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THE WORLD IN A CITY
Edited by Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

Toronto is arguably the most multicultural city in the world. The proc-
ess of settlement and integration in modern-day Toronto is, however, in
many ways more difficult for recent immigrants than it was for those
arriving in previous decades. Newly settled immigrants face a multi-
tude of challenges, including access to health care, education, employ-
ment, housing, and economic and community services.
The World in a City explores Toronto's ability to sustain a civic society
in the face of profound demographic change. The essays in this collec-
tion highlight the need to pay more attention to certain at-risk groups
and stress the importance of adapting policy to fit the changing settle-
ment and clustering patterns of newcomers. Throughout the volume
the concepts of social exclusion and integration are examined and
employed to analyse the various challenges facing newcomers. The
authors' research findings demonstrate that there are many obstacles to
providing opportunity for immigrants, such as low resource bases and
inadequate service delivery. Together the authors make a convincing
case that by providing a level 'playing field' for its newly arrived
inhabitants, and recognizing the particular needs of new communities,
the city of Toronto can encourage social and economic growth that
would be of immense benefit to the community as a whole.
PAUL ANISEF is a professor of sociology and associate director of the
Centre of Excellence for Research in Immigration and Settlement (CERIS)
at York University.
MICHAEL LANPHIER is professor emeritus of sociology and senior scholar
at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University.
This page intentionally left blank
THE WORLD
IN A CITY

Edited by Paul Anise/and Michael Lanphier

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS


Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com

University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2003


Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada

ISBN 0-8020-3560-4 (cloth)


ISBN 0-8020-8436-2 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

The world in a city / edited by Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier.


Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-3560-4 (bound). ISBN 0-8020-8436-2 (pbk.)
1. Immigrants - Ontario - Toronto Region - Social conditions.
2. Toronto Region (Ont.) - Emigration and immigration - History -
20th century. 3. Multiculturalism - Ontario - Toronto Region.
I. Anisef, Paul, 1942- II. Lanphier, C. Michael, 1937-
FC3097.9.A1W67 2003 305.9'0691'09713541 C2003-900682-4
F1059.5.T689A28 2003

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to


its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for


its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Vll

Introduction: Immigration and the Accommodation of Diversity 3


Paul Anise/and Michael Lanphier

1 Becoming an Immigrant City: A History of Immigration into


Toronto since the Second World War 19
Harold Troper

2 Immigrants in the Greater Toronto Area: A Sociodemographic


Overview 63
Clifford Jansen and Lawrence Lam

3 Towards a Comfortable Neighbourhood and Appropriate Housing:


Immigrant Experiences in Toronto 132
Robert A. Murdie and Carlos Teixeira

4 Immigrants' Economic Status in Toronto: Stories of Triumph and


Disappointment 192
Valerie Preston, Lucia Lo, and Shuguang Wang

5 Immigrant Students and Schooling in Toronto, 1960s to 1990s 263


Carl E. James and Barbara Burnaby
vi Contents

6 Diversity and Immigrant Health 316


Samuel Noh and Violet Kaspar

7 Images of Integrating Diversity: A Photographic Essay 354


Gabriele Scardellato

8 Integrating Community Diversity in Toronto: On Whose


Terms? 373
Myer Siemiatycki, Tim Rees, Roxana Ng, and Khan Rahi

9 World in a City: A View from Policy 457


Meyer Burstein and Howard Duncan

Epilogue: Blockages to Opportunity 474


Michael Lanphier and Paul Anisef

REFERENCES 479

CONTRIBUTORS 523

INDEX 529
Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge the research assistance of Lynn Winter, Jadranka


Bacic, Colleen Burke, Suzanne McFarlane, Tomoko Mizuguichi, Eliza-
beth Rossick, Denise Tom-Kun, and Kelliebeth Hand. Martha Ayim
provided early proofing assistance while Andrea Knight copy-edited
the near final manuscript and Irinel Bradisteau prepared the index.
Susan Rainey offered secretarial assistance in producing the first itera-
tion of the manuscript. Technical assistance in assembling the final
tables and figures was provided by Stephen Young.
This book would not have been possible without a Major Research
Initiatives grant from the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on
Immigration and Settlement-Toronto (CERIS). Both Morton Beiser and
Kenise Murphy Kilbride of CERIS warrant special mention for their
advice throughout the process of developing The World in a City. We are
also grateful for the research funding provided by Canadian Heritage
for this and other related projects. Funding for final editing and index
construction was generously provided by the Office of the Dean, Fac-
ulty of Arts, the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, at York
University; the Associate Vice-President, Academic (Research and In-
ternational Development) at Ryerson University; and the Executive
Head of the Metropolis Project.
Virgil Duff of the University of Toronto Press recognized the value of
the book and supported us throughout. Several anonymous readers
offered suggestions, which we believe helped us to strengthen the
manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank the following persons who
were asked to review and comment upon-specific chapters: William R.
viii Acknowledgments

Avison, Gerald Tulchinsky, June Beynon, Dan Hiebert, Brian Ray, Roderic
Beaujot, and Daiva Stasiulis. The editors are most appreciative of the
encouragement and sustained support from their spouses - Etta
Baichman and Caroline Lanphier - and from their families throughout
the months and years as this project grew to fruition.
THE WORLD IN A CITY
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction:
Immigration and the
Accommodation of Diversity

Paul Anise/and Michael Lanphier

At the end of June 2001, a reporter asked Mel Lastman, mayor of


Toronto, for his comment on the Mombasa meeting of the Association
of National Olympic Committees of Africa he was to attend in support
of the Toronto Olympic bid. Lastman quipped, "Why the hell would I
want to go to a place like Mombasa? I just see myself in a pot of boiling
water with all these natives dancing around me' (James 2001). As soon
as his remark hit the press, his effort at humour turned into a firestorm
of controversy. In spite of his repeated apologies, the remarks led to
increased public questioning of the mayor's leadership style. Others
assessed the damage his remark had done to Toronto's Olympic hopes.
Most importantly, the mayor's comment ignited soul-searching debate
on the state of racial harmony and intergroup relations in Toronto, a
city where the public culture has long trumpeted the success of its
planned pluralism and exemplary mutual respect among diverse cul-
tural groups.
Events such as the Lastman incident raise a series of challenges
regarding the capacity of a racially and ethnically pluralist Toronto to
sustain a civic society. It is true that Toronto is among the most, if not
the most, pluralist of the major cities in the Western world. Indeed, in
this era of emergent globalism, Toronto may be the first global city to
sustain ethnic diversity. Consider that, as of 1996, 42 per cent of
Toronto's population was foreign-born, in contrast to 23 per cent in
New York, 31 per cent in Los Angeles, 39 per cent in Miami, and 34 per
cent in Sydney. Furthermore, the Toronto metropolis currently attracts
almost half of all newcomers to Canada. Some 70,000 immigrants arrive
4 Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

in the city annually from approximately 170 countries. Almost half of


these new immigrants speak neither English nor French upon arrival; as
a result, over one hundred languages are commonly spoken in the city.
It is therefore understandable that Lastman's comment should refocus
public attention on issues of exclusion and inclusion in such a multiethnic
and multiracial urban society. The World in a City explores the chal-
lenges with respect to the accommodation of immigrants in Toronto,
employing the critical lenses of social exclusion and inclusion as a key
theoretical perspective. Beginning with a historical overview of how
Toronto emerged in the late twentieth century as an important destina-
tion for immigrants from all over the world, The World in a City goes on
to analyse the impact of racial and ethnic pluralism on areas of critical
importance to public life in the city: housing, education, health, eco-
nomic well-being, and the dynamics of community and group life. The
contributions in this volume, individually and severally, add to our
understanding of how the diverse origins in a major city become the
shaping factor in developing a workable civic society. While each of
these analyses is written within the conventions of the various aca-
demic disciplines represented among the authors - history, sociology,
political science, demography, geography, and education - all of the
essays wrestle with the central question of the extent to which the social
structure includes or shuts out immigrants in the Toronto region.

INTEGRATION PERSPECTIVES

Several factors may render the process of settlement and integration


more difficult for many immigrants than in previous decades. Rapid
social change, globalization, and persistently high unemployment rates,
especially among newcomers, have produced a less-than-warm wel-
come for immigrants who strive to do well for themselves and their
children. In addition, many recent immigrants who choose Toronto as
their new home arrive from non-European countries and represent
ethnic and racial groups that are minorities in Toronto and in Canada.
Although racism has traditionally appeared to be a less prominent
issue in Canada than in the United States or Great Britain, increases in
racial conflict and systemic forms of discrimination have undermined
the image of Canada as a multicultural country. These factors pose
settlement difficulties for minority immigrants and increase the
likelihood of social exclusion. Complaints of numerous forms of dis-
Introduction 5

crimination have occurred with some frequency and are discussed


throughout this book.
Many experiences with forms of exclusion stem from informal agree-
ments or structural arrangements embedded in the everyday institu-
tional processes in the life of a metropolis, rather than from formal
stipulations or restrictive covenants. As a result, such cases of discrimi-
nation are among the most difficult of human rights violations to inves-
tigate, even though the grounds for the complaints are well founded
(Frideres and Reeves 1989). However intractable such claims may be in
litigation, the struggles against exclusion of some groups by other
interests in the community or the state are important issues for The
World in a City to explore.
Throughout this work, and in much research on the settlement of
newcomers, we speak of the end result as the integration of newcomers
into the ongoing community and society. Integration is defined as the
process by which newcomers become part of the social, cultural, and
institutional fabric of the community or society (Breton 1992), a pro-
cess comprising three dimensions. The first dimension refers to the
structural or institutional environment that moderates the terms and
styles of integration, such as the prevailing levels of rights and the
existing economic conditions. The second is the agency among the
people resettling; that is, those who resettle exercise individual choice
directed at influencing their life conditions and their personal envi-
ronment. The third dimension includes the process or processes by
which agents of resettlement engage with the structural and institu-
tional environment.
Integration is a generic process of creating long- and short-term
arrangements between an immigrant group and the host society.
Weinfeld and Wilkinson (1999) outline three perspectives on integra-
tion, the first being the perspective of the immigrant group on the
fulfilment of its needs and interests upon resettlement. These may
range from short-term immediate concerns, such as orientation to the
community, housing, acquisition of a new language, employment, edu-
cation of children, establishing a social network, to long-term interests
such as concern for family members, development of a subcommunity
of people from a similar background, representation of collective inter-
ests in associations and government. For long-time residents of the
metropolis, however, integration may imply the assimilation of stand-
ards already established in the wider community for language use,
6 Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

family relationships, consumption patterns, and entitlement to places


in the occupational and social structure. These expectations may be at
variance with those that newly arrived community members have for
themselves. And governments may assume a third set of criteria for the
interpretation of integration: official indicators of belonging to the new
society such as acquisition of citizenship, financial contribution to the
state through taxes, and relatively low rates of welfare use. In addition,
governments are particularly interested in conventional forms of active
civic participation, such as representation in local community organiza-
tions, contacts with government officials and members of Parliament,
and campaigning for political office.
The common denominator running through these three perspectives
is the two-way exchange between the newcomer group and the host
society. With this exchange comes a sense of expectation from one
group that the other will act not only out of its own interests but also
out of concern for the wider community. Integration as a concept,
therefore, assumes that the interests of the various parties will comple-
ment one another and add to the development of a civil society without
blurring the identities of the participants.
Weinfeld and Wilkinson (1999) also note that the onus of integration
is borne disproportionately by the newcomer group, whatever the norm
of tolerance for diversity within Canadian society and the official policy
of rnulticulturalism may be. At the same time, changes in technology
now permit everyone, including newcomers, to reach across Canada,
across North America, and well beyond by means of the telephone and
the Internet. Contact with the homeland culture remains strong and can
be continually renewed through electronic means and international
travel. Multicultural patterns, then, will persist regardless of pressures
for conformity. Moreover, they will be reinforced by sustained contacts
with friends and relatives in the former homelands. Transnational ex-
changes have become woven into the fabric of multicultural orientation
at the millennium.

SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND INCLUSION

The origin of social exclusion as an explanatory concept can be traced


back to the response in France in the early 1970s to the problem of
sustaining adequate living conditions for people left behind by eco-
nomic growth (Ebersold 1998). Many researchers have used the term
Introduction 7

interchangeably with poverty and/or unemployment, but it is impor-


tant to understand social exclusion as a concept that is broader than
either of those terms. Thus, in 1989, the European Economic Commu-
nity (EEC) began to link social exclusion to the inadequate realization
of social rights. And, in 1990, the European Observatory on National
Policies to Combat Social Exclusion was established to examine 'the
social rights of citizenship to a basic standard of living and to participa-
tion in major social and economic opportunities in society' (Cousins
1999,127). Duffy (1995) defines social exclusion as the lack of material
means and the inability to participate effectively in economic, social,
and cultural life that results in alienation or distance from mainstream
society. Room (1995) adds a new dimension to the definition by stat-
ing that social exclusion is the denial or non-realization of civil, politi-
cal, and social rights of citizenship. Byrne (1999) further refines the
concept by characterizing social exclusion as a dynamic process that
impedes healthy participation in social, economic, political, and cul-
tural institutions.
Paugam (1996) cautions that there is no 'right/wrong' or 'good/bad'
meaning attached to social exclusion and writes:

On questions as socially and politically sensitive as poverty and exclusion,


sociologists must first of all recognize the impossibility of finding ex-
haustive definitions. These concepts are relative, and vary according to
time and circumstance. It is unreasonable to expect to find a fair and
objective definition, which is distinct from social debate, without falling
into the trap of putting unclearly defined populations into clumsily de-
fined categories (4).

