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‘A HAPPY HOLIDAY’:
ENGLISH CANADIANS AND TRANSATLANTIC TOURISM,
1870–1930

One of the most revealing things about national character is the way
that citizens react to and report on their travels abroad. Oftentimes a
tourist’s experience with a foreign place says as much about their
country of origin as it does about their destination. ‘A Happy Holiday’
examines the travels of English-speaking Canadian men and women to
Britain and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. It describes the experiences of tourists, detailing where they
went and their reactions to tourist sites, and draws attention to the cen-
trality of culture and the sensory dimensions of overseas tourism.
Among the specific topics explored are travellers’ class relation-
ships with people in the tourism industry, impressions of historic
landscapes in Britain and Europe, descriptions of imperial spectacles
and cultural sights, the use of public spaces, and encounters with fel-
low tourists and how such encounters either solidified or unsettled
national subjectivities. Cecilia Morgan draws our attention to the
important ambiguities between empire and nation, and how this
relationship was dealt with by tourists in foreign lands. Based on
personal letters, diaries, newspapers, and periodicals from across
Canada, ‘A Happy Holiday’ argues that overseas tourism offered peo-
ple the chance to explore questions of identity during this period, a
time in which issues such as gender, nation, and empire were the sub-
ject of much public debate and discussion.

cecilia morgan is an associate professor in the Department of History

at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
This page intentionally left blank
CECILIA MORGAN

‘A Happy Holiday’
English Canadians and Transatlantic
Tourism, 1870–1930

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R E S S
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9758-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8020-9518-3 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Morgan, Cecilia Louise, 1958–
A happy holiday: English Canadians and transatlantic tourism, 1870–1930 /
Cecilia Morgan.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8020–9758-3 (bound) ISBN 978-0-8020–9518-3 (pbk.)

1. Canadians, English-speaking – Travel – Great Britain – History.

2. Canadians, English-speaking – Travel – Europe – History. I. Title.

G156.M67 2008 914.1'0089112 C2007-906001-3

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).

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
To Paul
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Prologue xiii

Introduction: Holidays, Happiness, and Transatlantic Tourism 3

1 Porters, Guides, and the Middle-Class Tourist:

The Practices of Transatlantic Tourism 31
2 The Landscape of History and Empire, Part 1: Scotland 59
3 The Landscape of History and Empire, Part 2: England 78
4 ‘Paddy’s Grief and Native Wit’: Canadian Tourists and Ireland 124
5 ‘The Hot Life of London Is upon Us’:
Travel to the Imperial Capital 161
6 The Street, the Regatta, and the Orphanage:
The Public and Social Spaces of Tourism in Britain 202
7 ‘This Sight-Seeing Is a Strenuous Business’:
European Sojourns, Part 1 236
8 Natural Wonders and National Cultures:
European Sojourns, Part 2 268
9 ‘A Big Old Country Car, Speeding around a Winding Road’:
Transatlantic Tourism in the 1920s 317

Epilogue 361
viii Contents

Notes 371
Bibliography 447
Index 455
Acknowledgments

It is hard to be brief, as this is a fairly long book (although it could well

have been longer!), and I’ve accumulated many debts along the way.
I first must thank Queen’s University, which in 1996 supported my
initial research with a small-scale grant from its Advisory Research
Committee. Nancy Wood, Office of Research Services, Queen’s, pro-
vided critical advice and encouragement that was of great assistance in
developing a larger funding proposal. The Social Sciences and Humani-
ties Research Council provided me with a Standard Research Grant; the
anonymous reviewers of my proposal also gave well-considered feed-
back and advice. The University of Toronto’s Connaught Fund sup-
ported this work with a New Faculty Grant and a New Staff Matching
Research Award. The financial support of all these institutions was vital
in order to undertake the travel needed to write a book about transat-
lantic tourism. It also allowed me to hire a number of research assis-
tants, whose dedication to and excitement about this project was truly
gratifying: John Allison, Martha Donkor, Pamela Genn, Arlis Peer,
Elizabeth Price, Joan Simalchik, and Nicole Woodman-Harvey.
Across Canada, a very wide circle of archivists and librarians, from
Halifax to Victoria and in local, regional, provincial, and national insti-
tutions, generously offered their knowledge and made helpful sugges-
tions for material, both published and unpublished. Pamela Miller of
McGill University’s Osler Library generously gave me the consider-
able benefit of her wealth of knowledge of English Canada’s elite. I
couldn’t follow up on all of her wonderful suggestions but learned
much from our discussion. Thanks are due to Dena Doroshenko of the
Ontario Heritage Foundation for her generosity in granting me access
to the Ashbridge Family Papers at the Foundation’s Ashbridge House,
x Acknowledgments

for sharing her knowledge of the family’s history, and for suggesting
that I consult the Fulford Family Papers. My thanks to the following
for permission to reproduce visual material: the Archives of Ontario,
the D. B. Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario, Library
and Archives Canada, and the McCord Museum, Montreal. I thank
Victoria University Library for granting me permission to quote from
the Kathleen Coburn papers.
My intellectual debts are very large and probably can’t be repaid. A
number of historians of the British Empire introduced me to new bod-
ies of historiography and gave me the benefit of their rich knowledge
of its history. It would be very hard to write imperial, transatlantic,
and transnational histories without such scholarly generosity. Sandra
den Otter read the initial grant proposal and offered very good advice
for its improvement. Stephen Heathorn and Paul Deslandes have not
only been good friends over the years but in 1997 also were kind
enough to invite me to participate in a panel on national identities
at the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) at
Asilomar, California. I am extremely grateful to them for introducing
me to NACBS: the Association’s gatherings have been a wonderful
source of intellectual stimulation and that initial meeting introduced
me to Angela Woollacott. Her work on white Australian women trav-
ellers has been a great source of inspiration and her friendship and
support have been equally important. For their interest, enthusiasm,
and very insightful suggestions, I also would like to thank Anne
Clendinning and Matthew Hendley. Closer to ‘home,’ Karen Dubinsky’s
enthusiasm for this project has been truly gratifying. In 1996 she had
the prescience to tell me that this would be my next book: not only
was she right but she also was generous enough to read the first draft
and to give me wonderful advice and suggestions for its improve-
ment. Brian Young, whose work has shown us how to look at the
privileged with critical and perceptive eyes, was a constant source of
enthusiasm and support. I must also thank Elizabeth Kirkland for
so generously sharing her knowledge of Montreal’s Clouston and
Roddick families. My thanks to audiences at the following confer-
ences and seminars: the Canadian Historical Association; NACBS;
Cultural Approaches to the Study of Canadian Nationalism, Nipissing
University; Queen’s University History Department’s Faculty-Graduate
Seminar; and the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario. Special
thanks to Barbara Lorenzkowski and Steve High for inviting me to
participate in the Nipissing Conference, an experience that helped
 Acknowledgments xi

refine my thoughts on English-Canadian nationalism. The anony-

mous readers of the manuscript provided wonderful suggestions and
comments; I have attempted to incorporate as much of their advice as
I could.
Lori May, Communications and Special Projects Coordinator, Depart-
ment of Theory and Policy Studies, OISE/UT, gave me much-needed
help with the initial scanning of the images used in this book. I also
would like to thank the staff at Brock University Library’s Office of
Reproduction Services for their generous and patient work in scanning
many of the images from the Canadian Magazine. At the University of
Toronto Press, it has been a great pleasure to work with Len Husband
as my editor: I thank him for his support, his good advice and humour,
and his enthusiasm for something this long and with so many illustra-
tions. Thanks too to my copy-editors, Kate Baltais and Harold Otto, for
their expertise and patience, both of which made this book much more
pleasant to read. Frances Mundy shepherded this book through its
final stages with professionalism and care.
Eleanor Cardoza and Jeremy Morgan offered great hospitality in
Saskatoon and Suzanne Morton did the same in Montreal. Over the
years of working on this book I’ve been fortunate to have the friend-
ship and support of Karen Dubinsky, Nancy M. Forestell, Franca
Iacovetta, Lynne Marks, and Katherine McPherson, even if we don’t
get to see each other as often as we might like to. Suzanne Morton has
been a true friend, both about this project and many other things: it is
a great treat to acknowledge her wit and wisdom in matters aca-
demic, historical, and otherwise. Thanks, as always, to my family, for
their consistent support of and interest in my work. Saving the best
for last, Paul Jenkins has seen this project through to its completion
without flagging in his enthusiasm and loving encouragement. Here’s
to many ‘happy holidays.’
This page intentionally left blank
Prologue. ‘It seems a long time since I have
seen anything Canadian’: Mary Leslie’s
Transatlantic Travel, 1867–1868

