did her part in depopulating the north of Ireland, so today is the Province of Ontario and the country to the west of it draining old England. It is related that one little English village--Dove Holes is its name and it is situate in Derbyshire--has been sadly depleted in just this fashion. Eight years ago and it boasted a population of 1250 persons. Today 500 of that number are in America--a new village of their own right in the city of Toronto, if you please--and Dove Holes awaits another Goldsmith to sing of its saddened charms. One resident came, the others followed in his trail to a land that spelled both opportunity and elbow-room. Your real Englishman of so-called middle class, even gentlemen of the profession or service in His Majesty's arms, seem to have one consuming passion. It is to cross Canada and live and die in the little West Coast city of Victoria. Victoria stands on Vancouver island and they have begun to call Vancouver island, "Little England." In its warm, moist climate, almost in its very conformation, it is a replica of the motherland of an Englishman's ideal; a motherland with everything annoying, from hooliganism to suffragettes, removed.