Klasen (1998) asserts that the goal of an inclusive society, by contrast,


is for 'people to have equal access to basic capabilities such as the
ability to be healthy, well-fed, housed, integrated into the community,
participate in community and public life, and enjoy social bases of self-
respect' (1). This view implies that the inability to participate in main-
stream society is a violation of a basic right of all citizens and thereby
places a burden on society to ensure that it supports the participation
and integration of all its members (2). Alexander (1997) develops a
conception of civil society that extends the traditional notion of collec-
tive or public consciousness to one that analyses the interpersonal,
intergroup, and institutional ties required to create cohesion through
8 Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

abstract notions (e.g., rights and peoplehood). Achieving civil society in


this sense will, in all likelihood, be accompanied by a protracted strug-
gle for inclusiveness.
A metropolis as complex as Toronto exemplifies the notion of a civil
society. As an area that receives large numbers of newcomers, the city
contains many social arrangements that predetermine an individual's
social and economic status. The outcomes of differences in social back-
grounds among newcomers are sometimes (mis)construed as group
inferiority. Consequently, this type of social perception results in new-
comers encountering difficulties in their resettlement that exacerbate
the normal process of integration.
The main sources of social exclusion - which Klasen (1998) lists as
economic, social, birth or background, and societal/political - are closely
related to the multiple risk factors that inhibit the healthy development
of individuals in society; the process of social exclusion further leads to
various forms of economic, social, and cultural disadvantage. If, as is
believed by many social scientists and mental health practitioners,
children who experience social exclusion pose a threat to society be-
cause they grow up with little stake in the existing social order, then the
explanation lies in their being subjected to multiple risk factors.
Applying this view of social exclusion to the experience of immi-
grants in the City of Toronto, a report commissioned for social agencies
and municipal governments documented considerable evidence.
Ornstein (2000) carefully demonstrated through a detailed series of
1996 census tabulations the pervasive extent of social and economic
disadvantage newcomers experienced. His data analysis indicates that
a number of newly arrived ethnic groups suffer simultaneous obstacles
in overlapping areas of completed formal education, individual and
household income, lower occupational status, and greater periods of
unemployment (122-33). Despite variations in the disadvantage pro-
files, from one group to another, there is sufficient overlap to infer that
certain groups experience pervasive structural discrimination in the
Toronto region (and more broadly in Canadian society). Moreover,
these disadvantages, especially with respect to income, have widened
to some extent since 1990.
A dynamic and multidimensional process, social exclusion encom-
passes economic, social, cultural, and political realms, touching on
aspects of power and identity, as well as on the labour market. As a
concept, social exclusion highlights the variety of ways in which people
may be denied full participation in society and full effective rights of
Introduction 9

citizenship (Lister 2000,38). It takes into account relations of power and


the process of marginalization experienced by the excluded. In deploy-
ing this concept, the intersection of social class and sociocultural as-
pects of marginalization are brought to the forefront of the analysis.
Social exclusion is the opposite of social integration, which stresses
the importance of being part of a society (Freiler 2000). In restricting the
life chances of individuals and groups, social exclusion commonly
leads to a process of marginalization, polarization, and social disinte-
gration. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of children, where the
decisions, choices, and opportunities will shape the social, economic,
and civic position that children will later assume as adults (Klasen
1998). But the applicability to the case of newcomers is no less cogent.
Decisions, choices, and opportunities available to newcomers will simi-
larly project onto their life course as well as their children's.
In a recent critical examination of the concept of social exclusion, Sen
(2000) stresses that its importance lies 'in emphasizing the role of rela-
tional features of deprivation of capability and thus in the experience of
poverty' (6). Accordingly, Sen distinguishes between the 'constitutive
relevance' of exclusion and the instrumental aspects of exclusion. Being
excluded from participating in the activities of a community can itself
be a form of deprivation and directly impoverish a person's life. As
such, it is a loss on its own, in addition to whatever further deprivation
this may indirectly generate. Sen refers to this scenario as a case of the
constitutive relevance of social exclusion. But there may also be instru-
mental deprivations that result from causally significant exclusions.
For example, not having access to credit markets is not automatically
impoverishing, although it may lead to income poverty (13). Sen's
distinction is useful in that it moves beyond a strict theoretical focus
on the material dimensions of poverty and segregation to include
non-material dimensions, such as cultural factors that shape relation-
ships and choices both within community and larger society. In Sen's
words, 'We must look at impoverished lives and not just at depleted
wallets' (3).
Sen also makes a distinction between active and passive social exclu-
sion, thereby accounting for intentional and non-intentional aspects of
deprivation. He writes:

When, for example, immigrants or refugees are not given a usable politi-
cal status, it is an active exclusion, and this applies to many of the depriva-
tions from which minority communities suffer in Europe and Asia and
10 Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

elsewhere. When, however, the deprivation comes about through social


processes in which there is no deliberate attempt to exclude, the exclu-
sion can be seen as a passive kind. A good example is a sluggish economy
and a consequent accentuation of poverty. Both active and passive exclu-
sions may be important, but they are not important in the same way. (Sen
2000,15)

In considering Sen's discussion, along with the works of Klasen,


Ornstein, and the other writers discussed above, it becomes clear that
the concept of social exclusion opens up promising ways to analyse the
various challenges facing newcomers to Toronto.
In summary, Rodgers (1995) suggests that the value of social exclu-
sion theory lies in its diagnostic powers. 'Social exclusion, then/ he
writes, 'is seen as a way of analyzing how and why individuals and
groups fail to have access to or benefit from the possibilities offered by
societies and economies' (45). According to Rodgers, the 'pattern of
exclusion' affects individuals or groups in six key areas, all of which
will be considered in the essays contained in this volume:

1 Exclusion from goods and services, including material goods and


services such as education and health care.
2 Labour market exclusions, including both unemployment and
unstable, low-wage employment.
3 Exclusion from land, including unstable housing and homelessness.
4 Exclusion from security, including risk to physical safety.
5 Exclusion from human rights, including racist or discriminatory
treatment; non-acceptance by the mainstream society and culture.
6 Exclusion from macroeconomic development strategy, referring to
adverse impact of market-driven economic and political restructur-
ing reducing public services and supports. (Rodgers, 44)

To this comprehensive list we add one more important type of exclu-


sion:

7 Exclusion from (regaining) identity, including problems of mental


health and loss of community.

The above concerns take us well beyond the consideration of ethnic


particularities in the Toronto region, towards an examination of the
processes of inclusion and exclusion in the context of a metropolis
Introduction 11

integrally linked to all parts of the contemporary world. Given the


current trends of emergent pluralism and globalism, one would hope
that negative characterizations of peoples in other lands would be in
decline. However, utterances such as that of the mayor of Toronto are
piercing reminders of the everyday relationship between discourses of
exclusion and the invidious social arrangements that block the road to
integrating diversity.

ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK

This volume is designed to provide an introductory overview of the


key issues of resettlement and integration outlined above. Successive
publications in this series will address specific questions and additional
concerns in each domain area. The present study represents the first
effort towards the portrayal of Toronto as a complex metropolis as we
enter the new millennium. The research initiative is intended to extract
the main lessons of the experiences of the Toronto region with respect
to immigration and settlement and present them in a series of mono-
graphs that offer a multidisciplinary perspective on the dynamics of
Toronto's civic culture. The researchers address the reciprocal impact of
successive waves of immigration from diverse origins on the develop-
ment of Toronto since 1970 and, correspondingly, the effects of the
metropolis as a social form on the collective lives of those who have
newly arrived, as well as on their descendants. Some of the major
themes discussed in each domain are institutional transformation; peak
moments for various immigrant groups; adaptation problems; segre-
gation; institutional completeness; integration; interdependency; sys-
tematic discrimination; and future trends, challenges, and policy
implications. In addition, the editors agreed that a photo essay would
visually capture a few moments of the richness of Toronto's develop-
ment as a diverse, multicultural metropolis. It provides yet another
dimension in the complex appreciation of the city.
While this volume attempts to incorporate three decades of immigra-
tion into the composite, the authors can only speculate on ways in
which future immigration and policy will alter social arrangements. We
can only hypothesize about how increased population intake from a
range of origins will affect each domain and only estimate the impact of
larger developments in Canadian society, regional alignments, or glo-
balization on the local organization of the Toronto region as Canada
continues to widen its role in trade and other transnational activities.
12 Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

New types of occupations may arise while others wither. Certain new-
comers may find a niche, while others may see their jobs disappear
because of structural changes or adjustments in society. It is important
to note that only present conditions and the history of those conditions
are available from which to make inferences regarding future direc-
tions. Though one hesitates to predict outcomes, the authors will assess
possible scenarios of change. The clarity of these assessments depends
on the adequacy of available research. While, in many areas, the chapters
that follow leave no doubt about the extensiveness of our findings to
date, others leave some questions unexplored or unanswered and await
further contributions from researchers and members of the many diverse
groups constituting the greater Toronto community.
The objective of this volume is to explore the settlement and integra-
tion of immigrants in Toronto within the social exclusion/ inclusion
framework outlined in the previous section. The World in a City is
organized under specified domain areas (i.e., economy, housing and
neighbourhoods, education, health, and community) as established by
the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settle-
ment (CERIS). Research in each of these areas provides a provocative
and insightful investigation of how immigration-intake affects struc-
tural arrangements within the metropolis and the effect of those ar-
rangements on the lived experience of immigrants and their social
networks. The first two chapters survey immigration and ethnic groups
in the Toronto metropolis, in each successive chapter the discussion
turns to ways in which the process of integrating diversity takes shape
in a particular domain.
In chapter 1, Harold Troper provides a historical overview of immi-
gration to Toronto since the Second World War, focusing on the manner
in which immigrants have been envisioned as fitting into Canadian
cities. One example of this is the widespread public support for Prime
Minister Mackenzie King's national immigration policy that targeted
only 'desirable future citizens' - code words for light-skinned Europe-
ans. Changes to this policy occurred with the unfolding of the 1950s,
when post-war prosperity in Western and Northern European coun-
tries slowed Canadian-bound immigration to trickle; only then did
Canada begin accepting Italian immigrants and members of other groups
previously deemed unworthy of citizenship. The 1960s brought the
federal government's white paper on immigration, a document that
called for removing racial criteria while simultaneously attempting to
restrict regulations on family reunification. But by this time, Toronto
Introduction 13

was home to significant numbers of Jewish, Italian, and Eastern Euro-


pean immigrants, and their community leaders successfully mobilized
against the regressive aspects of the policy document. Taking his his-
torical analysis to the end of the century, Troper pays close attention to
settlement and integration issues such as employment, housing, educa-
tion, family, multiculturalism, and social services. While Troper's chap-
ter emphasizes the Greater Toronto Area, it also makes comparisons to
both Montreal and Winnipeg.
In chapter 2, Clifford Jansen and Lawrence Lam examine the same
period, but focus their survey on the changing nature of immigrant
settlement in the Toronto region through a sociodemographic analysis
of those individuals and groups who chose to make the city their home.
The authors demonstrate not only the expanding diversity of ethnic
and cultural origins over some three decades but also the widening
gaps in social equality - especially in the cases of more recently arrived
newcomers from world regions who do not have a history of settlement
in Canada or North America. Noting the different rates of unemploy-
ment among the twenty-one birthplace groups listed in the survey
data, the authors ask, 'What cost in terms of social value and market
value do groups have to pay for being "immigrants" who make To-
ronto their home, especially if they are from countries in Asia, the
Middle East, and Africa?' While Jansen and Lam remain cautiously
optimistic about Toronto's future, they show that, at present, discrepan-
cies exist across a number of demographic and cultural categories,
including country of birth, gender, marital status, and education.
Each of the following chapters profiles how the process of integrating
diversity plays out in a particular sphere of social life. In chapter 3,
Robert Murdie and Carlos Teixeira examine issues related to the resi-
dential patterns of immigrant groups and the success that these groups
have had in gaining access to good quality, suitable, and affordable
housing. The chapter includes a historical overview of the changing
spatial patterns of immigrant settlement, thereby complementing
Troper's review of the history of immigration in Toronto. Particular
attention is given to the way in which many groups entering the city
after 1970 have bypassed inner-city reception areas and have either
opted for or been restricted to initial settlement in the suburbs.
The emphasis on choice and constraint underscores the diversity of
immigrants who arrived in the city during this period, ranging from
relatively affluent business immigrants to more impoverished refugees.
These variations in settlement patterns have been influenced by changes
14 Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

at the global and national levels as well as at the local level, especially
by shifts in Toronto's housing market. The much more restrictive
opportunities in the rental market, particularly in the 1990s, mean
that many lower-status immigrants and refugees have been excluded
from appropriate housing and struggle to make advances in their
housing careers. The authors conclude that without serious efforts by
various levels of government towards expanding the supply of low-
income housing, there is little possibility of improving the housing
circumstances of Toronto's newest and most impoverished immigrant
groups.
In chapter 4, Valerie Preston, Lucia Lo, and Shuguang Wang investi-
gate the economic domain and provide an overview of the ethnocultural
composition of Toronto, as well as the federal legislative and policy
changes that resulted in increasing numbers of immigrants. The au-
thors use both government-collected administrative and census data
and independently collected information from the period 1971 to 1996.
In analysing a number of pertinent issues, such as unemployment and
poverty rates, the period of immigration, and socio-economic status,
Preston, Lo, and Wang provide insight into the economic activities of
immigrants and their effects on the Toronto economy. They highlight
the experiences of various immigrant groups, some relatively success-
ful and others still struggling The chapter begins by describing the
make-up of Toronto's immigrant communities, differentiating them by
immigration classes as well as by the usual categories of ethnic origin
and time of arrival, and then goes on to examine immigrants' economic
contributions through a tax-benefits analysis of the workers and the
job-generating abilities of the entrepreneurs.
In examining recent data on jobs created in Toronto by Somali and
Chinese immigrants, Preston, Lo, and Wang debunk the myth that
immigrants 'take away' jobs from native-born Canadians. Subsequent
sections of the chapter examine the industrial division of labour among
immigrants, taking into account their entrepreneurial activities, earn-
ings, unemployment, and poverty rates, and comparing them with
those of the native-born population. The authors find that long-stand-
ing patterns of stratification are mirrored in employment data that
show the high concentration of immigrant women in service industries
and the overrepresentation of immigrant men in fields such as con-
struction and transportation. Since there is a high concentration of new
Torontonians of both genders in the manufacturing sector, one can see
the relative vulnerability of certain groups in an environment marked
Introduction 15

by industrial restructuring, economic recession, and social exclusion.


The authors' suggestions on policy realignment and future research
should be considered within the context of these findings.
In chapter 5, Carl James and Barbara Burnaby explore ways in which
immigrants and refugees have been inserted into the Toronto educa-
tional system, and the ways immigrants have inserted themselves in
their efforts to become established in Canada. Subjects of particular
importance in their account are English as a second language (ESL)
courses, school and community relations, institutional adaptation, and
the impact of racial and/or ethnic differences in educational attain-
ment. The authors discuss, within a four-decade time frame, the edu-
cational participation, experiences, aspirations, and outcomes of
immigrants and, where information allows, of refugees. Examining
trends of educational outcomes for immigrant learners, particularly
young immigrants, James and Burnaby draw a number of conclusions.
They find that governments and institutions have changed consider-
ably in favour of including the perspectives and participation of all
stakeholders, especially those of immigrants and refugees themselves.
Information is readily available about programs and policies from the
policymakers' point of view, but is scarce in terms of how they affect
participants, much less the general public. Research implications, then,
are that more research must be done on the impact of programming.
However, truly informative research of this sort is difficult and time-
consuming. Linking cause and effect in these cases is challenging,
indeed. Finally, such research must take into account the dynamic
nature of immigration, immigrant groups, and the lives of immi-
grants themselves.
In chapter 6, Samuel Noh and Violet Kaspar review empirical find-
ings of research into the relationship between immigration and health.
They examine overall immigrant health and changes to immigrants'
health status over time, using a comprehensive array of indices of both
physical health (e.g., life expectancy, morbidity, disability) and mental
health (e.g., depression, somatic symptoms, and general psychological
distress). The overall conclusion is that immigrants arrive in good
health, but lose their health advantage. And further, the second genera-
tion (Canadian-born children of immigrants) appears to have more
health problems than their parents. The authors discuss how such
declines in health are often attributed to acculturation - a claim that is
based on the assumption that the second generation must be better
acculturated to American and Canadian life than the first generation of
16 Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