‘The noise was fearful, the children screaming and vomiting and my
fellow-sufferers groaning,’ wrote Mary Leslie to her mother at the fam-
ily’s home in Guelph, Ontario. Leslie herself had been delirious and
was unable to retain anything – food, water, or medicine – in her stom-
ach; a visit from a young and, it seems, rather brusque doctor was suc-
cessful only in sedating her. Her letter described not a hospital ward
where all were stricken by some deadly disease but, rather, the cabin of
a transatlantic ship bound for Liverpool, England, overbooked with
passengers in the throes of violent seasickness. From the moment she
set foot on board, the trip did not bode well for Leslie. She had been
‘horrified’ by the sight of her small and overcrowded cabin, with its
cloying smell of new paint and lack of ventilation. The disagreeable
behaviour of one of her cabin mates did not help, for Miss ‘L’ ‘always
dressed first in the morning, took full an hour and had the door shut all
the time nearly suffocating us poor creatures in our beds.’ Leslie’s
plight would have been wretched indeed had it not been for the kind-
ness of her capable stewardess, a fifty-year-old with ‘not a grey hair
and rosy cheeks,’ who had been twenty-two years at sea and had
sailed to almost ‘every port.’ Her diet of beef tea and gruel managed to
stay in Leslie’s stomach, and she was able to receive a visit from one of
the French Roman Catholic priests on board, the only passenger, she
told her mother, who came to see her.1 These men were initially
‘shunned and treated with contempt by all the good Protestant passen-
gers, but before the voyage was out they were very popular.’2
Once the ship reached the Irish coast and calmer waters Mary Leslie
was able to remain on deck for most of the day, enjoying the ‘coast that
appeared to you so desolate and frowning … the dark rocks were
xiv Prologue

clothed in the brightest and softest greenest moss I ever saw in my life.’
She attended a benefit concert for a ‘poor widow’ travelling in steer-
age, who was returning to Cornwall after her husband’s death in a
Quebec mining accident. Various songs were sung, and Shakespeare
was recited ‘very badly,’ but the evening’s efforts raised £7 for the
woman and her three children. Leslie also contributed to other charita-
ble collections for steerage passengers (a sick woman, a elderly man),
explaining to her father that ‘I had suffered so much myself and I had a
great many more comforts than these poor miserable creatures that I
felt it would be a sin not to give something.’ On disembarking in Liver-
pool she gave her stewardess a half sovereign and the steward 5s, as
she felt that she had given them more trouble than anyone else on
board. Her voyage ended on a somewhat sour note with her efforts to
tip the doctor. ‘I am paid by the shipowners,’ he told Leslie but ‘if you
like to give me a fee, I am a poor man and not above being paid like
any other “servant.”’ Forced to ask him the amount, Leslie was visibly
shaken when he quoted her two sovereigns. Seeing her distress, the
doctor relented and took only one. ‘You are not so rich as I supposed,’
he told her, ‘“I know you think two too much for you changed colour,
you value your life at one sovereign – good bye take care of your body
– though women never do that,” and so I took back the sovereign and
we parted.’3
The most gruelling part of her journey to England over, Leslie took
the train to London, where she spent the next four months with her
paternal uncle William and his family in Dulwich. An aspiring writer
who had travelled overseas to find a publisher, Mary Leslie spent her
time sightseeing, visiting relatives and family friends, and observing
the foibles of the English. In October she responded to a Times adver-
tisement for an English governess in a German school in Amsterdam.
In return for two hours of English lessons and drawing instruction, she
was to receive board, lodging, washing, and instruction in German,
French, and music (‘but no salary,’ she emphasized to her parents, the
recipients of a number of requests for money). The reference for the
school was a good one, she reassured them, as it came from the chap-
lain of the British Consul in Amsterdam.4 Once in the Netherlands,
Leslie continued to write home, describing and commenting on Dutch
manners and customs. Her letters to Guelph end 15 March 1868, with a
description of a Dutch wedding and a promise that she would bring
home ‘green cheddar and chocolate’ for her mother’s birthday.5
 Prologue xv

Mary Leslie’s account of her experiences across the Atlantic Ocean

helps introduce many of the themes of this book’s. Leslie was far from
being a ‘typical’ English-Canadian traveller. She would go on to have a
career as a writer of history, poetry for children, and fiction, and her
ability to observe with a sceptical (one might say acerbic) writer’s eye
is apparent in her letters.6 Nor can I argue that Leslie’s experiences
completely foreshadowed those reported by the English-Canadian
travel writers and tourists whose accounts are examined in detail in
this study; they did not entirely replicate Leslie’s cultural and social
experiences. Although there were many similarities between Leslie’s
story in Dulwich and Amsterdam and the sojourns of Canadians who
came after her, there were also a number of differences. Leslie herself
both resembled and was different from her fellow travelling Canadi-
ans. Both the similarities and the differences are worth exploring to
understand the varied meanings of Canadians’ transatlantic travel and
tourism from the 1870s to the 1920s.
From the start of her stay in England, Leslie openly professed a pro-
found ambivalence towards England and ‘the English,’ and the depth
of this ambivalence sets her apart from many of the English-Canadians
who visited Britain in the first five decades after Confederation. To be
sure, like most every other tourist, she participated in viewing royalty.
One of her first recorded experiences in London was the sight of Prin-
cess Alice (‘at least I saw a little pale face that they said was the Princess
Alice that I should not know again’), the Prince of Wales, and the Queen
of Prussia.7 Yet as her comment about the nondescript appearance of
Princess Alice suggests, Leslie’s report of seeing the royal family was
perfunctory, recorded more as a duty, and quite different from the
descriptions of the emotionally charged spectacles provided by later
tourists. To some extent such contrast may be explained by the relative
lack of pomp and display surrounding public appearances of English
royalty around the time of Leslie’s visit. Such was no longer the case by
the 1880s and 1890s.8 Leslie went on to tell her family that ‘what was
better I saw the Life guards blue and red with their gorgeous uniforms
and beautiful horses, and I can’t tell you how many coachmen and foot-
men in rich liveries.’9 Horses clearly interested Leslie more than titled
or fashionable personages. She enjoyed the ‘pretty dresses and the liver-
ies’ of Rotten Row, but confessed that ‘I would walk ten mile a day (if I
had the strength) to see such beautiful horses as I saw this evening.’10
Leslie had little patience with what she perceived as ‘English’ deference
xvi Prologue

and unwarranted respect for the titled. One time she ‘had a good look
at Lady Palmerston driving along in an open carriage looking rather
desolate I thought with her white hair and widow’s cap.’ Another time,
as she and her friend Mrs Williamson were leaving Rotten Row, they
stopped to watch the occupant of a carriage descend from it and enter
his house. A ‘gross gouty over-grown old man, like old Jones in the
face, but coarser and more surly … Mrs Williamson slightly pulled my
sleeve and we stood back till the old fellow got up the steps and into his
own house, with the assistance of a most gentlemanly looking man
(who proved to be the butler) and just as I was honouring her in my
heart for her deference to old age, she whispered deferentially “that was
Lord Lowborough.”’11
London would send many Canadian visitors into paroxysms of
delight. Mary Leslie judged it far more critically and at times quite
harshly. After she took a trip along the Thames to Greenwich on the
smallest steamboat she had ever seen, she reported that the river
‘exceeds my expectations for I had not imagination enough to conceive
anything so filthy and abominable. The stench nearly made me sick,
and entirely spoiled the pleasure of looking at the Traitor’s Gate,
Somerset House, and the London Docks.’ Greenwich itself, though,
was ‘wonderful,’ with its portrait and death mask of Nelson, relics of
the Franklin Expedition, and Van Dyke’s portrait of Prince Rupert’s
‘dark spirited face with a smiling satirical mask that would surely have
said something saucy to me if I had stood there a minute longer.’12 At
the Adelphi Theatre she saw the final performance of Kate Terry, a ‘pet
actress’ who was leaving the stage to marry a rich man, and found it
enjoyable – at least to a degree. Terry, appearing in Much Ado about
Nothing, ‘played with great spirit and had a nice Irish voice.’ The audi-
ence gave her a ‘thundering cheer’ on her first entrance and afterwards
two curtain calls of her own. Leslie was ‘supplied with a pair of opera
goggles and stared through them the whole evening like a black beetle.
The dresses of the performers were very rich, magnificent brocades
and velvets and once they used the magnesium lights to represent
noonday and it was wonderfully natural.’ But the theatre was
‘crowded to excess and the heat insufferable’ and, apart from Terry, the
‘only two good actors were a Mr Henry N (a scion of the aristocracy
who has been cut by his family for becoming an actor) and Mr Clarke
who acted Dogberry.’13
Leslie’s critical evaluation of English society touched on a wide vari-
ety of topics. She told her mother that ‘I have scarcely seen a pair of
 Prologue xvii

rosy cheeks since I came to England, scarcely a character who has a

better complexion than myself’ and that her uncle’s tea was ‘poor
stuff’ (although she admitted that another group of relatives ‘know
how to brew a cup of tea’). Much of her correspondence hints at pent-
up frustration with her new surroundings. After telling her mother
that the flowers in England were ‘magnificent’ and better than those in
Canada, she tartly observed that ‘the kitchen ranges are decidedly infe-
rior to the Canadian stoves – miserable things to iron and bathe with
and not a bit better for roasting than the stoves, and the people of
England are a slow people and take twice as long to do things as the
Canadians do.’14 She did not like London’s weather, or the polluted air.
‘It is not a climate I admire at least near London – in the first place it is
very damp and chilly and you are never sure of the rain and in the next
it is always dull and smoky, you can never see any distance for the
smoke even in Dulwich and one knows that is dirty coal smoke, and
not the gentle haze of Indian summer.’15
Unhealthy complexions, mediocre household technology, and a bad
climate were only some of England’s shortcomings. Leslie’s severest
criticisms of her ancestral homeland stemmed from her view of the
English attitude towards those weaker than themselves. Lifting her
head from the letter she was writing, Leslie watched a team of plough
horses for a few moments and was reminded that ‘the people of
England are a cruel people to animals the donkeys are dreadfully ill-
used and so are the omnibus horses and all the conveyances public and
private are too large and heavy for the animals that draw them.’16
Although she experienced ‘hospitality and kindness’ in all the homes
in which she was a guest, ‘for all this I cannot help observing the
intense selfishness, the utter indifference of nearly everybody I have
seen to those outside their own family … their callousness about the
dreadful poverty and human misery that festers under the nose of
everybody who lives in London and even of those merely passing
through, the general suspicion, and repugnance and objection they
have to everybody who is poor and in misery.’ To illustrate her point
Leslie told her father of an incident she had witnessed en route to the
theatre with her cousins. Walking through

a dirty back street, a sort of arched back way not far from the Adelphi the-
atre, I daresay you know the place and there was a number of blind men
there standing against the wall with their hats held out before them mis-
erable looking creatures most of them were, but one in particular who
xviii Prologue

was tapping the pavement with his stick and feeling his way slowly along
was the most wretched looking fellow creature I ever beheld. He was evi-
dently sight-less, his face scarred almost out of the form of humanity, he
was thin to emaciation and the rags he had on scarcely covered his naked-
ness. He carried a board on his waist with large printed letters on it
appealing to the charity of his fellow creatures by telling them that he had
lost his sight in a coal mine accident many years before. I was sorry but I
had left my purse at home for fear of thieves and had not even a penny to
give him and I said so. ‘It is very sad my dear,’ said cousin Anne drawing
her skirts up round her plump person and stepping back a little as he
passed us. Mr Green came up just then and he said with a look of repug-
nance to the beggars ‘you chose a very unpleasant way to come Mamma,’
and offered an arm to each of us. He never gave any of those poor old fel-
lows a half-penny and I don’t believe it ever occurred to him that he was
of the same humanity as them, or that there was any connection between
the wife who walked by his side, and the little daughter he had been pet-
ting at dinner-time, and a poor dirty woman and child whom we saw
asleep on a door step. I think if Christ came back to the earth that these
wealthy Britons would be as hard upon him as the rich Jews were of old,
and consider him a ‘pestilent fellow’ for healing and comforting the poor
– indeed I am sure of this point the way I have heard nearly every body
speak of Lord Shaftesbury, Dr Marsh and his daughter who did so much
good among the navvies.17

This lack of compassion and humanitarianism was not limited to

Leslie’s family. In English society

Charles Dickens is very much liked and everybody speaks well of him
but in a tolerant half-patronizing sort of way. They tolerate him because
he is amusing and gives them hard hits in a pleasant general way and his
lectures are well attended not because they are given for the benefit of the
poor but because the people who go are sure of spending a pleasant
evening and getting their shilling’s worth. Everybody whom I have heard
speak of his lectures has gone from this motive and no other. They praise
him for his genius and wit, and admire him for his wealth, and in consid-
eration of those qualities forgive him for his philanthropy and his ‘infatua-
tion about the poor.’ (I am quoting a tradesman who has heard his lectures
for many a long yr) and look upon him as a wealthy and eccentric old
idiot and feel on the whole rather proud to have him as a countryman.18
 Prologue xix

Leslie went on to explain that, ‘Lord Shaftesbury is universally dis-

liked – he is accused of taking up the poor and putting absurd notions
into their heads instead of keeping them in their “proper place.” Now
though I listen politely and never contradict (when I can help it) I
haven’t a feeling in common with these over-fed Britons – I honour
Lord S and Miss Marsh and her father and I love Charles Dickens not
because he is a great genius but because he is a man no longer young,
and not strong who labors nobly for his fellow creatures.’ She ended
angrily by telling her parents that ‘there is even less charity here than
in Canada for those who have lost the respectability and strayed out of
the paths of virtue – if you fall in England it is like the fall of Lucifer
you can never rise again, unless you should happen to stray to the
door of such foolish men as Mr Dickens or Lord Shaftesbury; and they
would try to help you up and clean the mud from your garments – but
what are two men or half a dozen among millions?’19
Although Leslie’s sympathies were generally with the English ‘poor’
and, as we shall see, not with the middle class (particularly those newly
arrived in it), she was not reluctant to pass judgment on working-class
behaviour. The customers who patronized her uncle William’s shop in
Dulwich ‘are in general a very poor class of customers, who come in for
“a haporth of tea, a pinch of pickles.”’ Among their numbers were
‘brickmakers’ wives, who ‘are always quarrelling with their husbands,’
their children, and the brickmakers themselves who come in Saturday
nights, after drinking ‘more than is good for them,’ to purchase pipes
and tobacco. Uncle William also sold groceries to the ‘better families’ in
the area (clerks in banks and lawyers’ offices), who sent their servants
to the shop on their behalf. Often these servants gossiped freely about
their employers, who, Mary Leslie informed her parents, were ‘without
exception dissenters. Not 10 minutes ago I heard a young lady complain
that her mistress would make her go and hear Mr Spurgeon preach
whereas she had been brought up to the Established Church, “He ain’t
so vulgar as he used to be,” said she, “but he’ll never be a gentlemen
and that I tell my mistress.” “She’s a mean one,” the young lady went on
“she makes a bread pudding without eggs or milk and she will have
the bedroom scrubbed every week and keeps me a going from morning
to night.”’20
Some of Leslie’s encounters with London’s working-class and poor
people were a great source of entertainment. On the way to the park
one Sunday morning with her relatives, Leslie came up to a ‘great
xx Prologue

crowd of dirty-looking, disreputable men and boys.’ She stood aside in

a doorway, shielded by a ‘solemn policeman.’ ‘I felt a dirty little hand
in my pocket’ but fortunately the pocket was completely empty. ‘I
turned round quickly and said “you did not get much little boy.”’ This
reaction, coupled with her lack of interest in chasing the child, appears
to have endeared Leslie to the young pickpocket. He winked, crossed
the road, and continued his work – with more success. Leslie contin-
ued to watch him ‘having put on my spectacles for that purpose while
the policeman who should have been minding his business’ was talk-
ing to a colleague. At last he spotted the boy and ‘held up his finger in
a stern and warning way as only a policeman can do,’ whereupon ‘my
young friend’ performed a song and dance that mocked the policeman
‘after which he cut off … singing out “a pig for Isabeller and her ging-
ham umbrella” … but I took it as a compliment that he was not afraid
of my giving him “in charge.”’ Her sympathies for what she clearly
saw as picaresque did not prevent Leslie from informing her family
that ‘Miss Williamson had her pocket picked in the House of Lords not
long since, the money extracted and the purse restored.’21
The materialism and philistinism of the middle-class women and
men with whom Leslie was most intimate upset her the most. She was
slightly scandalized by the ‘enormous’ amount of eating and drinking
indulged in by the English and told her mother that ‘if I drank as much
as Mr and Mrs Green do I should be all under the table. I went to bed
drunk every night I was there and I got drunk every day at dinnertime
but it was always under strong persuasion and never without resis-
tance. They thought me a North American savage never to have tasted
claret, champagne or Chablis, and looked upon me with an eye of
pity.’22 In response to her father’s request for information about the
people she met, Leslie wrote that ‘there is no fear of my being starved
to death for all the families in which I have stayed … think of nothing
but eating and drinking from morning till night.’23 While staying with
her cousin Charlotte a month later, the two spent their suppertime get-
ting ‘as drunk as lords or fishers … [It’s] a great proof of our respect-
ability that we never misbehaved ourselves in that state, and a great
proof of my individual sagacity but I never speak upon subjects of
which in my moments of sobriety I think it is better to be silent …
although I pass through all stages of intoxication from maudlin senti-
mentality and extreme gloom to a depth of wisdom so profound that
even I myself cannot fathom it, I never mention my aspirations to
authorship.’24
 Prologue xxi