immigrants, who most often arrive with a limited understanding of


official languages and with limited occupational, professional, and cul-
tural resources. However, Noh and Kaspar caution that there is a tautol-
ogy in many studies of acculturation and health: the association between
acculturation and cultural behaviours (e.g., smoking, alcohol consump-
tion, sexual behaviours, diet, drug use) as health outcomes. Nonethe-
less, research to date on adult and youth health seems to imply that
Canada (and Toronto) may not have been successful in accommodating
the health needs of immigrants.
In chapter 7, Gabriele Scardellato provides the reader with a photo-
graphic essay designed to illustrate the growing diversity of the Greater
Toronto Area, and to show the significant contributions that immigra-
tion has made to that diversity. Scardellato illustrates visually and in
chronological order the history of immigration and shows how immi-
grant groups followed one another to Toronto - though rarely in
linear progression. The other important criteria for the inclusion of
photographs are their ability to address themes covered by other
chapters in The World in a City, including immigrant enterprise, educa-
tion, health, community life, and social exclusion. These photographs
signal both continuity and change in the cultural features that charac-
terize Toronto.
In chapter 8, Myer Siemiatycki, Tim Rees, Roxana Ng, and Khan Rahi
examine the terms and conditions of immigrant community integration
in Toronto. A variety of historical and latter-day factors contributing
to 'differential incorporation' and social exclusion are discussed: the
pattern of twentieth-century migration to Toronto, the current socio-
economic status of newcomers to Toronto, manifestations of immigrant
community civic mobilization, and local government responses to
immigrant diversity. The chapter begins by exploring the settlement
experiences of four immigrant communities (Jews, Italians, Caribbeans,
and Chinese) whose large-scale arrival sequentially challenged the pre-
vailing definitions of who qualified as a Torontonian. As the authors
demonstrate, marginalization and exclusion proved to be recur-
ring experiences for each community of newcomers. A socio-economic
analysis of contemporary Toronto reveals that stark differentiation
and polarization between European and non-European residents have
not disappeared. But immigrant communities in Toronto have not
passively acquiesced to their accorded place in Toronto society. Rath-
er, a discussion of mobilization in four immigrant communities -
Introduction 17

anti-racism campaigns, immigrant women's organizing, access and


equity efforts, and political representation campaigns - illustrates the
civic determination and activism of many newcomers. Finally, after
analysing problems in the responses of municipal government to
immigrant diversity, the authors conclude that unfinished business
remains before Toronto fulfils its claim to modelling inclusive, immi-
grant integration.
In chapter 9, Meyer Burstein and Howard Duncan draw on the
observations and conclusions of authors in the preceding chapters to
point to avenues in the formulation of research and policy. Burstein and
Duncan begin by noting the difficulties that accompany terms like
'integration/ which is nevertheless preferable to the now-discredited
'assimilation.' Moving into the discussion of policy, the authors suggest
that governments can help the integration process in a number of ways:
by encouraging positive social values through laws, community poli-
cies, public debates, and educational systems; by creating expectations
that refugees and immigrants will be supported by individuals and
institutions, including neighbourhoods, social services, and the
workplace; by fostering a social climate in Canada and abroad that
encourages immigrants and refugees to accept Canadian citizenship;
and by supporting housing and settlement services, language training,
and other programs of assistance. These policy recommendations affect
not only local government but also extend to provincial and federal
jurisdictions. The chapter then discusses when, if at all, governments
should intervene in the process of integrating diversity. The authors
then go on to summarize research findings, such as the need to pay
more attention to certain subpopulations at risk and the importance of
adapting policy and understanding to fit the changing settlement and
clustering patterns of newcomers to Toronto. Some conclusions may
suggest that greater attention be paid to specific areas, such as the
renewal of low-cost housing especially for newcomers, while other
findings may converge into a more general issue, such as the need to
strengthen anti-racist principles and practices in civil society.
In their conclusion, the editors offer a brief summary and synthesis of
the chapters in this volume, paying particular attention to the variety of
interpretations that researchers and federal policy analysts have for
findings concerning the unequal distribution of resources, goods, and
services to newcomers in the Toronto area. The authors suggest that the
metropolis does not provide a level 'playing field' for newly arrived
18 Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier

immigrants and, consequently, the state's concern with equality of


opportunity over equality of outcome is misplaced; the findings re-
ported in this volume repeatedly demonstrate that there are definite
blockages in opportunity through low resource bases and inadequate
service deliveries.
1 Becoming an Immigrant City: A History
of Immigration into Toronto since the
Second World War

Harold Troper

In 1999, a Canadian immigration museum was inaugurated at Pier 21


in Halifax. It stands as a testament to the historic contribution of immi-
grants to Canadian society. The site is well-chosen: in just over forty
years - from 1928 to 1971 - tens of thousands of European immigrants
arriving by ship first set foot on Canadian soil at Pier 21. Unsure of
exactly what awaited them in their land of second chance, the new
arrivals were processed by immigration authorities and left Pier 21 to
begin new lives in Canada.
If this museum honours Canada's immigration past, it also shows
how much immigration has changed since the processing facilities at
Pier 21 were finally closed in 1971. Halifax's Pier 21 looks eastward, out
over the Atlantic towards Europe. In 1971, the number of immigrants
entering Canada from Europe dipped below 50 per cent; since then,
that percentage has continued to fall. What is more, Pier 21 was de-
signed to process immigrants arriving by ship. Today, the vast majority
of immigrants arrive by air and relatively few land in Halifax. The
single most important port of immigrant entry into Canada is Toronto's
Pearson International Airport. And not only do immigrants land in
Toronto: unlike the vast majority of those who once arrived in Halifax,
many stay there. Toronto is not only an immigration port of entry, it is
also an immigration destination. It has become home to more than one-
third of all immigrants arriving in Canada.
For Toronto, now Canada's largest city, so large an infusion of immi-
grants raises understandably important issues about settlement serv-
ices, urban planning, the place of immigration in shaping the city's
20 Harold Troper

culture, economy, and institutions, and about how best to accommo-


date and integrate immigrants from many different origins while avoid-
ing the scourge of racism. Even as the city and its surrounding suburban
ring continue to wrestle with these issues, there can be no doubt that
immigration is reshaping the city's self-perception. Indeed, the city's
boosters like to point out that the United Nations has proclaimed
Toronto the most multicultural city in the world (J. Berridge 1995). No
small accolade, this point of municipal pride is said to set Toronto apart
from its North American sister cities. But despite all the backslapping
hullabaloo, there is no United Nations proclamation. It is an urban
myth. Nonetheless, Torontonians, working by the dictum that some
events are so real it doesn't matter that they never happened, have
willed the myth into a functioning reality.
By any measure, Toronto is indisputably a multicultural city. If we
could take an aerial photo of the Greater Toronto Area at the millen-
nium, we would be looking at a sprawling urban complex of approxi-
mately four million people. According to the 1996 Canadian census,
just over 17 per cent of all Canadians were born outside Canada, but
more than 40 per cent of those in Toronto were born outside Canada.
Indeed, almost three-quarters of all heads of households in Toronto
were either born outside Canada or had at least one parent who was.
That inflow of immigration has come from every corner of the globe.
Once a parochial Protestant town - the Ulster of the North - where the
Sunday blue laws, Draconian liquor legislation, and the Orange Order
held sway, Toronto now trades on its cultural diversity as a draw for
tourists. More than one hundred different languages are commonly
spoken in this city, and many children born in Toronto enter public
schools each year not able to speak English well enough to avoid
remedial English classes. Included in the Greater Toronto Area
multiethnic mix are an estimated 450,000 Chinese, 400,000 Italians, and
250,000 African Canadians, the largest component of which are of Car-
ibbean background, although a separate and distinct infusion of Soma-
lis, Ethiopians, and other Africans is currently taking place. There are
almost 200,000 Jews, and large and growing populations from the In-
dian subcontinent, Greece, Portugal, Poland, Vietnam, Hispanic America,
and Central and Eastern Europe, to name but a few.
The Protestant majority is long gone. As a result of immigration,
Toronto now has a Catholic plurality and there are more Muslims in the
city than Presbyterians. Nor is the city the almost exclusively white
enclave it was only a generation ago. As the city ushered in the millen-
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 21

nium, a major proportion - and likely soon to be the majority - of those


living in this urban complex are people of colour. The simple fact is that
Toronto remains a magnet for immigration. With the federal govern-
ment promising to keep annual immigration into Canada at or near 1
per cent of the total population, more than triple the per capita Ameri-
can immigration level, both the number and diversity of this immigra-
tion show no sign of lessening. Compared with tomorrow, the Toronto
of today may be recalled as a city of relative cultural homogeneity
(Siemiatycki and Isin 1997).
Although Toronto is Canada's leading immigrant-receiving centre,
city officials have neither a hands-on role in immigrant selection nor an
official voice in deciding immigration policy. In Canada, immigration
policy and administration is a constitutional responsibility of the fed-
eral government, worked out in consultation with the provinces. Cities,
as creatures of the provinces, are officially kept at arm's-length from
immigration policy discussions. Yet, if Toronto does not have an official
role in determining immigration policy, immigration policy determines
much about Toronto. As the city continues to be the destination of
choice for so many immigrants, immigration has become a singular
force shaping and reshaping its streetscape, residential housing con-
struction patterns, economy, neighbourhood continuity, and delivery of
municipal services, including education and health care.
In order to fully appreciate the impact of immigration on Toronto, it
is important to understand the history of federal immigration policy
and how that policy has affected the city. It is also important to under-
stand that immigration was often a controversial area of public policy.
Advocates and opponents repeatedly tussled over immigration policy,
and immigrants and would-be immigrants have not sat passively like
pawns on some policy chessboard waiting to be moved here and there.
They have been actors on their own behalf, working to further agendas
shaped by their own needs and expectations. How the often separate
interests of the state, immigration activists, and immigrants play off
one another is also part of the Toronto immigration story, a story deeply
rooted in the past.

THE PRE-SECOND WORLD WAR IMMIGRANT PAST

Toronto was not always one of the world's major immigrant-receiving


centres. During the late nineteenth century and through to almost the
mid-twentieth century, Toronto was a major and bustling business and
22 Harold Troper

commercial centre, but it was also a city deeply respectful of British


Protestant ascendancy, values, and traditions. While there was a con-
siderable Roman Catholic minority, municipal political, economic, and
social levers were firmly in the hands of an Anglo-Protestant elite. Their
vision afforded little or no room for urban-bound immigrants, particu-
larly those who did not speak English.
That is not to say that Toronto and other major Canadian cities of the
day - Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver - did not each have signifi-
cant enclaves of 'foreigners/ as they were commonly labelled. On the
contrary. In the years before the Second World War each city had its
foreign neighbourhoods. Best known are The Main in Montreal, Van-
couver's Chinatown, Winnipeg's now-legendary North End, and the
Kensington Market area of Toronto. Each of these immigrant settlement
areas had its own particular tone and texture, even its own neighbour-
hood identity, institutions, and sense of how it fit into the larger urban
social and economic complex. But each of these different immigrant
neighbourhoods was also regarded by many in the mainstream as an
area apart from the city, in the city but not really an organic part of its
urban core. Many mainstream Torontonians hoped their city would be
no more than a stopover for foreigners who would quickly move on to
rural Canada or the United States. But if these foreigners insisted on
staying in Toronto, it was assumed that they would know their place. In
effect, this meant they would remain in the social and economic shad-
ows, relegated to a corner of the larger urban landscape reserved for the
immigrant underbelly of the urban labour force, doing jobs that 'real'
Canadians preferred not to do.
Thus, while there were immigrants in pre-Second World War To-
ronto, Toronto was not a city of immigrants in the way that urban
geographers and historians might talk about American cities like New
York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, St Louis, New Orleans, Galveston, or Los
Angeles. Going back to well before the turn of the century, as the
American agricultural frontier was being aggressively depleted of
new agricultural land and the burgeoning urban-based industrial
sector demonstrated an almost insatiable appetite for cheap labour,
Americans came to regard cities, especially in the industrial north-
east, as contact points between immigrant workers and domestic
capital. Cities were places where unskilled and semi-skilled immi-
grants stoked the furnaces of American growth in the decades follow-
ing the Civil War.
From Confederation through to the turn of the century and beyond,
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 23

no Canadian city, except perhaps Montreal, could claim the same urban
status as New York or Chicago. For the most part, Canadian cities -
with notable exceptions like Hamilton, Ontario, and Sydney, Nova
Scotia - were less industrial hubs than they were regional administra-
tive and commercial centres feeding off an agricultural or extractive
industrial hinterland. In Toronto, few could envision any good coming
out of immigrants piling up in their city, especially those of a non-
Anglo-Saxon lineage. It is true that immigration officials at the national
level actively sought out immigrants, but Canadian immigration policy
of the day deliberately and systematically sought to stream non-British
and non-American immigrants away from cities into non-urban and
labour-intensive industries like railway construction, mining, lumber-
ing, and, most particularly, farming. Indeed, until well after the First
World War, farming and the wealth it generated were regarded as not
just the bedrock of Canadian economic and social development, but the
very raison d'etre for encouraging large-scale immigration - the immi-
gration of agriculturalists (Gates 1934).
Farming was hardly an easy life. The unforgiving Canadian climate,
unstable markets for farm produce, and marginal lands unyielding to
the plough too often drained immigrant muscle, resources, and hopes.
As a result, in spite of hard work, it was not unusual for farm incomes
to fall far short of that necessary to sustain a family on the land.
Conditions were often so difficult that in the years before the turn of
the century, tens of thousands of immigrant farmers and Canadian-
born agriculturalists alike, unable to find alternative employment,
turned their backs on Canada and took refuge in factory jobs or
sought out more congenial lands in the United States. So pronounced
was the outflow of population to the United States that one wag
claimed Canada's story was foretold in the books of the Bible: 'It
begins in Lamentations and ends in Exodus' (Hamilton 1952,69; Hansen
and Brebner 1940).
This changed with the turn of the century. The completion of the first
Canadian transcontinental railway, built with borrowed capital and
cheap imported labour, opened the vast Canadian prairie to expansive
agricultural settlement. The time was right. A seemingly unquenchable
European market for Canadian raw materials and agricultural prod-
ucts, especially grains, coincided with a major population upheaval in
Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe that cut millions of people loose
to seek homes in the New World. The result was unprecedented Cana-
dian economic expansion propped up by a huge wave of immigration
24 Harold Troper

that the government streamed into labour-intensive extractive indus-


tries like mining and lumbering and, most of all, into settling the vast
expanse of agricultural lands in Western Canada. Wheat was king and,
from the government's point of view, immigration afforded an oppor-
tunity not to be missed - an opportunity to further economic and
population growth by settling farmers without land in a land without
farmers.
The name most associated with this peak period of Canadian immi-
gration is Clifford Sifton, Canada's forceful minister of the interior.
Working in collusion with industry and railway interests, Sifton revi-
talized Canada's immigration recruitment program. The priority con-
tinued to be fixed on aggressively promoting the immigration of
farmers and farm families. But, initially, this was not the only criterion
for preferred admission. Unabashedly colonial, the government de-
fined those from outside the British Isles as foreign and, unabashedly
North American, it excluded white, English-speaking American im-
migrants from this foreign category. In their source-country prefer-
ence, Sifton and the Canadian government were no more racist in
their thinking than the culture of their times. Nonetheless, Canadian
immigration policy remained as racially selective as it was economi-
cally self-serving.
With an insatiable demand for agricultural labour as well as for
workers for expanding industrial sectors, and confounded by a short-
fall in the number of settlers of the 'preferred types,' Sifton and his
immigration authorities were forced to set aside their racial concerns, at
least as far as Euro-ethnics were concerned. In their active search for
more and more agricultural and bush workers, Sifton reluctantly agreed
to admit other European agricultural settlers in a descending order of
ethnic or racial preference. At the top remained British and white Ameri-
can agriculturalists, followed closely by Northern and Western Europe-
ans. Then came Eastern Europeans - the fabled peasants in sheepskin
coats. Closer to the bottom of the list came those who, in the minds of
both the public and the government, were less assimilable and less
desirable; these were made up largely of Southern Europeans. Slotted
in at the very bottom were Asians, Blacks, and Eastern European Jews
who showed little inclination for farming. At first, the government was
unsure how to deflect urban-oriented Eastern European Jews from
Canadian shores while beating the bushes for other Eastern Europeans.
That would take time to work out. But it was clear what to do about
Asians and Blacks. Laws were passed and immigration regulations
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 25