If Leslie’s confessions of drunkenness shocked her family, there is no

hint of such a reaction in their letters. Her parents did attempt to per-
suade her to remain with her uncle William and his family, but it was
that group of people that, I suspect, either predisposed Leslie to see so
many of England’s shortcomings or, at the very least, contributed to her
disenchantment. In response to her father’s offer to pay her board at her
uncle’s home through the winter, Leslie replied that ‘for many reasons I
do not wish to stay [here] during the winter any more than I wish to
trust myself to the tender mercies of Neptune … this fall.’ She admitted
that her uncle, aunt, and cousins were very kind, but added ‘I have
every comfort but the comfort of privacy.’ Leslie described how she
shared a bedroom with her two female cousins, who were not ‘well
bred’ and who talked constantly, which left her with no solitude in
which to read her psalms, say her prayers, write, or copy her work for
an editor. Moreover, their kindness extended to washing her clothes
and that left her with the ironing; the household’s inferior kitchen range
meant that Leslie spent all her time, when not sightseeing or writing let-
ters, ironing and not working on her writing. ‘Now if Uncle William or
his family had an idea that such was my object in visiting England they
would think me fit for a lunatic asylum (for they are all matter of fact …
and as much opposed to novels as they are to religion).’25
The problem, it seems, was not confined to her relatives’ disdain of
culture and spirituality. Leslie felt she was treated as a ‘colonial
cousin,’ a being who lacked the critical social refinements of London’s
middle class. Her remark about being seen as a ‘North American sav-
age’ (itself suggestive of racially charged perceptions) for not being
acquainted with particular wines and spirits suggests such social clas-
sifications, as do her comments about clothing. The trip to the Adelphi
theatre had originally been planned as an outing to the opera but
Leslie lacked a ‘fall dress’ and had no opera cloak, and so her friends
‘kindly changed their plans.’26 But her cousins were less charitable,
being ‘great snobs about dress … and always want[ed] me to wear
their clothes, assuring me many of the things I have “Never are worn in
good society.” They made me quite uncomfortable when I went to the
Greens so uncomfortable indeed that I had a horror of the visit and
would rather have gone to Tyburn to have been hanged.’ She found,
though, that Mrs Green was more concerned about Leslie’s dinner than
her attire and admired her purple dress considerably. Nevertheless,
Leslie smarted under her hosts’ ignorance of Canada. Mrs Green was
sure that clothes were very expensive there, ‘judging from the price they
xxii Prologue

were in the Southern States at the time of the war’ and told her that she
must stock up on clothes before she left London: ‘there is a beautiful
brown satin in a shop in Regent Street only two sovereigns and a half
which is very cheap for a material of a best quality … Neither the
Greens nor Cousin Charlotte have any idea of how we are circum-
stanced in Canada they speak as if we were all well off as they are or
better – they seem to think any body who possessed land must be
rich.’27
‘On the whole,’ she announced to her father, ‘I feel proud of my
country and like it much better than the old, and think it has greater
natural advantages (except the extreme cold and heat) and hope it will
be a finer country than England some day, and I never see a pictur-
esque old church and parsonage without wishing I could transfer it to
Meaford or some other Canadian village where it was needed.’ As she
made clear in describing an English couple who had emigrated to New
Zealand ‘and were the better for it,’ Leslie preferred such colonies and
their residents to an ‘old country’ or its populace.28 Leslie’s intense dis-
like of perceived English condescension towards and ignorance of
Canada was very similar to the feelings aroused in Australian women
who travelled to Britain in the years shortly after Leslie’s trip. In
Leslie’s case, however, given her identification with English literature,
music, and art, her impatience with her relatives came at least partially
from what she saw as their lack of appreciation for their own cultural
‘heritage.’ Being a ‘white colonial,’ as historian Angela Woollacott has
shown, was not an uncomplicated identity.29
But if Leslie’s distancing herself from contemporary English society
was more pronounced than that of later English-speaking Canadian
travellers, she eagerly recorded the social and cultural ‘customs and
traditions’ of the Dutch. In many ways she thought more highly of
Holland than of England, telling her family that ‘Rotterdam is the most
beautiful city I have ever seen … the buildings are fine and picturesque
and the streets are clean to a marvel.’ En route to Amsterdam, Leslie
saw ‘peasant women with snow white caps and wooden shoes, little
carts drawn by dogs,’ as well as ‘fine fat cattle,’ goats, windmills, ‘pic-
turesque houses … and canals canals everywhere.’ Although she did
not much like her Dutch and German male travelling companions’
habit of smoking (‘in my face for twenty four miles’),30 and was discon-
certed by the poor English spoken by her fellow teachers and students,
Leslie found the area of Amsterdam in which she stayed quite charm-
ing and picturesque. Despite the fact that ‘in Holland unmarried ladies
 Prologue xxiii

are not allowed to walk alone,’ she went for a stroll every morning after
breakfast, figuring that ‘the privilege is accorded to me as the ignorant
foreigner who knows no better.’31
Although her letters were not as numerous as those from London,
Leslie’s correspondence from Holland was full of descriptions. Dutch
food included lots of vinegar, arrowroot broth, stringy beef (but good
German sausages), boiled chestnuts, hot drinks, and plum pudding.
Regarding table manners, she reported that forks were held in the right
hand. She commented on the Dutch language, which she was learning
quickly: ‘it is a very unmusical tongue, composed of snufflings, sneez-
ings, and strange gurglings in the throat.’32 In her last letter home, she
described attending a Dutch wedding, where, she observed, ‘she was a
novelty,’ although most of the forty-two guests preferred to flirt with
each other than speak to her. The fashions were unremarkable (even
the bride and groom were plainly dressed) except in the case of one
woman.

I know the meaning of Dutch courage now. One old lady had a cap literally
covered with rubies and I don’t know which but either diamonds or paste.
They flashed and sparkled in a wonderful way whenever she moved her
head. She was the wife of a burgermeister (whatever that is) and every one
paid her great respect. I don’t like to say she was treated with great servility
but it was something very like it. She had no teeth and her hair was as
white as snow. She looked a strange figure so gaily caparisoned, the cap
was a national cap without a bit of border and fitted the head like a skull cap
– having long tippets at the ears hanging down straight like rabbits-ears.33

An uncomfortable voyage across the ocean, seeing royalty, window

shopping on Regent Street, going to the theatre and to see art exhibits,
writing social commentary on class and gender relations, and noting
‘national’ clothing, food, and other types of customs in both Britain
and Europe: these and other types of experiences and their assess-
ments would be the stuff of many English-Canadian tourists’ transat-
lantic expeditions from the 1870s to the 1920s. Let us turn now to these
and other, related, themes.
This page intentionally left blank
‘A HAPPY HOLIDAY’:
ENGLISH CANADIANS AND TRANSATLANTIC TOURISM,
1870–1930
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction: Holidays, Happiness,
and Transatlantic Tourism

This book began with a diary or, rather, a number of diaries.1 Seques-
tered from the mugginess of the southern Ontario summer of 1995 in
the University of Western Ontario’s Archives, I was working my way
through the papers of Harriett Priddis. As she had been an active
member of the London and Middlesex Historical Society, I hoped that
Priddis’s writings would give me more insight into the writing of his-
tory by English-Canadian middle-class women in late-Victorian and
Edwardian Canada.
In addition to providing information on Priddis’s work as a histo-
rian, her papers held something else: a collection of three typescript
diaries that documented her travels to the Philadelphia Exposition of
1876, to Britain and Europe in 1906, and to Britain in 1911. Although
they had, ostensibly, little or nothing to do with the project that had
taken me to London – the commemoration of Laura Secord – the dia-
ries caught my eye for a number of reasons. For one, they were quite
lengthy. Priddis’s accounts of her overseas trips covered well over
three hundred pages. Moreover, even a cursory flip through them
made it clear that they were more than just lists of places visited and
sights seen, for Priddis was indefatigable when it came to recording
her impressions of her travels. Not only had she left very detailed
descriptions of monuments, castles, and cathedrals, she also recorded
her perceptions of the people she met, whether locals or other tourists,
in the course of her travels. The diaries also let me see how the daily
experiences of transatlantic tourism in this period – the scramble to get
on the right train at the right time, to have the correct papers for
‘foreign’ customs inspectors, to find one’s eyeglasses oneself when
Thomas Cook’s agency proved incompetent – could be both amusing
and provoking, well organized and maddeningly confusing.
4 A Happy Holiday