strictly enforced that tightly controlled Asian immigration and effec-


tively barred Blacks from Canada (Munro 1971; Troper 1972,1987).
Government programs encouraging agricultural immigration worked.
Between the turn of the century and the First World War, Western
Canada soaked up immigrants. While immigration into Canada never
reached the absolute numbers into the United States, the ratio of for-
eign-born to Canadian-born population was far higher. These non-
English- or non-French-speaking settlers, most arriving in family units,
gradually filled the geo-economic niches reserved for them in prairie
agriculture or wage labour on the rugged mining and lumbering fron-
tier. They fuelled Canadian economic expansion; they also raised social
anxiety. For many English-speaking Canadians, the continuing influx
of strange peoples speaking strange languages - people until recently
loyal to foreign kings, czars, and kaisers, who prayed to alien gods and
seemed so distant and indifferent to Canadian values - generated fears
that these foreigners might never be assimilated into Canadian society.
They would always be the strangers in our midst.
French-Canadian leaders had a different and almost diametrically
opposite fear. They feared that these foreigners would indeed assimi-
late and assimilate into English-speaking society. In so doing, they
would tip the national political and demographic balance even further
in favour of les anglais. But many English- and French-Canadian leaders
at least agreed on one thing: Immigration was a boon to the economy
and, in balancing economic benefits against social costs, they agreed
that so long as these foreigners were content to remain in the rural
hinterland, so long as they continued to play the subservient economic
and social role reserved for them, then immigration should continue.
Not all immigrants were content to play this game. To the unease of
many mainstream Canadians, the number of foreigners leeching out of
rural areas into waiting jobs in Canadian cities, including Toronto,
increased. As immigrant numbers in Toronto increased so did anti-
immigrant sentiment. But why were there immigrants working in To-
ronto at all? Wasn't there an unspoken agreement between immigration
boosters and the urban polity that the foreigners would stay put in
rural Canada? Yes. But, the prosperity that opened Canada's western
agricultural, mining, and lumbering frontier and attracted so many
immigrants to Canada in the first place also spurred industrial devel-
opment and an enlarged job market in cities like Toronto. Immigration
policy might still trumpet agricultural settlement as a national priority,
but it was not long before new immigrants were joined by older immi-
26 Harold Troper

grants or their Canadian-born children in abandoning the isolation of


the bush or escaping the vagaries and insecurities of life on the land in
favour of wage labour in cities. Immigrants rebounded into Toronto,
where the men found jobs in the expanding urban economy - paving
streets, laying trolley tracks, labouring in the expanding textile facto-
ries, and tunnelling the sewer systems - while women worked as
household domestics, took in boarders, or performed various kinds of
piecework.1
Regardless of how willingly immigrants - men and women - filled
waiting jobs in Toronto and other Canadian cities, by the early 1920s
there was a growing urban mind-set that regarded the 'foreigners' in
the city as an intrusive threat. Many Toronto gatekeepers charged that
immigration was hastening the onset of municipal blight, political cor-
ruption, and miscegenationist race suicide that they associated with
cities south of the border. The signs seemed to be there. Weren't these
foreigners starting to cram into Toronto slums in seeming defiance of
Canadian immigration policy? And didn't these foreigners, largely
Catholics and Jews, cleave to their Old-World ways and to one another,
showing precious little inclination to assimilate? It might be one thing if
foreigners were content to spend their lives in sweat labour; it was
another to find some of them starting to successfully compete with
skilled native-born artisans and small businessmen. And what about
the children of immigrants? With legislation requiring universal and
compulsory school attendance, they were present in classrooms and the
brightest among them were demanding access to universities, to pro-
fessions, and to the political arena. No. If these foreigners did not know
their place - and their place certainly wasn't Toronto - they should be
denied admission to Canada.
As xenophobia in Toronto and other cities inched upward, the fed-
eral government could not ignore demands for cuts to immigration. By
the mid-1920s, Canadian immigration laws and regulations were re-
vised so as to restrict immigrant entry into Canada along racial and
ethnic lines. Rules against Asian admission were already tight; now the
admission of Eastern Europeans was made much more difficult and the
immigration door was pushed shut on Southern Europeans and all
Jews, irrespective of country of origin, except those few who might
come to Canada from the United Kingdom or the United States (Troper
1982).
Following the economic collapse of 1929, with mass unemployment
in urban Canada and a withering away of farm income, any residual
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 27

appreciation for immigrants evaporated. The door was sealed. Immi-


gration officials who had once competed with other countries for immi-
grants now stood vigil against any breach in the Canadian wall of
restriction (Abella and Troper 1982).

POST-WAR IMMIGRATION POLICY

The Second World War and its aftermath are a critical watershed in the
history of Canadian immigration and of immigration into Toronto.
While many policy planners initially feared that the end of the war
would throw Canada back into the job-hungry Depression of the 1930s,
the exact opposite took place. A surprisingly smooth transition from
wartime to peacetime production found a new urban industrial base -
the product of massive wartime industrial investment - retooling to
satisfy pent up consumer demand for goods and services that had been
denied to Canadians as far back as the beginning of the Depression. In
addition, a huge export market quickly opened up as Western Europe
began its massive post-war reconstruction. Rather than a shortage of
jobs, within a year or so after the war's end, Canada faced a surging
demand for labour. Labour-intensive industry, much of it in and around
cities like Toronto, demanded that Canada's doors to immigration be
reopened.
In truth, however, when immigration was first reopened, the govern-
ment sought to hold the line against the wholesale entry of non-British
or non-Western Europeans. Prime Minister Mackenzie King was only
reflecting the national mood when he observed that 'the people of
Canada do not wish to make a fundamental alteration in the character
of their population through mass immigration.' Discrimination and
ethnic selectivity in immigration would remain. 'Canada is perfectly
within her rights in selecting the persons whom we regard as desirable
future citizens. It is not a "fundamental human right" of any alien to
enter Canada. It is a privilege. It is a matter of domestic policy' (House
of Commons, Debates, 1 May 1947: 2644-7). Nor was Ottawa congenial
to the notion of renewed immigration by people who were regarded to
be least likely to fit in. Immigration officials - who still understood their
duty to be to guard the Canadian gate against all comers - were par-
ticularly unsympathetic to any liberalization of guidelines when it
came to allowing in the groups against whom immigration barriers had
been carefully erected in the first place: Asians, and Southern and
Eastern Europeans. The officials, who could not see beyond their own
28 Harold Troper

hierarchy of ethnic preferences, asked what would be gained by filling


a short-term labour gap if it meant a permanent infusion of Jews and
Slavs - those who stood first in Europe's exit line (Abella and Troper
1982; Luciuk 1984).
The public seemed to agree. Just over a year after the guns fell quiet
in Europe, a public opinion poll found that Canadians would rather see
recently defeated Germans allowed into Canada than Eastern and South-
ern Europeans, and, in particular, Jews. Only the Japanese fared worse.
Thus, even a grudging willingness to reopen immigration in late 1947
was very much predicated on holding to the ethnically and racially
based immigration priorities of the 1920s (Canadian Institute of Public
Opinion, 1946).
British, American, and Northern European, particularly Dutch, im-
migrants, were actively courted. Legislated bars against Asians re-
mained in place and administrative tinkering assured that Southern
and Eastern Europeans, especially Jews, would find it difficult to get
into Canada. The government of Ontario was so concerned that it
receive only the 'right' type of immigrant that it flexed its jurisdictional
muscle in immigration matters and inaugurated a highly publicized
airlift of British families into the province. When British currency regu-
lations threatened to choke off the flow of applicants, special transpor-
tation tariffs were negotiated to stimulate the inflow (Richmond 1967).
When currency regulations similarly hobbled the immigration of other
desirable Western European groups, especially the Dutch, the federal
government intervened. In 1948, a three-year bilateral agreement was
signed with the Netherlands to ensure the smooth transplanting of
approximately 15,000 Dutch farmers and farm workers - family units -
to Canada, many of them taking up farming immediately to the north
of Toronto (Peterson 1955).
If labour-intensive and increasingly urban-based industry was gen-
erally pleased by the government's building commitment to immigra-
tion, it was less pleased with restrictions against importing cheap labour
from outside the government's narrow ethnic circle of acceptability.
Pleading that it must have access to a continuing supply of imported
labour willing to assume low-wage and low-status positions rejected
by both the preferred immigrants and native-born Canadians, business
warned that the economic boom was in jeopardy. They pressed Ottawa
to skim off the cream of the almost one-million-strong labour pool
languishing in the displaced person (DP) camps in Germany, Austria,
and Italy before other labour-short nations - including the United
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 29

States and Australia - beat Canada to the punch. Largely as a result of


this pressure, the federal government gradually began to sift through
DP camps for acceptable settlers, while carefully monitoring the public
mood at home for any negative reaction to their arrival (Abella and
Troper 1982; Momryk 1992).
Most of the displaced persons were former citizens of Eastern Euro-
pean states who refused repatriation to countries of origin now domi-
nated by the Soviet Union. Others were Jews, a tattered remnant of
Europe's pre-war Jewish community who had somehow survived the
Holocaust. Hoping to rebuild lives shattered by the war, many men and
some women accepted Canada's calculated kindness and accepted work
in assigned industrial, service sector, or domestic jobs as the price of
admission to Canada. And one should not confuse Canada's intake of
displaced Europeans with the United Way; this was not a humanitarian
effort. It was a labour-importation scheme, plain and simple. There can
be little doubt that, if there were no Canadian labour shortages, few
DPs would have been admitted to Canada and, certainly, few Jews or
other Eastern Europeans. As they sorted through the existing and avail-
able European labour pool, immigration officials gave preference when-
ever possible to refugees from the Baltic republics, highly prized as
hard working 'Nordic types.' Only as jobs remained unfilled did the
Canadian government cautiously agree to lift barriers against Jewish
and Slavic settlers (Abella and Troper 1982).
Along with racial and ethnic reservations about reopening immigra-
tion, the government had another domestic reason for a its go-slow
approach. Through the 1950s, government immigration and policy plan-
ners expected the economic bubble to burst and the demand for labour
to subside. Again they were wrong. What is more, while demand for
labour remained high, especially in and around booming centres like
Toronto, Canada was not the only immigration game in town. Labour
shortages in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere forced Cana-
dian officials to continually scramble for their share of a shrinking
labour pool. It was not long before candidates who might previously
have been rejected as undesirable became valued prospects. In the face
of the continuing demands of a robust economy, remaining barriers to
Jews and Slavic immigrants slipped away, especially for the families of
those already in Canada and for immigrants with skills demanded by
labour-starved Canadian industries (Abella and Troper 1982; Luciuk
1984; Aun 1985; Danys 1986).
By the time the DP admission program ended, tens of thousands of
30 Harold Troper

new immigrants had resettled in Canada - many in Toronto, home to


more displaced persons per capita than any other Canadian city - and
aggressive immigration recruitment in Europe remained the order of
the day. The old backwater of Ottawa bureaucracy, the Immigration
Branch of the Department of Mines and Resources, was revitalized and,
reflecting its new profile, was upgraded in 1950 as the new Department
of Citizenship and Immigration. Old-school restrictionist immigration
officers were also replaced with a new breed of pro-immigration per-
sonnel. Canada was finally back in the immigration importation busi-
ness, and Toronto became a major immigration destination.

AN URBAN-FRIENDLY IMMIGRATION POLICY

As part of its revamped activist mandate, the new immigration bu-


reaucracy set about preparing a new immigration law. The existing
legislation had been enacted before the First World War and, with its
emphasis on agricultural settlement, it was a stretch to make the new
industrial and urban labour recruitment priorities fit within its param-
eters. Recognizing this, in 1952, the government passed a new immigra-
tion act designed to attract a continuing stream of industrial and
urban-bound immigrants without casting an ethnic or racial immigra-
tion net beyond Europe's borders. The subtext of the 1952 legislation
might have been drawn from Mackenzie King's previous caution against
immigration undermining the social structure of Canadian society. Af-
firming what had long been Canadian immigration policy, the 1952 act
allowed the minister of immigration and his officials sweeping powers
to set such regulations as they felt necessary to enforce the act. At the
discretion of the minister, individuals or groups could be rejected be-
cause of nationality, geographic origin, peculiarity of custom, unsuit-
ability to the climate, or because of an omnibus provision that allowed
for the rejection of any individual or group who demonstrated an
inability 'to become assimilated.' In effect, this meant a continuation of
some sort of hierarchy of preference among European-origin applicants
and an almost total ban on non-white applicants, especially Asians
(Hawkins 1972).
Furthermore, in keeping with the deepening Cold War climate of the
day, security checks were required of would-be immigrants. Security
personnel, working under the umbrella of the RCMP, functioned as
something of a separate estate; a cone of secrecy was drawn over their
activities and procedures. Canada's Cold War gatekeepers focused on
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 31

the Communist threat. But many non-Communists and even anti-Com-


munists on the left - trade unionists, socialists, social democrats - were
also denied entry. Individuals barred from Canada on security grounds
had few avenues of appeal and often were not even told the true cause
of their rejection. Unfortunately, while standing guard against Commu-
nists, Canada allowed or abetted the entry of others whose Second
World War records should have set off alarms in Ottawa. Most were not
even questioned about Nazi skeletons in their closets. But even if there
had been reason to suspect individuals of having a Nazi past or pro-
Nazi sympathies, in the eyes of Canadian security authorities, they had
the virtue of being proven anti-Communists (Whitaker 1987; also Com-
mission of Inquiry on War Criminals 1986; Matas and Charendoff 1987;
Troper and Weinfeld 1989).
At least there was positive change in one area. Through the 1950s,
concern for ethnically biased selectivity gradually receded, at least as
far as Euro-ethnics were concerned. One might see this racial leavening
as the 'whiting' of Euro-ethnics, spurred on by a repudiation of eugeni-
cally based notions of racial boundaries and by public revulsion at the
excesses of Nazi racism. Perhaps. More likely it was triggered by a
combination of the continuing heavy demand for labour and the sur-
prising level of comfort Canadians, particularly in cities, seemed to
have with the new immigration. As long as the economy remained
buoyant and immigrants were regarded as essential to keep the economy
moving forward, immigration was tolerated, if not welcomed.
The wall of restriction against people of colour started to show a first
tiny crack. Former British colonial holdings were achieving indepen-
dence in a reconfigured British Commonwealth and, in 1951, hoping to
gain an economic toe-hold in the developing world, Canada set aside a
small but symbolically important immigrant quota for its non-white
Commonwealth partners, India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. If the actual
numbers admitted to Canada were small, the symbolism of the govern-
ment-sanctioned admission of even a small group of non-white immi-
grants should not be minimized (Hawkins 1972).
The question now for government was whether the economy would
be able to sustain still more immigration. To the surprise of many
economists and immigration officials who had warned that the Cana-
dian economy would cool and unemployment increase through the
1950s and into the early 1960s, the Canadian economy generally re-
mained strong, as did the labour market. Jobs in Toronto's labour-
intensive industries were going begging and there was a particular
32 Harold Troper