Harriett Priddis was a delightful diarist: observant, amusing, and

often self-deprecating, able to laugh at her own foibles as a tourist as
well as muse about the historical, national, and imperial dimensions of
the tourist landscape. While it would be exaggerating, with the benefit
of 20/20 hindsight, to claim that I experienced an epiphany on finding
her diaries, nevertheless I believed that I had made a ‘find’ – that
sought-after but all-too-rarely felt archival experience – although at
that point I was not sure what I would do with it. (It also must be said
that I had recently returned from a three-week trip to Scotland and
England and a number of Priddis’s observations about overseas travel
had a familiar ring.) In examining other historical societies’ records I
had run across similar accounts, although they were not as lengthy or
as all-encompassing as Priddis’s. Yet talks given to these groups, such
as Constance Boulton’s ‘A Canadian Bicycle in Europe’ or Miss Peake’s
‘How a Toronto Girl Saw the Queen,’ when placed alongside Priddis’s
diary, made me wonder if overseas travel and tourism was a subject
worth considering.
As this book suggests, I believe that it is. Not only, as I discovered,
was there a wealth of primary sources to explore – diaries, letters,
newspaper articles and advertisements, periodical literature, and pub-
lished travelogues – by the mid-1990s a large body of secondary litera-
ture had become available that examined the meanings and significance
of travel and tourism for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The latter included literary historian Eva-Marie Kröller’s 1987 study,
Canadians Abroad, which examined Canadians’ transatlantic tourism
from 1850 until 1900.2 Kröller’s work explored themes that I too was
finding in the diaries and travelogues: issues of gender, questions of
national and imperial identity, and the pursuit of culture in Britain and
Europe. Where we differ most is in the periods we examine (I start and
end later), the ‘cast’ of tourists (she included French Canadians and I
did not – about which decision more later; I also tried to have a wider
degree of regional coverage), and the scope of our sources (her work
focused on unpublished material, whereas this book includes pub-
lished sources). Finally, the question of the timing of our research is
critical: her pioneering study came just as a wide range of international
scholars were starting to explore travel and tourism. Thus I benefited
from Kröller’s study and the work of other scholars, as well as having
a broader historiographical context within the field of Canadian his-
tory and, in particular, the ‘new’ imperial history in which to situate
this book. My study of transatlantic tourism thus builds on Kröller’s
 Introduction 5

work while simultaneously deviating from it and, I believe, expanding

the field of inquiry. It also responds to international scholarship on
travel and tourism by literary scholars, sociologists, and historians.3 As
well, ‘A Happy Holiday’ has been influenced by the work of historians
of tourism in Canada who have examined, for example, trips to Niagara
Falls, excursions down the St Lawrence River and into Ontario’s cen-
tral and northern regions, and the state of tourism and tourist promot-
ers in Nova Scotia.4

Tourism and the English-Speaking Canadian Middle Class

Diaries entitled ‘My Trip to Britain and Time on the Continent,’ news-
paper columns called ‘Travel, Adventure, and National Customs,’ and
books with titles such as Our Trip to Europe suggest that, for middle-
and upper-middle-class English Canadians, transatlantic tourism was
desirable for its own sake, as well as offering multiple opportunities
for reflection on, and perhaps for testing and questioning, social and
cultural sensibilities. This is not to argue that a trip overseas became de
rigueur for all those who thought of themselves, and were seen by oth-
ers, as middle class (although for some it clearly was). Not all were
able to or even wanted to visit London, Edinburgh, Brussels, Berne, or
Rome – although this book will be about those who could and did.
However, the press and periodical literature, texts that helped consti-
tute the public spheres of the nineteenth-century middle classes, con-
stantly and consistently invited those who might never venture further
than Truro, Hamilton, Selkirk, or Victoria to imagine themselves as
doing so, to acquire and share in the social and cultural tastes, knowl-
edge, and customs of like-minded men and women.
Most of the people in this study went overseas primarily to see
sights and to be informally educated, as well as to be entertained. I
have included a few Canadians who were overseas for other reasons,
such as professional, familial, political, or business, because they also
used those opportunities to travel around Britain and Europe as tour-
ists and left detailed and rich records of their experiences. However,
particularly in the case of those who travelled to Britain and Europe for
professional and artistic training, the range of material and questions
to be asked would be so extensive as to warrant another, separate
study. Nevertheless, culture plays an important role in this book, as I
explore how a range of cultural genres including theatre, art, music,
history, and literature featured in middle-class Canadians’ overseas
6 A Happy Holiday

travel. Furthermore, because so many wrote of their reactions to

Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Shakespearean productions or about the reli-
gious art of Italy, I also can examine their reception of culture, a
question that, although important, is often difficult for historians.5
Although the term ‘middle class’ obviously has utility and weight for
this period in Canadian history, it does not imply homogeneity. As a
group these tourists might be said to comprise an elite; they were middle
class, English-speaking, and (in general) Protestant. But I caution against
treating them belonging to a homogeneous group, for gender and grada-
tions of wealth and privilege within that supposedly all-encompassing
category, middle class, might create rather different experiences of over-
seas tourism. Harriett Priddis was a single elderly woman at the time of
her transatlantic travels. Ever-conscious of the need to economize while
abroad, she did not enjoy the same privileges and luxuries in Britain and
Europe as did Montreal’s Edward Greenshields, a member of that city’s
wealthy anglophone elite. Where Priddis took advantage of Cook’s
tours and third-class rail fares in Europe, and queued for cut-rate theatre
tickets in London, Greenshields hired a car and chauffeur to take himself
and his wife, Elvira, through southern Spain, France, and Britain. The
Greenshields were able to see a wide range of theatre, opera, dance,
and musical performances (not to mention private art showings)
throughout their travels.6 If wealth divided travellers, so did their
social and cultural backgrounds. Thus, although a number of the dia-
ries and letters left by Canadian travellers speak of sensibilities forged
in larger urban centres such as Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton,
Ottawa, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria, residents of small-town
and rural Canada also travelled overseas. They did so either indepen-
dently or, like their big-city counterparts, as members of group tours
organized by churches, schools and universities, educational leagues,
and sporting teams.
‘A Happy Holiday’ focuses on the tourists’ discourses and practices,
less so on the British and European tourist industries as such. Never-
theless, this book has been enriched by the literature on transatlantic
travel for this period and on the structures and organization of tourism
in Britain and Europe.7 Often the tourists themselves were well aware
that they were being confronted with carefully orchestrated phenom-
ena (sometimes pleasing, sometimes not) and that various types of
tourist infrastructure surrounded and shaped their activities. Further-
more, they might freely assume the designation of ‘tourist.’ Occasion-
ally, it is more difficult to know whether some particular experience – of
 Introduction 7

a landscape or local residents – was less obviously mediated and man-

aged by the local or regional tourist industry. Travellers were quite
selective about their experiences and made choices about what to see
and how to report what they saw. These processes were, I argue, clear-
est in their understanding of Ireland. Chapter 4 will examine how dif-
ferent political and social sensibilities – those of Irish-Canadian writer
Margaret Dixon McDougall and the Catholic priest Mortimer Shea –
produced an Irish landscape at odds with that presented by other
travel writers and diarists. Selectivity was demonstrably at work in
these travellers’ dealings with people who worked in the tourist
industry. Canadian tourists were voluble in cataloguing the sights
they saw, their likes and dislikes, and as was the case with British and
Americain tourists, they employed a range of strategies when record-
ing their thoughts and impressions of the porters, guides, waiters, and
other workers whose labour was essential to their travels. At times
workers in the tourist industry were simply rendered silent, their pres-
ence not deemed worthy of comment, while at other times a tourist
could not stop going on about the porter who had demanded a (seem-
ingly undeserved) tip or the guide who had given wrong – or too
much – information.8
As chapter 1 will demonstrate there is plenty of evidence of such
incidents; it is more difficult to determine why they became so ubiqui-
tous in tourists’ discourse, although I do suggest a few explanations.
The record of these exchanges is weighted more heavily in favour of
the tourists’ voices and perspectives, a problem (by no means new to
historians) that needs to be considered. To no small extent this is a
problem of lack of sources. It is a problem related to relations of power,
which, as social historians have told us, have shaped the sources we
use, not least because these relations determined who had literacy
skills and the leisure to exercise them. This is not to suggest that histo-
rians should abandon inquiries. It is possible, for example, to follow in
the footsteps of social historians and try to read the travelogues, dia-
ries, and letters against the grain; or as a cultural historian might put it,
look for the fault lines in the tourists’ discourse, be sensitive to those
moments when contradictions became apparent, and (where possible)
point to gaps, absences, and silences. At times I have attempted to do
just that: for example, travellers’ frequent discussions about guides
and porters suggests to me a perhaps not always welcome degree of
dependency and reliance that might have been motivated by a number
of reasons, ones that chapter 1 explores.9 Furthermore, as I argue in
8 A Happy Holiday

chapter 4, guides too may have been playing along in this act, creating
and performing in character for reasons both tangible and less obvi-
ous. Yet none of this, I caution, should let us forget the relationships of
class, ethnicity and race, nation and empire, and gender that framed
and encoded transatlantic tourism, relationships that resulted in some
people being able to represent themselves more fully for the benefit of
themselves and (although they might not have intended to do so) for
historians. For various reasons, others have not been able to do so.