pressing need for immigrant workers to service a massive boom in


residential housing construction and in the expanding urban infra-
structure. Where would the necessary immigrant labour force come
from? There weren't that many options. As prosperity gradually re-
turned to Northern and Western Europe in the late 1950s and early
1960s, the pool of applicants from those areas gradually dried up. The
DP camps had been emptied of all but the hard-core cases - displaced
persons who were physically or mentally disabled or infirm. The low-
ering of the Iron Curtain locked Europeans in the Eastern bloc in place
and no one in government could conceive of recruiting immigrants
from the non-white world.
With business interests cautioning that continued prosperity was at
stake and pressing for more and more labour, immigration officials had
little choice but to expand their focus to include Europe's southern rim.
Labour-intensive industries such as the construction trades were par-
ticularly interested in Italy and other Mediterranean countries, where
population increase and land dislocation sapped the absorptive capac-
ity of war-ravaged local economies. The result was an unskilled, rural
labour pool that could easily be redirected to waiting employment in
Canada. After some hesitation, the government agreed. Restrictions
against the admission of Italians, recently barred as former enemy
aliens, were lifted and, with security personnel on guard against Com-
munist infiltration, immigration offices were opened in Italy.
Ottawa may have hoped at first to attract the more 'Germanic' north-
ern Italians, but, almost immediately, southern Italians dominated the
immigrant flow. By the mid-1960s Italian immigration climbed into the
hundreds of thousands (lacovetta 1992). In the industrial heartland of
Southern Ontario and in urban Canada more generally, Italian labour-
ers, many of them former agricultural workers from the rural farm
villages that dotted central and southern Italy, soon became a mainstay
of the thriving construction industry, much as Slavic immigrants had
been in breaking the prairie sod and Jews had been in the needle trades.
So extensive was the influx of Italian immigrants that, in the decade
of the 1950s, Canada's Italian-origin population grew threefold - from
approximately 150,000 to 450,000. Toronto received the lion's share of
these new arrivals. Indeed, almost half of all Canadians of Italian origin
soon lived in Toronto and, unlike the pre-war Italian migration, there
were comparatively fewer sojourners among them. The post-war Ital-
ian immigration was largely made up of permanent settlers arriving in
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 33

family units or, if the male head of household was the first to migrate, of
men who made reunification with family a first priority (lacovetta
1992).
Unschooled in large city ways, most Italian immigrants to Toronto
located in residential working-class pockets along major public trans-
portation arteries and took up lower-status manual - but often union-
ized - labouring jobs in construction and related industrial sectors. For
many immigrants from Italy, residential property acquisition and or-
ganizing chain migration to ensure reunification with kin were their
twin priorities. Home ownership and a widening circle of kin also
served to prop up the integrative process. Family often took in family
and together the extended family formed a social and economic unit,
pooling capital and resources, networking together for jobs, caring for
one another's children, sharing information, and serving as a secure
base for personal interaction and emotional strength. As the numbers
of Italians in Toronto increased, so did their institutional presence.
Italian grocery stores, cafes, food wholesalers, and newspaper publish-
ers, along with Italian parishes and social clubs, gave Italian neighbour-
hoods a distinctive flavour and streetscape, and even a distinctively
ethnic subeconomy.
Other immigrant groups followed suit. As Italian immigration con-
tinued, Greeks, Portuguese, and the peoples of the Balkan peninsula
began arriving in Toronto in large numbers. Each group was unique in
its historical self-definition, cultural traditions, institutional organiza-
tion, and economic priorities; at the same time, each adopted many of
the same family-based economic and social integrative strategies so
characteristic of post-war Italian immigrants (lacovetta 1992; Harney
1998).

THE NEW PLURALISM

Immigrant resourcefulness and integrative patterns were hardly no-


ticed by federal government officials. Their priorities were elsewhere.
With bureaucratic tunnel vision, many persisted in regarding immigra-
tion as little more than the importation of labour to capital, workers to
jobs. The impact of this immigration on the Toronto urban landscape
and mind-set, however, was far more than economic; post-war immi-
grants gradually reshaped urban life and attitudes. Whether they were
Southern or Eastern Europeans, these immigrants altered the city's
34 Harold Troper

religious balance, gradually undermining the long-standing Protestant


hegemony while invigorating existing Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and
Jewish communities in Toronto. They also brought with them a rich-
ness of cultural forms and a diversity of social expression that Toronto
had never seen before.
At first, Toronto wore this new cosmopolitanism like a new and
somewhat uncomfortable pair of shoes. Mainstream Torontonians un-
derstood that immigration played into the city's growth, but they still
felt a little pinched and thrown a little off balance by the changes that
immigration was bringing to the world around them. They felt the city
they had known beginning to slip away and some were cautious about
stepping into an ethnically pluralist future. Old ways died hard. Diffi-
cult as it is to believe in retrospect, in the late 1950s, Toronto police
descended on picnicking Italian immigrants for having a glass of wine
in a public park, let alone for allowing their children take a sip. Munici-
pal health authorities were suspicious of new European-style cafes that
violated city ordinances by serving food at sidewalk tables. And what
could they make of the smells and tastes of foods so alien to the fare
that most Torontonians were used to? Even espresso coffee, new to
Toronto, smacked a little too much of the exotic - maybe even of the
subversive.
And when would these foreigners learn to be like us? It was not
uncommon for immigrants speaking their mother tongue in the street
or on public transit to be made to feel out of place and told to 'Speak
white!' School teachers and administrators, thinking they were liberat-
ing immigrant children from narrow Old-World parochialism or pro-
tecting them from the schoolyard bully, took liberties with many an
immigrant child's most personal possession - his or her name. Gabriella
became Gail, Luigi became Louis, Olga became Alice, and Hershel
became Harold. All the while, some members of the press and some
local politicians warned against the evils of immigrant overcrowding,
ghettoization, and crime. But not all. Slowly at first, Torontonians be-
came more and more comfortable with the new foods, the polyphony
of languages, and the new neighbourhoods that immigrants brought in
their wake. And for some, comfort gradually turned to pride in Toron-
to's new-found sophistication and cosmopolitan image.
And what became of the bedrock of vitriolic and politically acidic
xenophobia that so dominated Canadian and Toronto thinking only a
few years earlier? What of that mainstream certitude that, almost as a
sacred trust, Toronto must stand guard over British values in North
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 35

America? How was it that in less than one generation Toronto's public
face shifted from the defence of Anglo-conformity to a celebration of
the mosaic? Put simply, by the late 1960s, the past was cut loose, made
dysfunctional both by the onslaught of city-bound immigration and the
mediating force of governments awakened to the fact that political
power was increasingly in the hands of a new and pluralist urban
electorate that was made up more and more of immigrants and their
children. If it would take time for its importance to soak in, the election
of Nathan Phillips - a Jew and a child of immigrants - as the first mayor
of the 1960s Toronto was a telling barometer of the effect that immigra-
tion was having on the municipal polity; it represented something of a
civic revolution of the mind.
The revolution was of many parts, but had its genesis in the late
1940s with the redefining of community through the introduction of a
distinct and separate Canadian citizenship. Until 1947 there was no
such thing as Canadian citizenship; people living in Canada were le-
gally designated British subjects who were residents of Canada, not
Canadians. Pressure for change began in the post-war period and the
name most associated with that change was Paul Martin, a Liberal
backbencher who was appointed secretary of state towards the end of
the war. In his autobiography, he claimed to have previously flirted
with the notion of a distinct Canadian citizenship, but his total conver-
sion to the necessity of separate citizenship came during an official visit
to recently liberated Europe in 1945. In France he visited the Canadian
military cemetery at Dieppe where, walking amid the rows of graves,
some still fresh with wooden markers, he reported being deeply moved
by the incredible diversity of names found among the Canadian fallen -
names which spoke to the pluralism of origins that even then made up
Canadian society. Martin later wrote, 'Of whatever origin, these men
were Canadians.' They had fought and died for Canada; they deserved
to be remembered as Canadians. In their memory, Martin claimed, he
championed the creation of a Canadian citizenship (Martin 1983,437).
Without negating Martin's contribution, it has to be acknowledged
that other factors prodded the government towards instituting a sepa-
rate Canadian citizenship. Certainly, there was desire to build on pride
at Canada's major contribution to the Allied war effort - distinct from
that of Britain's - but there was also a desire by Ottawa to carve out an
independent place for Canada in the post-war United Nations and in
the family of nations. An independent Canadian voice would be well-
served by having a separate Canadian citizenship. On the domestic
36 Harold Troper

level, it was hoped that Canadian citizenship would become a focal


point for a national unity that all - Canadian-born and immigrant,
French- and English-speaking - could share (Martin 1983; Brown 1996).
It took several years but Canadian citizenship became a reality on
January 1,1947. The adoption of Canadian citizenship turned out to be
far more than simple post-war patriotic puffery or flag-waving senti-
mentalism; it proved a far-reaching act. By rejecting the notion of lay-
ered citizenship, a citizenship of degrees, Canada pronounced itself
inclusive. Henceforth, individual Canadian citizens were promised that,
under the law, all would be treated the same, irrespective of whether
they were Canadian- or foreign-born, no matter their heritage, religion,
or national origin, and irrespective of any proprietary claim that one
group might make to being more Canadian than another. It would take
time for reality to match rhetoric, but with post-war immigration just
building up a head of steam, the introduction of an inclusive Canadian
citizenship paved the way for all subsequent human rights initiatives
that became so important to immigrants to Canada.
The inauguration of a distinct and separate Canadian citizenship was
only the first step towards a major expansion of human rights legisla-
tion in Canada. If anything, the implementation of Canadian citizen-
ship raised expectations about more openness in civic society and about
unprecedented equality of access to public institutions for all Canadi-
ans, and fuelled the demand for legislated equality before the law. This
human rights agenda was soon being driven by a coalition of organized
labour, liberal churches, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation
(CCF), and older Canadian ethnic communities who had embraced the
Canadian war effort, sent their children off to fight, and, in the after-
math of war, refused to ever again accept second-class status for them-
selves or their children. Alive with expectations raised by Canadian
citizenship, the coalition was also swept along by a number of contrib-
uting forces: revulsion at the racial excesses of Nazism; a populariza-
tion of the new social sciences and the consequent academic-led assault
on social Darwinist and eugenic thinking; a growing sense of the
disfunctionality of the Anglo-centric urban Canadian world-view now
rendered an anachronism by the erosion of colonialism and the British
imperial dream; a spillover of social justice ideology from the nascent
Black civil rights struggle in the United States; and, of major impor-
tance, a recognition that civic society had to clear away encumbrances
to smooth the social, economic, and political integration of immigrants
moving into cities like Toronto.
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 37

Canadian human rights activists pushed for legal protections against


racial, religious, or ethnic discrimination. If few believed social atti-
tudes could change overnight, all worked to ensure that the law would.
And the law did. In the first decade after the war, Canadian provinces
followed Saskatchewan's lead and enacted fair employment and ac-
commodation legislation barring discrimination on account of race,
religion, or country of origin. In the international forum, Canada's
signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights added symbolic
urgency to the new Canadian human rights agenda. Canadian courts
were soon responding to the more progressive spirit of the day by using
their powers to expand society's human rights thrust (Walker 1997).
This embrace of a singular citizenship and the legal guarantees of
human rights for all Canadians mirrored a new spirit in urban Cana-
dian thinking. It even remade language. Immigrants were no longer
foreigners; they were 'New Canadians.' And, for that matter, they were
no longer part of cities like Toronto by sufferance. They were there by
right, and now by right of law. It was only a matter of time before the
domestic human rights upheaval impacted on Canadian immigration
legislation and administration.
In Toronto, where most immigrants lived, the revitalization of the
notion of citizenship and human rights reinforced the realization that
yesterday's immigrants and their children were becoming tomorrow's
taxpayers and voters. Urban politicians, once leery of 'foreigners/ now
reached out to New Canadians. Issues that were important to immi-
grant communities were being taken up by city hall. Most important to
many immigrants, boards of education that had long been home to
assimilationist, if not nativist, assumptions about the place of the for-
eign-born and their children in Canadian society were being forced to
reinvent themselves as open and inclusive. Public expressions of racism
shifted from being normative to being anti-social and from being anti-
social to being legally punishable violations of community-wide stand-
ards. Toronto's urban polity had changed.
Immigration showed no sign of slowing. While Southern Europeans
continued to dominate the stream of European immigrants entering
Canada through the 1950s and into the 1960s, in 1956 the Cold War
unexpectedly increased immigration from Central Europe. When the
Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising, they unleashed a flood of
refugees westward into Austria. This first major European refugee
crisis of the Cold War came at a fortuitous moment for Canada. The
economy was still strong and the plight of exiled Hungarian 'freedom
38 Harold Troper

fighters' moved Canadians. At first, Ottawa was cautious. Canadian


security personnel warned that the Soviets might salt this refugee move-
ment with secret agents seeking entry into unsuspecting Western coun-
tries. For its part, the Canadian government seemed less concerned
with Communists than with costs. Unlike the earlier DP movement, in
which labour-intensive industry, ethnic communities, and families shoul-
dered much of the financial burden, any Hungarian resettlement pro-
gram promised to be largely Ottawa's responsibility.
As the government dithered, public sympathy and media pressure
grew. Press editorials, savaging the government for inaction, demanded
that Canada take the lead in welcoming victims of Soviet aggression.
Under withering pressure, the Cabinet finally cut a path through immi-
gration red tape. Normal immigration procedures, including pre-em-
barkation medical and security checks, were sidestepped or postponed
until after arrival in Canada. Jack Pickersgill, the minister of immigra-
tion, hurried to Vienna and hard on his heels came immigration teams
authorized to scoop up the best of the well-educated and highly moti-
vated Hungarian refugees before other countries got them.
The Hungarian refugee resettlement program ran remarkably
smoothly in spite of its lurching start and a lack of preparedness on the
part of education and social service officials to deal with the influx. In
Toronto, after some initial confusion, government officials at all levels
joined forces with non-governmental organizations to help settle the
new arrivals. And, in the end, Canada did well by doing good. The
refugee resettlement program brought almost 37,000 Hungarians to
Canada, with Toronto soon becoming home to the largest community.
Many of these refugees were established professionals who, once they
received orientation and English-language training, gradually found
employment in the retail, commercial, or white-collar sectors. But, suc-
cessful as this refugee resettlement exercise was, it was hardly a routine
immigration program. Immigration officials regarded it as a one-time
initiative, a singular exception to the procedural guidelines they so
closely guarded. Time would prove them wrong (Dirks 1977; Dreisziger
1982).