Nation, Empire, Gender, and Religion in Transatlantic Tourism

Middle-class Canadian tourists were also imperial and national sub-

jects. As Harmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte have argued, ‘despite its
transnational character tourism plays a prominent role in the forma-
tion of national identities and stereotypes.’10 Tourists and travel lit-
erature participated in the construction of national and imperial
communities at a time when Canadians were attempting to identify
their own personal relationships to nation and empire. In choosing
Britain as an important cultural destination for themselves, English-
speaking Canadian travellers were choosing to participate in the ‘Brit-
ish world.’ Such a community, historians have argued, took shape
between the 1880s and the 1950s, as British networks around the globe
were forged by more efficient and frequent transoceanic travel and
communications.11 These networks were clearly depicted in newspa-
pers, the periodical literature, travelogues, illustrated talks, and in the
correspondence of friends and family members who had been on over-
seas trips before them; these were the cultural genres that educated
men and women about the need to visit Britain.12 These tourists,
whose travels are the focus of this book, also would have been exposed
to discussions of matters such as imperial federation, the meanings of
‘Canada,’ and Canada’s relationship to the British Empire.13 Further-
more, in Britain itself during these decades public manifestations of the
far-reaching and complex relations of empire were to be found in
myriad places.
Many of these tourists arrived in Britain carrying notions of them-
selves as ‘Canadians,’ as members of the British Empire, and of the his-
torical and cultural landscapes through which they would be moving.
Their sense of themselves as part of a nation that was enfolded into a
larger entity, the empire, complicated their reactions to its staging: as
chapters 3, 5, and 9 will show, ‘neo-Britains’ might occupy a complex
 Introduction 9

and at times ambivalent relationship to the originals. For some Canadi-

ans, travel to Britain may have been a more self-conscious endeavour
in which such complications could be sorted out, an attempt to come to
terms with various identities and subjectivities – regional and provin-
cial, national, and imperial. Others signed on for overseas tours with-
out, it seems, giving much thought to their own personal position
within nation and empire, yet the structures of their travels ensured
that they were confronted with such issues and compelled to engage
with these questions all the same. This is not to argue that travel did, or
even could, bring such matters to an easy resolution, or that determin-
ing ‘who one was’ or was not vis-à-vis ‘Canada’ or ‘the Empire’ was a
matter to be settled by visits to Westminster Abbey and the Lake Dis-
trict (or, for some, Versailles or the Coliseum in Rome). As a number of
scholars have reminded us, constructing such meanings is a practice
that involves constant repetition and reiteration, an open-ended proce-
dure subject to revision and alteration.14 Yet just as other travellers
negotiated their national and imperial sense of themselves through
travels that emanated from the imperial centre to the so-called ‘colo-
nial’ margins, travel to the metropole for these colonial subjects
frequently produced similar moments of self-consciousness and reflec-
tion. The result might be self-congratulation on being a member of a
white, settler dominion and thus closest to the top of the imperial hier-
archy; conversely, the process might involve moments of doubt and
consternation about being a ‘colonial cousin,’ and thus only an indirect
heir to the cultural, social, and political privileges of empire.15
Tours of Britain and Europe were not the only trips abroad taken by
these Canadians. To date we do not have a study that focuses on
English Canadians’ travel in other countries during this period; how-
ever, some of the individuals examined here did so for both education
and entertainment. Harriett Priddis visited Philadelphia for the 1876
Exhibition. George Pack, of Victoria, British Columbia, used his rail-
road trip to New York City’s docks to stop and tour Chicago, Albany,
and Boston.16 Mary Bain went by train from Vancouver to visit Chi-
cago and them spent a few days in New York, where she discovered
that ‘Central Park was so sunny and bright it seemed almost like
southern California’; her papers, located in the Public Archives of Brit-
ish Columbia, include a diary of a nine-month trip to South America,
taken just after she returned from her trip to Britain and Europe.17 Oth-
ers ventured even further afield. In 1896–97 Ellen Bilborough of
Belleville, Ontario, visited Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji,
10 A Happy Holiday

and Hawaii.18 George Fulford left his Brockville home in 1902 and set
out on a five-month ‘world tour’ that took him to London and Paris, as
well as Egypt, India, Singapore, and Japan.19 That being said, travel to
Britain – and, to a certain extent, Europe – was understood to be the
apogee of an education, formal and informal, in culture, history, and
progress; many aspects of these overseas trips resembled the early
modern Grand Tour undertaken by young male aristocrats who
wished to further their education in the classics.20 People who under-
took such a trip could reassure themselves that they would be exposed
to ‘the very best’ and that by taking such a trip they could claim mem-
bership in a community of cultured, enlightened, and modern men
and women. Moreover, while travel within Canada was becoming
increasingly popular and accessible during this period, the few indi-
viduals who left documents comparing Canada’s tourist sites with
those in Britain tended to reinforce this belief.21 Natural wonders such
as Niagara Falls or the Canadian Rockies were remarkable and should
be seen; however, it was the Atlantic crossing that would bring those
Canadians face to face with the pinnacle of history and culture.
The writings of the tourists who included Europe in their overseas
trips help us understand the contingent and shifting nature of the lines
of affiliation to empire and their links to the racialized discourses of
civilization in late-Victorian and Edwardian anglophone Canada.22 As
chapters 6 and 8 will show, Europe was an important cultural destina-
tion, desired because of its rich store of art and architecture and scenes
of immense natural beauty, such as the Alps and the Mediterranean
coastline. Europe also was a place where quaint folk customs, particu-
larly interesting types of peasant dress, might be observed and
recorded. Europe also was in many ways the ‘other’ and experiencing
Europe served to strengthen these English-Canadians’ ties to Britain
and their sense that they themselves were members of a civilized, pro-
gressive nation and empire. Europe housed the artefacts that they felt
were part of their cultural heritage. Also in Europe, as it was plain to
see, were societies that were socially backward, societies that, in the
estimation of the Canadian tourists, were missing the most essential
features of progress and British imperial greatness.
Nowhere was this more obvious than the organization of gender rela-
tions in European peasant societies. In the agricultural regions of coun-
tries such as Switzerland and Italy, what they saw of women’s labour
(and, conversely, men’s apparent idleness) spoke to these Canadian
tourists of societies that clung to primitive, not progressive, habits. At
 Introduction 11

the very least, such observations suggested that European nations were
not yet fully formed entities, that civilized habits and social structures
had not yet taken full root across all sectors of society. In time, perhaps,
with the good example set by the continent’s improving middle class,
such habits and structures would become widespread. But some Euro-
peans might, though, have more in common with such ‘racially back-
ward’ groups as Native peoples: they were not really members of
nations at all. All of this appeared to some travellers to be very unlike
the Dominion of Canada, where the middle-class, English-speaking,
Protestant population was making a considerable effort to assimilate
both Aboriginal peoples and European immigrants into modern,
English-Canadian ways.23 As a group of Manitoba school teachers, who
toured Britain and Ireland in 1910 themselves put it, their work for the
dominion and empire involved convincing both materialistic Ameri-
cans and a plethora of European ethnicities of the formers’ benefits; by
bringing them into contact with the ‘real thing,’ overseas travel would
strengthen their commitment to national and imperial projects.24 Trans-
atlantic tourism did not abolish the racial and ethnically charged hierar-
chies of power that structured Canadian society; rather, it might at
times have confirmed the view that such hierarchies were necessary
components of ‘civilized’ society, along with ‘appropriate’ gender roles,
certain cultural genres, and particular norms of behaviour.
Such hierarchies of power included their belief that English, not
French, Canada represented the nation, a belief expressed in ways more
implicit than explicit. I chose to confine my focus to English-speaking
and (mostly) Protestant Canadians and to omit French-speaking
(mostly) Catholics – a choice shaped by considerations such as the
sheer volume of sources and the intricacies of questions surrounding
issues of religious, national, and imperial identities. But I should note
that, although French Canada appears conspicuous by its absence
from this study, this absence is not entirely because of my choices as a
historian. The absence of French Canada and French-speaking Canadi-
ans is also a reflection of the very conspicuous absence of French Can-
ada and French Canadians from the individual and, I would argue,
collective consciousness of my research subjects. To be sure, a number
of them used their departing or returning stops in Montreal or Quebec
City as opportunities to tour those cities, and they might have observed
Quebec’s landscape as they sailed the St Lawrence.25 Yet, once they
reached the other side of the Atlantic, Quebec – or the notion that Can-
ada included that province and its inhabitants – vanished from their
12 A Happy Holiday

sensibilities (or at least was eclipsed from the historian’s eye by other
considerations). There is not the slightest indication in these accounts
that travels around France evoked comparisons, for better or worse,
with Quebec’s society and culture; the religiously inspired cultural
tours of Italy’s cathedrals and galleries did not elicit musings about the
church’s cultural influence on or in French-speaking, Catholic Canada.
In reports of their travels in Ireland, where we might have expected to
find various comparisons between Catholic peasantries on both sides
of the ocean, Canadian tourists either were silent on such matters or
considered it was more salient to discuss Ireland’s relationship with
England. Widespread absences and silences like these can be difficult
for the historian, given our discipline’s epistemological and method-
ological preference for that which is tangibly present and visible. Nev-
ertheless, while outside the scope of this work, the general absence of
French Canada from these men’s and women’s consciousness of nation
and empire is a topic that warrants its own historian, for absences and
exclusions do not occur naturally or inevitably: they are as a much a
product of historical processes as are inclusions and presences.
If being a Canadian was predicated on an identification with Britain
that actively excluded (or, at the very least, ignored) French Canada,
these travellers’ sensibilities concerning gender relations were often
acute; moreover, their experiences of transatlantic tourism were
shaped and structured by gender relations in a number of ways. As is
the case with the other types of affiliations discussed in this book, gen-
der roles and constructs were not static. The ways in which they
thought about themselves as men and women were inflected by their
other relationships and ways of imagining themselves: class, for one,
and nation and empire, for another (and vice versa). Travel and tour-
ism were structured by the discourses and practices associated with
normative gender roles, although not always in predictable or straight-
forward ways. It would be claiming too much to argue that late-
Victorian and Edwardian middle-class femininity and masculinity
were fundamentally challenged or reshaped by the experiences of
being abroad, if for no other reason than the sources and methodology
I employ do not permit an extensive exploration of such a claim: my
study ends as the passengers disembarked from the steamers at Hali-
fax or Quebec. Nevertheless, these travellers’ sense of being in differ-
ent situations, as well as the genre of travel writing itself (which is
explored in more depth later in this chapter), prompted them to record
impressions in which their own understandings of gender were never
 Introduction 13