THE WHITE PAPER

After two decades of almost uninterrupted growth, Canada's economy


began to weaken in the early 1960s. With insistent 'I-told-you-so' warn-
ings from many economists and government planners that Canada
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 39

now faced serious industrial burnout, demand for new immigrant


labour took a nosedive. Toronto's economy flagged along with the
rest of the national economy, federal immigrant recruitment was cur-
tailed, and immigration numbers soon fell by half. As the number of
immigrant arrivals dropped off, some officials, convinced that immi-
grant absorptive capacity of the Canadian economy had been reached
if not exceeded, called for a permanent cap on immigrant inflow.
Responding to the chorus of naysayers, Ottawa commissioned a re-
view of Canadian immigration with an eye towards redefining immi-
gration priorities.
A white paper on immigration was released in 1966. The policy
document attempted to walk a tightrope between the still-vocal pro-
immigration lobbyists and a growing body of immigration opponents.
For immigration advocates the white paper was infused with the lib-
eral rhetoric of the day, even though it called for a complete overhaul of
Canadian immigration law, regulations, and procedures, including a
final purge of every last hint of racial or ethnic discrimination. While
these were hailed as long overdue reforms, some immigration advo-
cates viewed other white paper policy recommendations with alarm.
Perhaps reflecting the larger public debate in the 1960s on optimum
population size, the white paper questioned the long-term wisdom of
taking in so many job-hungry immigrants at the prime of their fertility
cycle. The white paper's recommendations were far from the Malthu-
sian warnings of an earlier time and were certainly not endorsing the
then-fashionable zero population growth, but they did offer a blueprint
for capping immigration numbers. This stirred up a hornets' nest of
controversy. Particularly controversial was the document's plan for
tightening regulations on family reunification, which accounted for
almost half of all immigrant entries into Canada, in favour of more
skilled, independent immigrants. The white paper recommended that
landed immigrants, those who were not yet citizens, be restricted to
sponsoring only immediate dependents, the closest of family, while
those who were Canadian citizens only be allowed to sponsor relatives
who satisfied the educational and occupational qualifications in place
for the admission of independent immigrants. If implemented, these
moves would sharply restrict the possibility of sponsoring family, espe-
cially for immigrants who had come to Canada from Southern Europe.
Perhaps still unaware of the depth of controversy brewing over the
family reunification issue, Cabinet referred the white paper to the Par-
liamentary Committee on Immigration for public input and discussion.
40 Harold Troper

The committee soon got an earful. Italian, Jewish, and Eastern Euro-
pean ethnic leaders, particularly in Toronto - now home to large and
increasingly resourceful post-war immigrant and ethnic communities -
were outspoken in their hostility to any reduction in family sponsor-
ship. They warned politicians that enraged ethnic voters would neither
forgive nor forget any political party that slammed the door on their
kith and kin. Mainstream churches and the Canadian Labour Congress
joined the chorus of those demanding a broadening, not a narrowing,
of family reunification provisions of the immigration regulations. Mem-
bers of Parliament from Toronto, especially those from immigrant-
heavy ridings, who feared that campaign contributions and ethnic
votes would go elsewhere, waded in on the side of family sponsorship.
Ducking the political buckshot, the federal government set aside the
proposed changes, at least as recommended in the white paper. Instead,
Ottawa tinkered with the regulations. The list of those family members
entitled to entry into Canada as first-degree relatives was narrowed. At
the same time, however, a new class of immigrant, a nominated class,
was announced. Nominated immigrants, primarily non-dependent fam-
ily members who seemed likely to integrate well, were given priority in
immigration processing. Their Canadian sponsor or nominator was
also relieved of some of the legal and fiscal liability assumed in the case
of sponsorship of immediate family. As a result, family migration was
not curtailed. It was restructured and, to some degree, expanded. For
years to come, the largest single subset of immigrants arriving in To-
ronto would continue to be family or other sponsored categories (Sta-
tistics Canada 1990).
There was another and, conceivably, more significant impact of the
sponsorship battle. Thoughtful political observers of the day may have
sensed the emergence of a newly empowered urban immigrant and
ethnic political constituency, largely based in Toronto. In the white
paper debate, that constituency seemed to be serving notice that it was
prepared to take its place as a player on the Canadian political stage.
But was this particular political victory an aberration, a one-time
single-issue success by a coalition of otherwise disparate ethnic groups?
Political commentators were unsure and began discussing a possibly
fundamental and far-reaching shift in urban politics. One thing was
certain, though, in Toronto, yesterday's immigrants were emerging as
political, social, and economic powerbrokers in their own right - a
'third force' whose origins were neither English nor French (Porter
1972; Burnet 1976,1979; Troper 1978; Breton 1979; Lupul 1983).
Immigration into Toronto since the Second World War 41

FROM ETHNIC TO RACIAL PLURALISM

Several other white paper recommendations were implemented, in-


cluding the final expunging of racial and ethnic barriers to Canadian
entry. A few years earlier, in 1962, in line with human rights initiatives
at the provincial and federal levels, Cabinet approved the lifting of
racial and ethnic restrictions on the processing of independent appli-
cants. But the government stopped short of universalizing the policy
change. To assuage public concerns about any sudden influx of de-
pendent Chinese or other Asians, especially in British Columbia, racial
restrictions remained in place for Asian family reunification cases. None-
theless, even if the direction of public policy seemed clear, de facto
racial and ethnic discrimination lingered for a time under administra-
tive guise: the resources of the immigration bureaucracy were almost
exclusively concentrated in areas of traditional immigrant preference -
the United Kingdom, the United States, and Western Europe.
By contrast, few on-site immigration services were available and
little immigration promotion money was spent in the developing world.
In 1960, for example, Canada operated twenty-seven immigration of-
fices outside North America. Twenty-four were in Europe and three
were in Asia (one of which was in Israel). There was not one in all
of black Africa, the Caribbean, or South America. But change would
not be denied. In 1967, as a result of one of the key white paper
recommendations, all vestiges of racial and ethnic discrimination were
finally and officially expunged from Canadian immigration regulations
and procedures, including all those relating to sponsored and nomi-
nated immigration. The privilege of applying to bring in family was
extended to all Canadian citizens and landed immigrants alike, includ-
ing family from the developing world (Ramcharan 1982).
Canada's network of immigration offices abroad were gradually ex-
panded. A Canadian immigration office was opened in Egypt in 1963;
in Japan in 1967; and in Lebanon, the Philippines, the West Indies, and
Pakistan in 1968. And, as part of the package in which Ottawa restruc-
tured family reunification regulations and ended racial and ethnic pref-
erences, the government also overhauled the procedures by which
independent immigration applicants were admitted into Canada. Again,
without enacting new legislation, the government both reined in the
discretionary powers of immigration officials to reject an applicant and
brought immigration admissions more exactly into line with domestic
economic fluctuations. The point system, as it came to be known, was
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But Jim shook his head solemnly.
“No, old lady,” said he, “I am afraid it wouldn’t be playing the game.”
Nevertheless, immediately luncheon was over, Jim took the key of
his studio off the sitting-room chimney-piece, and went forth to the
misshapen wooden erection in the small Balham back garden. The
key turned in the lock stiffly. It was nearly three weeks since it had
last been in it. For several hours he worked joyfully, touching and
retouching the picture and improvising small details out of his head.
And all the time the Goose Girl smiled upon him in the old Widdiford
manner. Her hair had never looked so yellow, and her eyes had
never looked so blue.
CHAPTER XVII
DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEMALE US

THE next morning, a little before eleven, the wonderful Miss Perry,
accompanied by the admirable Mr. Bryant, was approaching Apsley
House when the figure of a solitary horseman was to be seen. It had
a combination of unexpectedness and familiarity which fixed Miss
Perry’s attention. She gave a little exclamation. The horseman was
unmistakably Jim Lascelles.
Jim received a most affectionate greeting.
“You are just in time,” said he. “It is a near thing. Gobo is yonder in
the offing. I was afraid he would get here before you.”
Miss Perry was delighted but perplexed by a suggestion that Jim put
forward. It was that they should go down the left while Gobo rode
up on the right.
“But I promised Gobo,” she said.
“Look here, Goose Girl,” said Jim, with tremendous resolution, “do
you suppose I have invested the last half-sovereign I have in the
world on the worst hack in London, to be cut out by that old duffer?
Come on round, you Goose, before he gets up.”
Really Miss Perry is not to be blamed. Jim Lascelles was resolution
incarnate once he had made up his mind. Jim’s horse, a nondescript
who does not merit serious notice, walked a few paces briskly, the
chestnut followed its example, as chestnuts will, and the next thing
was Jim’s horse broke into a canter. The chestnut did the same. Of
course it was Miss Perry’s business to see that the chestnut did
nothing of the sort. But it has to be recorded that she failed in her
obvious duty. And then, so swift is the road to destruction, in less
time than it takes to inform the incredulous reader, the chestnut and
the nondescript began literally to fly down Rotten Row.
It was a golden morning of glorious June, and, of course, things
constantly happen at that vernal season. But as the four pairs of
irresponsible hoofs came thundering by, flinging up the tan in all
directions and nearly knocking over a policeman, equestrians of both
sexes, and pedestrians too, stared in polite amazement and very
decided disapproval. If not absolutely contrary to the park
regulations, it was certainly very wrong behavior.
There is every reason to suspect that the opinion of that high
authority, Mr. Bryant, was even more uncompromising. Not for an
instant did he attempt to cope with the pace that had been set. He
was content sadly to watch his charge get farther and farther away.
He then turned to look back at the man with the red face, who had
just arrived at the turn.
That elevated personage, who could not see at all well without his
spectacles, halted at the turn and looked in vain for the wonderful
Miss Perry. His friend Cheriton, who had entered the gates just in
time to be au courant with all that had happened, accosted him
cheerfully.
“Doctors’ orders, George?”
“Ye-es,” said George, rather gruffly.
“I warned you years ago, my dear fellow,” said his friend,
sympathetically, “that any man who drinks port wine in the middle of
the day as a regular thing, can count later in life on the crown of the
martyr.”
George looked rather cross. He peered to the right and he peered to
the left. The ever-receding pair were by now undecipherable to
stronger eyes than those of George Betterton.
“Seen a gal about?” he inquired rather irritably. There never was a
duke since the creation of the order who could endure to be kept
waiting.
“I’ve seen several,” said his friend, with an air of preternatural
innocence.
“I mean that gal of Caroline Crewkerne’s,” said George.
“I was not aware that she had one.”
“Tall, bouncing gal,” said George. “Ginger hair.”
“Ginger hair!” said his friend. “Tall, bouncing gal! Do you mean my
ward, Miss Perry?”
“Your ward! What d’ye mean, Cheriton?”
“Caroline Crewkerne seems to think,” said Cheriton, coolly, “that I
shall serve the best interests of a lonely and unprotected and
extraordinarily prepossessing girlhood if I act, as it were, in loco
parentis during Miss Perry’s sojourn in the vast metropolis.”
George began to gobble furiously. It was a sign, however, that his
mind was working. That heavy and rusty mechanism was very
difficult to set in motion.
“If it comes to that,” said he, “I should say I am quite as capable of
looking after the gal as you are.”
“A matter of opinion, George, I assure you,” said Cheriton, with
genial candor.
“What d’ye mean?”
“For one thing, I am rather older than you. Therefore, in Caroline’s
opinion, I am better fitted to occupy the paternal office.”
“Are you, though?” said George, stubbornly.
“I am sixty-five, you know,” said his friend, with an air of modest
pride. “The ideal age, if I may say so, for wisdom, experience, and
knowledge of the world to coalesce in the service of innocence,
beauty, and extreme youth. At least, I know that is Caroline
Crewkerne’s opinion.”
“Goin’ to marry the gal, are you?” said George, bluntly.
Some men are very blunt by nature.
“The exigencies of the situation may render that course expedient,”
said Cheriton, rather forensically. “But in any case, my dear George,
speaking with the frankness to which I feel that my advantage in
years entitles me, I am inclined to doubt the seemliness of the open
pursuit by a man of nine-and-fifty of a wayside flower.”
“What d’ye mean, Cheriton?” said George, with a more furious
gobble than any he had yet achieved.
“What I really mean, my dear fellow,” said his friend, “is that you can
no longer indulge in the pleasures of the chase without your
spectacles. Had you been furnished with those highly useful, if not
specially ornamental adjuncts to the human countenance, you would
have been able to observe that the wonderful Miss Perry—whose
hair, by the way, is yellow—was spirited away exactly ninety seconds
before you arrived on the scene.”
“Who took her?” said George, who by now had grown purple with
suppressed energy.
“A young fellow took her,” said Cheriton. “A smart, dashing, well-set-
up young fellow took her, my dear George. He simply came up,
tossed her the handkerchief, and away they set off hell for leather.
By now they are at the Albert Memorial.”
No sooner was this information conveyed to him than George
Betterton did a vain and foolish thing. Without bestowing another
word upon Cheriton he set off in pursuit. It was supremely ridiculous
that he should have behaved in any such fashion. But it is surprising
how soon the most stalwart among us loses his poise; how soon the
most careful performer topples off the tight-rope of perfect
discretion and sanity. The spectacle of George pursuing the
runaways with a haste that was almost as unseemly as their own
was certainly romantic. And at the same time it provided infinitely
pleasant food for the detached observer who was responsible for
George’s behavior.
Cheriton stood to watch and to laugh sardonically. The marionette
had begun to answer to the strings in delightful fashion. He
promised to excel all anticipation.
In the meantime Young Blood was careering away like the wind.
Faster and faster it went. It was higher, deeper, richer, more
exhilarating than any of the old Widdiford madnesses. It was in vain
that the British public looked pained and the London police looked
important. This was its crowded hour of glorious life; and if there
was to be an end to all things, there were two persons at least who
felt that, after all, the cosmos had done very well to get itself
invented.
However, this sort of thing cannot last forever. The nondescript soon
began to display signs of distress.
“Bellows to mend,” said Jim.
The glorious Miss Perry had difficulty in checking her chestnut.
“Why,” said she, “he is almost as strong as your papa’s pedigree
hunter.”
“We’ve done a record from the Red House to the Parsonage, I think,”
said Jim.
Even when they turned to ride back their high spirits met with no
check. The crowded glorious hour continued, if pitched in a less
emotional key. Jim’s nondescript was no longer equal to the fine
careless rapture.
“Goose Girl,” said Jim, “do you know I have made a resolution?”
“Have you, Jim?” said Miss Perry.
“I am determined to finish that picture of you in your wonderful
Gainsborough frock.”
“Of course, Jim,” said Miss Perry.
“That picture is to be a masterpiece, you know.”
“Is it, Jim?” said Miss Perry.
“Yes,” said Jim. “And when it has made me famous what do you
suppose I am going to do?”
“I don’t know, Jim,” said Miss Perry.
“Can’t you guess?”
Miss Perry knitted her brows in grave perplexity.
“Marry Muffin.”
“What, marry the Ragamuffin!” said Jim, scornfully.
“She is prettier than Polly is.”
“But she is such a Ragamuffin; and she has never an incredible hat
and a Gainsborough frock to call her own.”
“She has her mauve, Jim,” said Miss Perry.
“No,” said Jim, decisively; “in spite of her mauve I decline to marry
the Ragamuffin.”
Miss Perry looked vastly disappointed.
“Milly is too young,” said she.
Jim pressed the nondescript. The ice was getting desperately thin.
And every moment the light of the morning was making it thinner.
“Goose Girl,” said Jim, “do you remember that once you promised to
marry me?”
“Yes, I did, Jim,” said Miss Perry, “if you got those three big red-
cheeked apples off the tree at the Red House at Widdiford.”
“I got them off all right,” said Jim. “But instead of receiving your
hand in matrimony I got a tremendous licking.”
“The apples were awfully nice, though,” said Miss Perry, like a true
daughter of Eve.
The high personage who controls the limelight continued to play
most embarrassing tricks with the light of the morning. The hapless
Jim Lascelles felt himself to be no match for that master hand.
“Goose Girl,” said Jim, defiantly, “assuming for a moment that I
made myself famous enough to buy back the Red House at
Widdiford, with the strawberry beds and the apple orchards, and the
old wicket-gate that leads into the back lane which takes you
straight to the Parsonage—would you keep the promise that you
made when you were a long-legged person of seven, with a very
large appetite, and I was a chubby subject of thirteen and a half
with rather thin trousers?”
“Yes, Jim, I would,” said Miss Perry, with remarkable promptitude,
frankness, and sincerity.
“There, now I’ve done it,” groaned Jim. “It was bound to happen. I
knew the royal daylight would provoke me to make a cad of myself
before it had done playing its tricks. But if people will have yellow
hair, and they will wear yellow gauntlets to match it, and that fellow
upstairs will fling the limelight all over the place, how can a poor
painting chap help himself?”
Miss Perry had grown very grave. She was silent for twenty-five
seconds.
“Jim,” said she, with slow-drawn solemnity, “if you do marry
anybody, I r-r-really think it ought to be Muffin.”
“That Ragamuffin!”
“She is such a sweet,” said Miss Perry. “And she is so pretty; and
dearest papa says she is so clever; and of course you know I am
rather a Silly.”
“All the world knows it.”
“And Muffin always said she would just love to live at the Red House
at Widdiford.”
“Goose Girl,” said Jim, “I am afraid you are deep. You want to marry
Gobo.”
“Not r-r-really,” said Miss Perry, with wide-eyed earnestness. “Of
course he is a dear, but—but of course, Jim, he is not like you are.”
“Thank you very much for the information. But tell me, Goose Girl,
wouldn’t you like to be a duchess?”
“Oh no, Jim,” said Miss Perry.
“Why not, you Goose?”
“It sounds rather silly.”
“So it does, now you come to mention it,” said Jim. “But think of all
the wonderful frocks and jewels you would have, and the wonderful
houses, and the wonderful horses, and the wonderful ices of every
conceivable color and every possible flavor. And as for cream buns, a
duchess of course can have as many as she requires.”
“I would rather have the Red House at Widdiford,” said Miss Perry.
“Really,” said Jim, “you are the most tremendous thing in Geese. Just
think what you could do if you were a duchess. You could buy old
books and new vestments for your papa; Muffin could have a new
mauve; the Polly Girl could marry her parson, and she could boast of
her sister who married the duke; and the Milly Girl could think more
about Persian kittens and less about self-improvement; and as for
Dickie and Charley, they both might go to Sandhurst and probably
become field-marshals.”
The blue eyes of Miss Perry opened in their dazzlement to
dimensions that were perfectly astonishing.
“It would be awfully nice,” said she; “but, Jim——”
“Well?”
“I did promise you, didn’t I?”
“You would never have got those three red-cheeked apples if you
hadn’t,” said Jim.
As they neared the turn at Hyde Park Corner they began
unconsciously to assume airs of decorum. The accusing figure of Mr.
Bryant awaited them. Lord Cheriton too was only a little way off. He
stood by the railings looking the picture of outraged delicacy.
When the runaways came up to greet him he held up both hands
before his face with the gesture of dismay of a very nice old lady.
“I am dumb,” said he.
Apparently Jim Lascelles was smitten with a similar infirmity. As for
Miss Perry, the ineradicable instincts of her sex assumed the control
of that irresponsible person.
“Have you seen Gobo?” she demanded breathlessly.
The blend of disinterested concern and absolute innocence was
perfectly charming.
“I could never have believed it,” said Cheriton, with a pained air.
“The finished duplicity, the Jesuitical depth.”
“Have you seen him?” demanded Miss Perry.
“Have I seen Gobo? I have seen a roaring, outraged lion in the guise
of a rampant turkey cock.”
“It is an awful pity,” said Miss Perry. “We missed him.”
Cheriton felt that he had never observed such gravely sweet concern
in the human countenance. To have suspected its proprietress of
arrière pensée would have been barbarism.
“Yes; an awful pity,” Cheriton assented. “Particularly for men of a
rather full habit of body who are decidedly short in the neck.”
“Do you think Gobo will mind?” said Miss Perry. “You see, Jim”—the
handle of Jim’s crop was ominously near to her knee—“Mr. Lascelles
came up, and we thought if we went down we should be sure to
meet Gobo, but we didn’t.”
“Lascelles, my good fellow,” said his friend, “isn’t it time you began
to play up a bit? Miss Perry’s lucidity is admirable, but somehow one
has the feeling that her verisimilitude wants eking out a little. Your
version will be interesting.”
“My mount cost a cool half-sovereign which I couldn’t afford,” said
Jim, brazenly, “and I thought as it was a fine morning I had better
have my money’s worth.”
Cheriton’s smile expanded to the dimensions of his necktie.
“Yes,” said he, laughing, “this sort of thing is best left to those who
are born with the instinct for diplomacy. Lascelles, my good fellow,
you would have done far better to have pinned your faith to your
companion in guilt. Her version was excellent, if a little bald. To my
mind it was pitched in quite the right key. It was natural, lucid,
admirably reticent. It clearly suggested that the blame could not
belong to either of you, whoever else it might be fixed upon.
Unfortunately, your own version does not tend to exonerate you
equally. I must confess, Lascelles, that upon my mind it leaves a
most unhappy impression.”
“The truth is,” said Jim, “I am seeking a fresh store of inspiration in
order that I may complete the chef d’œuvre.”
“I think it should be a masterpiece undoubtedly.”
“I think so too,” said Jim.
Miss Perry’s far-seeing, west-country eyes appeared to be searching
for something on the far horizon.
“Gobo is coming,” said she.
“Which way?” said Jim.
“He is coming up on the right. Don’t you see him?”
Jim had to strain his gaze.
“Yes; by Jove, you are right!” said he. “What wonderful eyes you
have got, Miss Perry!”
“It is so long since one inhabitated the halcyon era of one’s youth,”
said Cheriton, “that one is rather at a loss to remember whether Red
Riding Hood made a similar observation to the wolf, or whether the
wolf made the observation to Red Riding Hood.”
“The former, undoubtedly,” said Jim.
“I am glad of that,” said Cheriton. “I feared it might have been the
latter.”
“Hadn’t we better be going?” said Jim, brazenly, to his companion in
guilt. “This screw of mine seems to have got his wind back.”
“Has he, Jim?” said Miss Perry.
Jim’s nondescript took a turn to the left. The chestnut followed in
the most natural manner. On this occasion, however, the distance
between the Parsonage and the Red House at Widdiford was not
accomplished in quite such record time. All the same, for the greater
part of the way the pace was decidedly hot.
“Seen anything of the gal, George?” inquired his friend Cheriton.
George was looking very purple indeed.
“I saw a cloud of dust just now,” said he. “There was a ginger-haired
gal in it going at a dooce of a rattle.”
“I can’t imagine my ward, Miss Perry, attempting anything in the
nature of a rattle,” said Cheriton.
“Can’t you?” grunted George, sourly.
CHAPTER XVIII
FASHION COMES TO THE ACACIAS