far from the surface, whether in discussing their own movements or

describing the gender relations and roles of those among whom they
moved. At times their writings suggest more complicated and nuanced
ways of conducting themselves as men and (especially) women than I
had assumed, possibly because our understandings of these issues in
the context of middle-class English-speaking Canadian society are not
as extensive or as nuanced as they might be. Furthermore, their writ-
ings hint that at times these travellers also inhabited those liminal
spaces discussed by sociologists of modern tourism, in which they sus-
pended or at least stretched the boundaries of customary norms of
gendered behaviour in order to indulge playful and permissive desires
and whims – witness, for example, Mary Leslie’s drinking or the
delightful anonymity offered by London’s streets enjoyed by Mabel
Cameron, a young schoolteacher from Victoria – that probably would
have been denied them at home.26
While class, nationalism and imperialism, race and ethnicity, and
gender all helped constitute English-Canadian tourism, religious affili-
ations and beliefs also played a part in shaping these tourists’ gazes.
Much has been written over the past twenty-five years of the dynamic
history of Canadian Protestantism during the period covered by this
study: the complicated connections between earlier forms of evangeli-
calism and late-nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism; debates over
secularism, social reform, and the place of the state; the complex rela-
tionship of white, middle-class women to organized religion, social
reform, and the suffrage movement; the impact of overseas and
domestic missionary movements; and the question of working-class
English-speaking Canadians’ attitudes towards organized religion
(and vice versa).27 It should not be surprising that these tourists were
far from unanimous on these issues or that they showed varying
degrees of interest in them. Emily Murphy, as chapter 6 will show,
made it quite clear that she thoroughly disapproved of the appearance
of anything associated with Roman Catholicism rearing its ‘decadent
head’ in an Anglican service, and Edward Greenshields, a member of
Montreal’s St Paul’s Presbyterian Church, shared her sentiments.28
George Pack had a wide range of interests that included both the archi-
tecture of churches and the services held within them, but he seemed
less interested in theological matters than Murphy or Greenshields.29
Mary Bain, who judging from her searches for ‘Scottish churches’ in
unfamiliar cities, was a Presbyterian, had little to say about the precise
content of services unless she found them disagreeable, as in the case
14 A Happy Holiday

of the sermon preached on Christmas Day in 1910 at a ‘poor little

church’ in Venice by a young missionary. ‘I daresay the poor young fel-
low meant well,’ Bain mused, ‘but I did not care for his sermon. For
one thing he said Christianity was a losing force, and I certainly don’t
agree with him about that, and then he did not seem to approve of
Christmas, for he made no reference to it in his sermon, nor were any
of the hymns of the Christmas order.’30
Murphy, Greenshields, and Bain were quite open about their denom-
inational affiliations, although Pack was not so clear about his (he may
have been a Methodist, judging from his liking of their chapels). I have
not been able to discover the denomination of every traveller in this
study, but their accounts make it clear that Christianity (and, for the
vast majority, Protestantism) underpinned their trips abroad in myriad
ways,31 some of them obvious: tours were organized by ministers, such
as Ontario’s William H. Withrow or New Brunswick’s Dr Borden, and
certain prominent churches and cathedrals in Britain and Europe, Prot-
estant and Catholic, were frequently visited attractions. These Canadi-
ans also toured and attended services in a number of smaller, more
obscure churches and chapels; in all cases, they compared, weighed,
and evaluated religious institutions and their clergy for their perfor-
mances of piety. In religion, as in other aspects of their travels, these
tourists were not passive recipients of the sights upon which they
gazed. As Kröller has pointed out, not all Protestant Canadians dis-
played reactionary or bigoted attitudes when faced with the material
manifestations of Roman Catholicism; their assessments of Catholicism
as displayed in church architecture, art, and sculpture were complex
and multilayered.32 As well as visiting religious sites, these tourists
constructed narratives meant to explain and order the landscapes
through which they moved, ones in which the centrality of religion
coexisted and, at times, was intertwined with secular accounts of
nation and region.
Religious beliefs and religious practices were fundamental to the
cultural and social framework that these tourists carried with them,
although simultaneously for some these might be subjected to degrees
of questioning and critical scrutiny. Judging from the frequency of
their references to church attendance overseas, this weekly ritual could
both diminish and reinforce the more unsettling dimensions of their
travel, whether they managed to find the ‘right’ service, chose or were
forced to sample another Protestant denomination, or attended Catho-
lic masses. The modernity that, as I will explore later in this chapter,
 Introduction 15

was central to transatlantic tourism did not preclude them from dwell-
ing on spiritual matters and their religious heritage. Rather, it perhaps
encouraged and fostered private reflections and public acts of venera-
tion that helped buttress the hegemonic influence of religion that,
Marguerite Van Die has argued, became a central dimension of public
life within nineteenth-century Canada.33

Spaces and Senses: Performances of Tourism

As well as cathedrals and churches, the public spaces frequented by

these tourists included museums, shops and markets, restaurants, edu-
cational and social welfare institutions, trains and omnibuses, and of
course, the streets, plazas, and piazzas where they observed ‘the locals’
and where, we must remember, they were observed (both by the locals
and by other tourists). Guidebooks, travelogues, and newspaper and
periodical articles about tourist sites helped shape these tourists’ sense
of what could be entered, traversed, and known. Yet their accounts
make it clear that, although they had been educated to find and
explore spots such as the Tower of London or Le Bon Marché, they also
brought their own needs, fantasies, and desires to bear on the mean-
ings that they attributed to such attractions. These were not uncompli-
cated processes. As feminist scholars have argued, such spaces and the
processes that forged them were not without their contradictions, nor
could all who circulated within them participate equally in their possi-
bilities and pleasures.34 Moreover, certain types of elite spaces – the
homes of the British and European upper middle class, aristocracy, and
royalty, or the classrooms of schools such as England’s Eton – were, for
the vast majority of these Canadian tourists, open only on a very lim-
ited basis (tours of Windsor Castle, for example) or through particular
kinds of lenses – through the fiction of Canadian novelists such as Sara
Jeannette Duncan (Mrs Everard Cotes), Maria Amelia Fytche, and
Alice Jones, for example. Other areas – the homes of peasants, the
workplaces of souvenir makers, and the bedrooms and dining rooms
of orphanages, workhouses, and hospitals – were opened up for curi-
ous and ethnographically minded tourists, who could and did judge
and analyse their residents’ living and working conditions.
Transatlantic tourism was not only about seeing places and recording
impressions. As sociologists of tourism have observed, travel was a per-
formed art: it was stylized, it was self-conscious, and it involved a reper-
toire that was repeated and reiterated, albeit with various levels of
16 A Happy Holiday

negotiation.35 English-Canadian travel writing and tourists’ own

accounts suggest that tourists were always ‘performing’ to various
degrees and in various ways, even when within the four walls of their
hotel rooms or pensions. Communication studies scholar Della Pollock’s
observation about the subject/object split that performers encounter –
they are simultaneously speaking and enacting subjects that are gazed
upon and assessed by their audiences – seems germane for understand-
ing the experiences and assessments of Canadians who moved through
the transatlantic world of overseas tourism.36 But performance is a con-
cept not limited to tourists. Although it is not always possible to know
what their audiences made of these visitors from the other side of the
Atlantic, such enactments and transactions needed fellow actors and
audiences. The discourses and practices of nineteenth-century tourism
were dependent on local residents and workers in the tourist industry
enacting particular categories and identities: the Cockney cabby, for
example, or the Sicilian street beggar. As the domestic spaces and ‘pri-
vate lives’ of peasants and working class people were laid open for tour-
ists’ scrutiny, they too became part of the theatre of tourism, one forged
by the relations of capitalism, consumerism, and, in many cases, colo-
nialism. Yet while scripts might be adhered to and cues picked up
according to agreed-on conventions, at times both tourists and their fel-
low participants in a performance might deviate from the script or miss,
possibly ignore, the conventions.
Performances of travel and tourism had sensory dimensions.
Although not reducible to relationships of power, their meanings were
inflected and shaped by gender, class, race and ethnicity, colonialism,
and nationalism. This book details some of the minutiae of the daily
practices of tourism, minutiae that might seem at first glance trivial
but that, I would argue, play a critical part in facilitating insights into
the larger subjectivities and relationships. The details of tourists’ expe-
riences and perceptions were central to the practices of tourism: it
mattered whether the food was palatable, whether the streets were
redolent of delightful aromas or reeking of sewage, whether the
guides and porters were willing and obliging or rapacious and sullen,
clearly understood or unintelligible, and whether the tour of the Lou-
vre or Windsor Castle resulted in feet so sore that the sensory delights
offered were lost on the visitor. Despite the many complaints about the
negative aspects of travel, it bears emphasizing that the subjects of this
book boarded transatlantic steamships expecting to be both educated
and entertained, to have their senses stimulated in ways that were
 Introduction 17

uplifting and enjoyable. This book describes describes the smells,

sights, sounds, and, for some, textures that these women and men
encountered, evaluated, and attempted to sort into various categories
and typologies. No study of their experiences abroad would be com-
plete without mention of the roar of London’s traffic, the smells of
Naples, the taste of Dutch food, the glitter of Italian jewelry, and the
daring of French Impressionist pointillism. Tourism is a way to further
our understanding of the role of sensation and pleasure within this
group, one that has not been much noted for its ability to have fun.37
Harriett Priddis, who spent a great deal of time in London attending
meetings of various imperial associations and social reform groups,
also had a wonderful time at Ascot until she spilled the whiskey from
her flask.