JIM LASCELLES was inclined to view his morning as a very great


success. It is true that it had cost him the last half-sovereign he had
in the world, but he felt that it had been invested to full advantage.
He had derived a new store of inspiration from that memorable
morning. For a whole week he was sustained by the recollection of
it. He gave up his days to joyous labor in the wooden erection in the
Balham back garden.
“I shall make something of her after all,” said he.
One morning when he came down to breakfast he found a letter at
the side of his plate. This, in itself, was an event sufficiently rare,
because Jim Lascelles was one of those people who never write a
letter if they can possibly avoid doing so. The envelope had rather
an air about it. Upon the back of it was a monogram of a
distinguished club.
“What ho!” said Jim.
A pair of eyes by no means ill found in worldly wisdom had duly
noted that which was on the back of the letter.
“The correspondent of dukes,” said their owner. “Which of them is it,
my son?”
Jim threw the contents of the envelope across the table with a gay
laugh.
Dear Lascelles (it said),—The art of the age seems clearly
to call for the presence at the Acacias of the wonderful
Miss Perry. Unless the Fates are adverse—which,
according to Juvenal, they are sometimes—she will appear
about 4.30 o’clock to-morrow (Tuesday) afternoon to
claim in her own proper person a cup of tea, together with
two lumps of sugar and one cream bun, Buszard’s large
size. Forgive the shortness of the notice. Our old and
common friend did not develop sufficiently marked
symptoms of laryngitis until this morning to submit to the
decree of her medical adviser. He has ordered her to keep
her bed. The accomplished Miss Burden accompanies us
in an official capacity. Ponto does not.
Sincerely yours,
Cheriton.
P.S.—Strawberries and cream are known to be very
delectable.
Jim’s uncommonly youthful mother was vastly amused.
“Never tell me, my son,” said she, “that an extremely well-informed
Providence does not watch over the destinies of even the humbler
denizens of the suburb of Balham. We are to be deluged with three
persons of fashion, and the Miss Champneys are sure to pay a call—
they always pay a call—this afternoon.”
“Those old guys,” said Jim. “I sincerely hope not.”
“When will you learn, my son,” said Jim’s mother, “to be more
respectful towards the two great ladies of our neighborhood, the real
live daughters of a deceased dean?”
“I beg their pardons,” said Jim, who was humbled. “I am afraid I
have been getting very uncouth of late.”
“The great world is so unsettling, my son. I am afraid you are
already beginning to patronize a ridiculous old frump like me.”
“Beginning!” said Jim.
“But remember, my son, I am determined that I will not be
patronized in my own house by your friend the duke.”
“Oh! he won’t try to,” said Jim, airily. “He’s a very civil old soul, the
same as you are, my dear, although his circumstances are rather
better.”
“I won’t be patronized by that Goose either,” said Jim’s mother, with
tremendous spirit.
“You run no danger in that quarter,” said Jim. “It will be as much as
ever she can do adequately to patronize the strawberries and
cream.”
“And who, pray, is the accomplished Miss Burden? I will not be
patronized by her either.”
“I won’t answer for you there, señora. You might get short shift from
that quarter.”
“We shall see, my son,” said Jim’s mother, with an air almost of
truculence.
The back sitting-room at the Acacias was really a very mediocre
affair. It contained so little furniture that it was made to look half as
large again as it actually was. The small room was cool and tasteful
if, perhaps, somewhat too obviously simple and inexpensive. It
contained not a single reminiscence of bygone grandeur. For one
thing, the crash had been rather in the nature of a holocaust; and
again, an opulent past is a poor sort of aid to a penurious present.
The walls were decorated by a blue wash and by a single picture, a
study by Monsieur Gillet for his enchanting “La Dame au Gant.” It
had been given by that master to a young English pupil of whom he
was extremely fond. It held the bare walls all by itself. Jim was a
little vain about it. Then there was a little shelf of books. It
comprised five novels by Turgenev, two by Stendhal, three by
Anatole France, four by Meredith, three by Henry James, two
volumes of Heine, the lyrics of Victor Hugo, two plays of D’Annunzio,
and a volume of Baudelaire. There were two bowls of roses also,
which Jim had procured for his mother in honor of the occasion.
At a quarter to four Mrs. Lascelles sat reading “Pêcheur d’Islande”
for the thirteenth time. She looked very cool and dainty in a simple
black dress, embellished with still simpler white muslin. Her look of
youth had never been quite so aggressive; and in Jim’s opinion her
wise little smile of tempered gayety was perfectly irresistible.
“My dear,” said Jim, censoriously, “it is time you made a serious
effort to look older.”
“I do try so hard,” said Mrs. Lascelles, plaintively. “This is positively
the most frumpish frock I possess, and I have done my hair over my
ears on purpose.”
“Haven’t you an older frock?” said Jim.
“This one is decidedly the elder of the two, laddie.”
“How old is it?”
“Seven years.”
“And what is the age of the other one?”
“It is a mere infant. It is only five.”
“Then it is quite time you had a new one.”
“It is not usual, I believe, for a woman to get a new dress for the
purpose of making herself look older.”
“But then you are a most unusual woman.”
“I don’t want to be unusual, laddie. I do try so hard not to be. If
there is one thing I dislike more intensely than another it is an
unusual woman.”
“Then you are very perverse. I wonder what effect it would have if
you did your hair higher.”
“I will try if you like; but I know——”
“What do you know?” said Jim, sternly.
“That I never look quite so maternal as when I have it over my
ears.”
“Well, it’s a serious matter. I look like being driven to get a new
mother.”
“There is a scarcity of good ones, my son.”
Jim scanned the tiny sitting-room with a very critical look.
“Upon my word,” said he, “that little rosewood piano and that little
effort of Monsieur Gillet’s are the only decent things in it.”
“I am afraid we have an air of cheap gentility,” said his mother. “But
don’t let them sneer at it. Gentility of any kind is quite an honorable
aspiration.”
“I wonder,” said Jim, “if there is anybody in the neighborhood who
would lend us a Peerage for the afternoon. We might stick it in the
center of the room upon that little Japanese table.”
The front-door bell was heard to ring.
“Too late, too late,” said Mrs. Lascelles, dramatically. “The peerage
has already arrived.”
“It is the Miss Champneys,” said Jim.
“I think not, laddie. It is only twenty past four, and it is so much
more impressive to pay a call at five.”
“Two to one it’s the Hobson Family.”
The countenance of Jim’s mother assumed a look of anxiety that
bordered upon the tragic.
“By all the saints and all the powers,” said she, “I had quite
forgotten the existence of the Hobson Family. Do you really think it
can be?”
“I am perfectly sure of it,” said Jim, with immense conviction. “This
is an opportunity that the Hobson Family could not possibly miss.”
“Oh dear, oh dear!” said Jim’s mother, “what is to be done?”
“These things are sent to try us,” said Jim, philosophically. “The
Hobson Family has no other raison d’être.”
“Alack! alack!” gasped Jim’s mother.
The little maid-of-all-work entered the room. With her prim freckled
countenance and her hair, which like herself was quite unnecessarily
pretty, done over a roll, she conveyed somewhat the impression of a
small cat who has the furtive air of a confirmed cream stealer. Also
she had the air of one who takes an immense interest in everything.
“Miss Burden,” announced the little maid-of-all-work, as though it
gave her great pleasure to do so. “Miss Perry. The Earl of Cheriton.”
Mrs. Lascelles laid “Pêcheur d’Islande” upon the varnished boards.
She rose to greet Miss Perry with an exclamation. In the
circumstances it was most natural, for Miss Perry was looking neither
more nor less than a goddess.
Jim’s mother took a hand of Miss Perry in each of her own.
“You are too wonderful,” said she. “You take away one’s breath. I
always predicted that you would grow up a beautiful girl; but, really,
who could have expected this.”
Miss Perry said nothing at first. She merely proceeded to hug Jim’s
mother in the traditional Widdiford manner.
Mrs. Lascelles appeared to undergo some little personal
inconvenience in the process.
“You wonderful being,” she gasped.
Jim presented Miss Burden to his mother with a formal and
becoming gravity. There was always a veiled tenderness about the
eyes of Miss Burden which to some people rendered her oddly
attractive. Her air of shyness was also thought by some to be a
merit.
“So sweet of you to come,” said Jim’s mother. She had already
performed the feminine operation of falling in love with Miss Burden
at first sight.
“I should also like, my dear,” said Jim, with excellent gravity, “to
make you and Lord Cheriton acquainted with one another. You can’t
think how kind he has been to me.”
Jim’s mother gazed demurely into the complacent and amused
countenance of that peer.
“I think I ought to be able to guess,” said she.
“Capital,” that peer was heard to murmur with extraordinary
irrelevance.
“I beg your pardon,” said Jim.
“Not at all, my dear fellow,” said Cheriton, in his most graciously
musical manner, “not at all. I made no observation. But I should like
to be allowed to make one. What remarkable sunshine for London.”
“The sunshine is occasionally quite obtrusive at Balham,” said Jim’s
mother. “Lower the sunblind a little, laddie. You will find that chair
the coolest, Lord Cheriton.”
It was really not necessary for Mrs. Lascelles to offer the coolest
chair to Lord Cheriton. For, if the truth must be told, he looked cool
enough already. It was perhaps his most assiduously cultivated and
most carefully cherished characteristic. However, he took the chair
Jim’s mother had indicated. He took it almost as if he were
conferring homage upon it. Having chosen a likely spot upon the
varnished boards upon which to set his silk hat, he proceeded to
place it there with immense precision. He then crossed his lavender
trousers very urbanely, displaying in the process an extremely neat
and spotless pair of white gaiters. He then placed his black-rimmed
eyeglass in the left or more fashionable eye, and surveyed his
surroundings with a leisurely benevolence that was really most
engaging.
By the time Cheriton appeared to be pleasantly settled, and by the
time Mrs. Lascelles had fully recovered from the effects of Miss
Perry’s third hug, she said—
“Ring, laddie.”
Jim obeyed. He had assumed already an air of almost unwarrantable
humor.
The little maid-of-all-work entered.
“Tea, please, Miranda,” said her mistress.
Miranda embellished the command of her mistress with a totally
unnecessary half courtesy which she was apt to produce upon state
occasions. It was a remarkably effective little affair, although its true
place was undoubtedly a comic-opera.
“Capital!” murmured Cheriton. And then, as a pause in the
conversation seemed to give his remark a significance to which it
laid no claim, he added sententiously, “weather!”
“Yes,” said Jim, “capital weather.”
Miss Burden addressed a remark to Jim’s mother.
“Do you think the exhibition of the Royal Academy is equal to the
last one?”
“I think it is better,” said Mrs. Lascelles, with an air of conviction,
“decidedly better, don’t you?”
“That is because there is a picture by a young fellow of the name of
Lascelles in it,” said Jim.
“Quite a sufficient reason,” said Cheriton.
“The brutes have skyed me, though,” said Jim.
“Jealousy, my dear fellow,” said Cheriton. “The Church, the stage,
and the fine arts live in perpetual dread of the rising generation.”
“That is so true, Lord Cheriton,” said Jim’s mother. “I am so glad to
hear you say that. Of course it is jealousy. Those musty and
stereotyped old R.A.’s are dreadfully frightened of young men with
new ideas.”
“Profoundly true, my dear Mrs. Lascelles; profoundly true,” said
Cheriton, with the deference of a courtier.
“My mother expects every one who enters this house,” said Jim,
aggrievedly, “to declare that I’m a genius.”
“I do not find it at all hard,” said Cheriton, “to obey that condition.”
“People of taste never do,” said Jim’s mother, beaming upon my lord.
The little maid-of-all-work brought in a tea-tray and a basket of
comestibles.
“Miranda,” said her mistress, “if Mrs. Hobson calls, or Miss Hermia
Hobson, or Miss Harriet Hobson, or Mr. Hobson, or Mr. Herbert
Hobson, or Mr. Henry Hobson calls, I am not at home.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said the little maid-of-all-work, with an air of
great intelligence, and with a further display of the comic-opera
courtesy.
“Sugar or lemon, Miss Burden?” said Jim’s mother.
Miss Burden took sugar, a small lump. Miss Perry took two lumps,
size not stated.
“I wish these cups were more sensible,” said Jim’s mother, with a
reminiscence and an apology.
“That cup is absurd, my dear,” said Jim.
Miss Perry seemed inclined to agree with Jim.
“Fetch the largest cup we have in the house, please, Miranda,” said
her mistress.
“Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Lascelles,” said Miss Perry.
Jim handed bread and butter and strawberries. Miss Burden was
content with a small slice of the former. Miss Perry was more eclectic
in her patronage. Jim was then guilty of an action which his mother
was forced to consider as singularly ill bred. He took up the plate of
cream buns, Buszard’s large size, which had been specially procured,
and placed it on the chimney-piece in a very ostentatious manner.
And at the same time he indulged in a classical quotation to Lord
Cheriton, who laughed as though he understood it. It is possible that
Miss Burden understood it also, but Mrs. Lascelles seemed a little
doubtful about its meaning. As for Miss Perry, she was perfectly
frank and wholly unabashed in her abysmal ignorance.
“What does it mean?” she demanded, with a thrill in her voice and
her azure orbs very wide.
“It means,” said Jim, “it is better to contemplate from afar the
rewards of virtue than to partake of them prematurely.”
“A free translation, my dear fellow,” said Cheriton, “creditable alike to
your scholarship, your literary instinct, and your knowledge of
human nature.”
“But you owe me one, you know,” said Miss Perry. “Doesn’t he, Lord
Cheriton?”
“I am afraid, Lascelles,” said that peer, “it will be necessary to return
a true bill.”
Jim presented Miss Perry with one cream bun on a blue china plate.
“That spotted cake with the almonds in it is topping,” said he,
attempting maliciously to embarrass Miss Perry with riches. “The
pastrycook who creates it has a reputation that extends as far as
Upper Tooting and Streatham.”
“I will try some,” said Miss Perry.
Lord Cheriton took lemon with his tea, also a rusk.
“Genius is a delightful thing,” said he, conversationally. “I have a
genius for admiring it in others.”
“One feels sure you must have,” said Jim’s mother, most
sympathetically. “I am trying to cultivate it also. As one is the mother
of a highly gifted son, one feels that one ought.”
“Precisely,” said Cheriton. “And may one venture to remark that you
will not find the undertaking difficult?”
“Lord Cheriton,” said Jim, in a tone of warning, “weigh your words
carefully. My life is in danger of becoming a burden to me. As for
you, señora,” said Jim, sternly, “once more, and with the most
marked publicity, I deny with all the vehemence of which I am
capable that I am a genius.”
“What, pray, is the use?” said his mother. “It is futile to deny it.
Besides, even if you were not, it is not right to contradict your old
mother, especially before company.”
“So true,” murmured the arbiter elegantiarum nibbling at his rusk.
Jim, however, was a young fellow with resources. He proceeded
immediately to carry the war into the enemy’s country.
“I am afraid, Lord Cheriton,” said he, “that judgment is not my
mother’s strong point. You see, she is not so mature as she might
be.”
“I have observed it,” said Cheriton.
“Her absence of judgment,” said Jim, coolly, “or her absence of
maturity?”
“I have observed her absence of maturity,” said Cheriton, with a
coolness in nowise behind the coolness of Jim.
“In my opinion,” said Jim, “she is too young to be the mother of a
great hulking fellow like me.”
“I am inclined to agree with you, Lascelles,” said my lord, with his
courtier’s air. “But in my humble judgment it is a pleasant folly for a
mother to err on the side of youth.”
“It is a form of indiscretion not without its dangers,” said Jim.
“Yes, my dear Lascelles, you are undoubtedly right there.”
“This spotted cake with the almonds in it is awfully nice,” said Miss
Perry.
“The confection with the pink icing and the sugar-plums is generally
admired at Balham,” said Jim.
“I will try some,” said Miss Perry. “Quite a small piece, please. I think
pink icing is so nice; don’t you?”
“I do,” said Jim, cutting a liberal piece for two persons.
A ring was heard to proceed from the front-door bell. Mrs. Lascelles
betrayed anxiety.
“I trust,” said she, “our small Cerberus will prove equal to a frontal
attack by the Hobson family.”
“She will, unquestionably,” said Jim, with an air of reassurance.
“It would be a great disappointment if she didn’t,” said Cheriton, “if
one may venture to express a purely personal emotion.”
“Why, Lord Cheriton?” said Jim’s mother. Her tone was a natural
blend of surprise and interest.
“A lifelong habit of minute observation,” said Cheriton, “emboldens
one to think that she would prove equal to anything.”
Before Cheriton could suffer rebuke for holding an opinion upon such
a subject, the little maid-of-all-work announced—
“Lady Charlotte Greg, Miss Champneys, Miss Laetitia Champneys.”
The space of the small back sitting-room was sensibly diminished by
the entrance of three tall bony women, each equally austere of
feature and ponderous of manner. Each was veiled and habited in
black with white facings; and although their boots were not elastic-
sided, it is difficult to advance any adequate reason for their not
being so fashioned.
Miss Champneys, whose manner was decidedly impressive,
introduced to Jim’s mother Lady Charlotte Greg, her oldest friend,
who was staying with them at The Laurels for the purpose of
opening the sale of work at Saint Agatha’s. Lady Charlotte Greg, the
daughter of a successful politician and the wife of an evangelical
bishop, conveyed the right degree of distance in her greeting. And
after all, when you come to think of it, the distance is very great
between a tiny back sitting-room at Balham and the Palace at
Marchester.
While these three very large ladies were adjusting themselves to
three somewhat small chairs, and they were accepting tea from a
fresh brew duly procured by the assiduous Miranda, each lifted her
black veil and scrutinized her surroundings and her company with a
rather ruthless directness. It always seemed to the quailing hostess
of the Acacias, the Chestnuts, the Elms, or of Beaconsfield Villas,
when she met that glance that a personal apology was demanded
from her.
All three ladies were unanimous in the opinion that Mrs. Lascelles’
callers were overdressed. And in their opinion to be overdressed was
to be guilty of one of the seven deadly sins.
“I am convinced,” said Miss Laetitia Champneys, in an undertone to
Lady Charlotte Greg, “that that girl in the preposterous hat with
feathers is an actress.”
In the opinion of Miss Laetitia Champneys for any person to be an
actress was to identify one’s self with the most elemental form of
human degradation.
“Do you suppose I require to be told, Laetitia?” said Lady Charlotte,
bridling. She felt that not only her sense of decency but also her
knowledge of the world had been aspersed. “And that preposterous
person with the eyeglass,” added Lady Charlotte, “is, of course, an
actor-manager.”
Neither Miss Laetitia nor her elder sister, Miss Champneys, was quite
sure what an actor-manager really was. They did know, however,
that dear Charlotte was excelled by none in knowledge of the world.
Lady Charlotte, as is the way with Lady Charlottes all the world over,
as the erudite inform us, put up her glasses. She proceeded to study
the actor-manager, a rare species of wild fowl of which the Close of
Marchester was mercifully free, in a manner which can only be
described as remorseless. Yet the actor-manager appeared to suffer
no embarrassment. He serenely changed his black-rimmed monocle
from his left eye to his right, which, if not quite so fashionable as the
other one, was rather perversely endowed with better powers of
vision.
CHAPTER XIX
A SOCIAL TRIUMPH

FOR almost the space of a minute a battle royal was waged between
the monocle and the long-handled folders. All present, with the
exception of Miss Perry, who was not in the habit of observing
anything, sat in breathless silence to observe the issue. And
incredible as it may appear, the issue was not with the long-handled
folders.
“Capital!” murmured the victor, to nobody in particular, and for no
apparent reason.
Jim Lascelles was one of those unfortunate and misguided people
who have an extraordinary flair for what they call “fun.” He bent over
to his mother.
“Don’t give the show away yet,” said he.
“You are too cryptic, my son, for this addle-pate.”
“Don’t you see,” said Jim. “They think our dark horse is an outsider.
Had they known they wouldn’t have come.”
Jim’s mother smiled her little half smile whose furtive mischief was
really far more becoming than it ought to have been.
“When is the sale of work, Lady Charlotte?” she asked, in order to
keep the pot boiling.
The simple question was received by the three ladies with hauteur.
As the sale of work began on the morrow, and Mrs. Lascelles had
promised to preside over the bran tub or the refreshment stall or the
rummage counter, she was not quite clear which, their demeanor
was perhaps not unnatural.
“The sale of work begins to-morrow at three o’clock, Mrs. Lascelles,”
said Miss Champneys, coldly.
“Of course,” said Jim’s mother. “How stupid of me! I knew that
perfectly well. What I meant to have said was, which is the day upon
which Lady Charlotte will perform the opening ceremony?”
“The first, Mrs. Lascelles,” said Miss Champneys and Miss Laetitia,
speaking as one.
“Of course,” said Jim’s mother; and involuntarily added the rider,
“how stupid of one!” The Miss Champneys were matchless in putting
people in the wrong. “What I should have asked was, who will
perform the ceremony on the second day?”
“The wife of the member,” said Miss Champneys.
“And on the third?” asked Jim’s mother, rather obviously.
“Lady Plunket,” said Miss Laetitia.
“The wife of the brewer?” asked Jim.
Jim’s question provoked a further display of hauteur. In the first
instance it was an act of presumption for a young man like Jim to
have ventured to ask a question at all, and in the second he had
contrived to ask the sort of question that stamped him as belonging
to the neighborhood.
“Lady Plunket was a Coxby, I believe,” said Miss Champneys. She
assumed an air of devastation, which was singularly becoming to
one whose forebears, according to their own oral and written
testimony, had first appeared in these islands in the train of the
Conqueror.
“Any relation to the parson chap?” inquired Cheriton, casually.
Lady Charlotte Greg again elected to do battle.
“I am informed that Lady Plunket is a niece of the late Archbishop
Coxby,” said she, in a tone and manner which for two decades had
cowed the minor clergy of the diocese.
“Archbishop, was he?” said Cheriton. “I only knew him in his capacity
of a bore.”
Each of the three ladies was susceptible of a little quiver of horror.
“Pray where did you meet him?” demanded Lady Charlotte Greg,
with dilated nostril.
“In the House,” said Cheriton. “Shockin’ bore in the House.”
Lady Charlotte raised her glasses with studious care.
“The domestic life of Archbishop Coxby was renowned for its
simplicity,” said she.
A pause surcharged with suppressed emotion followed, and then the
ludicrous drawl of Miss Perry was heard in the land.
“I think a sale of work is too sweet,” said that Featherbrain. “We
always have one once a year in the parish-room at Slocum Magna.”
The Miss Champneys and Lady Charlotte Greg received this
announcement with a frosty disdain which, sad to relate, had not the
least effect upon Miss Perry. The fine shades of social feeling did not
percolate to that obtuse person.
“That is very interesting, my dear Miss Goose,” said Cheriton, in his
most mellifluous manner; “very interesting indeed.”
“We raised eight pounds two and ninepence for the organ fund in
1900, at Slocum Magna,” drawled Miss Perry.
“Where, pray, is Slocum Magna?” inquired Lady Charlotte Greg.
Miss Perry had learned by this time that whenever Slocum Magna
was mentioned in the presence of London people the question was
inevitable. However, before she could take steps to enlighten Lady
Charlotte Greg, Cheriton favored her with a paternal finger.
“Permit me, my dear Miss Goose,” said he, elaborately. “Slocum
Magna,” he proceeded, with the weighty air of one who is no
stranger to the Front Bench, “is the next village to Widdiford.”
“And where, pray, is Widdiford?” inquired Lady Charlotte Greg.
“Widdiford,” said Cheriton, meditatively, “Widdiford is the place
where the Red House is and where they haven’t quite got the
railway, don’t you know.”
“But it is only three miles away,” chimed Miss Perry.
The pause which ensued made Jim’s mother and the Miss
Champneys wonder what was going to happen. All three felt a little
uncomfortable. On the contrary, Lady Charlotte Greg felt it to be a
tribute to the overpowering nature of her personality, and was
gratified accordingly. Cheriton crossed and recrossed his lavender
trousers, and changed the glass from the right eye to the left with
the air of a High Church clergyman pronouncing the benediction.
“Have you been to see the horses at the Hippodrome?” inquired the
undefeated Miss Perry of Lady Charlotte Greg.
“I have not,” said that lady, with a quiver of an evangelical top-knot.
“Have you?” inquired Miss Perry of the Miss Champneys.
“My sister and I have not,” said the elder Miss Champneys, whose
top-knot, although not quite so evangelical as Lady Charlotte’s, yet
contrived to quiver just as much.
“You ought,” said Miss Perry, with irresistible friendliness. “They play
bridge and fire off guns and pretend to be dead. I have been nine
times.”
The Miss Champneys conferred in discreet undertones with Lady
Charlotte Greg.
“Too natural to be an actress,” said that authority. “Her hair and skin
bear inspection. If she were not so painfully overdressed she would
be a singularly beautiful girl.”
“Can you place that curiously artificial person?” asked Miss Laetitia,
who had a passion for exact knowledge.
“An actor-manager unmistakably,” said Infallibility with immense
decision.

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