Anglophone Canadian Tourism and Modernity

Hovering over all of this is the question of modernity, one that has
been addressed only sparingly in Canadian historiography. While
modernity often has been relegated to the twentieth century or
explored as ‘modernization’ (as in, for example, transitions from agri-
cultural to commercial economies or secularization), I argue that by
examining transatlantic tourism for this period we can see the multi-
faceted ways and means in which modernity shaped the lives and
identities of the subjects of this study. In many respects this aspect of
late-Victorian and Edwardian tourism seems so obvious as not to war-
rant any special discussion. Various scholars have pointed out that
nineteenth-century tourism was intricately and intimately tied to
modernity. Technological and cultural forms of modernity took tour-
ists to the steamship dock in the first place. Modernity brought them
into contact with ‘Others.’ Shaped by technologies (the railroad, the
steamship, the telegram) modernity encouraged ever-faster movement
across geographical regions and time zones, and thus collapsed time
and space, perhaps encouraging a sense of fragmented identity and
uncertainty, and modernity was deeply implicated in commercial and
industrial capitalism.38 In his study of Toronto’s Industrial Exhibition,
historian Keith Walden has pointed to the many lessons in modernity
that attending that event entailed – ‘learning how to control fleeting
moments and impressions, how to interpret delicate, shifting grada-
tions of taste, how to interact with strangers in chance encounters, how
to cope with ambiguity, how to sustain coherence and self-possession
18 A Happy Holiday

in the face of dizzying sensory overload’39 – lessons that seem equally

applicable to the experiences of overseas tourism. Scholars who have
studied the complicated relationships between modernity and imperi-
alism from the eighteenth century on have drawn our attention to the
growth of nation states, an increased centralization of power, the
development of global commerce and industrialization, and the expan-
sion of intellectual and cultural networks through such media as the
press.40 Historian Kathleen Wilson has argued that, starting in the
eighteenth century, modernity has involved an ‘unfolding set of rela-
tionships’ that have produced modern selves and subjectivities, with
their expectations of ‘perfection and progress.’41
All of these processes can be seen at work in anglophone Canadians’
experiences of tourism, down to the expectation – not always fulfilled –
that they would have the ‘perfect’ encounter with, say, the Scottish
Highlands or Italian art. Transatlantic tourism drew men and women
from across English Canada into wide-ranging global networks, espe-
cially those of British imperialism. For anglophone Canadian women in
particular, travel in both Britain and Europe offered opportunities to
experience movement through time and space and to reflect both pri-
vately (in their diaries) and publicly (as travel writers) on modernity’s
potential for individual fulfilment and the creation of liberal subjectivi-
ties. London was for most the epicentre of imperial modernity, a central
staging ground for the performance of modern, gendered imperial
identities constructed in relation both to their British ‘family’ and to
other members of the empire.42 Equally importantly, English-speaking
Canadian tourists’ own writings demonstrate that these travellers were
engaged in modernity themselves before they even got on the ship and
that their expectations of what they would see and how they would go
about doing it were shaped by these processes. With the 1920s, the
contours and public dimensions of modernity shifted somewhat, in
response to new forms of technology and consumption, not to mention
the growing political uncertainties of the interwar decades. And for
some postwar tourists, the timbre of modernity was registered in a
somewhat different key. Kathleen Coburn, of Toronto, for example, felt
a greater sense of fragmentation and ambivalence, particularly concern-
ing political developments, much more acutely than did many of her
fellow tourists, who continued to express their optimism about progress
in the more straightforward fashion of the tourists before them.
The role of modernity in transatlantic tourism is underscored by
antimodern discourses, modernity’s alter ego (which, interestingly,
 Introduction 19

have received more attention from Canadian historians).43 Antimod-

ernism was not, however, always and automatically the dominant cul-
tural mode used to give meaning to the tourist landscapes of Britain
and Europe. Tourists’ desire to find signs of imperial progress in
Britain, and their pleasure when they did so – for example, looking at
sites of social reform or participating in modern British culture –
should caution us against labeling all tourists who were interested in
history and historical sites as antimodern. Some travel writers luxuri-
ated – one might say wallowed – in antimodernist judgments about
quaint English cottages or charming Breton peasants, but theirs was in
no way the perspective shared by all of the diarists and letter writers
introduced here. And even the tourists who were of the opinion that
their travels among peasant and rural societies overseas would unlock
for them a lost world of innocence and purity did not necessarily or
automatically draw from them lessons for rejuvenating and reinvigo-
rating their own society and nation.44
Therefore, ‘A Happy Holiday’ takes a two-pronged approach. It exam-
ines overseas tourism in its own right, as an important activity sur-
rounded by varying levels of a tourist industry that, over the course of
the nineteenth century, grew in size and complexity. Simultaneously, it
demonstrates that tourism can be useful in exploring a range of issues,
the most central and recurring one being the role it played in forging
and sharpening middle-class identities and perceptions. Using tourism
as a way into questions of gender, national and imperial identity, class,
racial and ethnic relations offers the possibility of understanding how,
when, where, and (possibly) why these themes were interrelated and
intertwined.

Chronology and Themes

Two factors led me to choose the decades between 1870 and 1930. Many
fine works of cultural history have selected a small slice of time (and,
on occasion, a small cast of characters) to investigate large questions
and themes at a microscopic level.45 For this study, I made a conscious
and deliberate choice to widen my chronological canvas in order to
determine both commonalities and differences of various kinds. Cana-
dian historians have seen this period as having a particular kind of
unity that makes the category of ‘nation’ – at least in English-speaking
Canada – most relevant and important, reaching beyond the obvious
political structures and processes such as increased industrialization,
20 A Happy Holiday

urbanization, immigration, the growing consolidation of the middle

class, certain kinds of challenges to gender relations, and the expansion
of the dominion government’s power, particularly over Aboriginal
peoples. While this book makes no claims to be a comprehensive
‘national’ history, it does attempt to look beyond one region of English-
speaking Canada in an effort to gauge whether significant regional dis-
tinctions were apparent in transatlantic tourism.46 My findings on that
question, though, are not straightforward. Region undoubtedly played
a role in determining the ease and affordability of transatlantic tourism.
It was much easier and cheaper for anglophone Canadians in Ontario,
Quebec, and the Maritimes to travel across the ocean, in comparison
with the length of time and expense of the journey for British Columbi-
ans. Moreover, for much of this period, it is probably safe to say that
western Canadian and British Columbian society possessed a much
smaller middle class than did other regions of Canada. Nevertheless,
British Columbians such as Mary Bain, George Pack, Mabel Cameron,
and Sophie and Ada Pemberton did not appear to me to view their
experiences through an especially regional lens or, indeed, to have
experiences that varied much from those of tourists from other regions
of the dominion – individual personalities, gender, age, and economic
position made more of a difference.
The other factor, simply put, was the growth of overseas tourist traf-
fic during this period and thus the richness of the sources: diaries, let-
ters, travelogues, and newspaper coverage proliferated in the decades
leading up to the First World War and continued after the war was
over. Mary Leslie’s diary and Kröller’s study both attest that voyages
back and forth across the Atlantic, and North American tourists’ explo-
rations of Britain and Europe, were not unknown prior to and just after
Confederation; nevertheless, the decades that I examine here wit-
nessed a steady growth of overseas travel from Canada. Tourism is a
phenomenon difficult to quantify for this period, especially when
spread over a large geographical canvas. It would not be possible, for
example, to discern just how many Canadian tourists embarked for
overseas from a number of ports such as Quebec, Montreal, Halifax,
New York, and Boston or how many toured certain sights like the
Tower of London, Versailles, the Alps, or the Vatican. Nor is it possible
to argue that the types of cultural discourses and practices that I point
to, such as a desire to see the landscapes of British history or visit the
Sistine Chapel, were shared equally across the dominion’s Protestant,
English-speaking middle class. As Ian McKay has argued, there are no
 Introduction 21

easy conceptual or methodological tools for historians ‘to conclusively

resolve the vexed question of how to assess the impact of a given cul-
tural practice.’47
I would submit, however, that the fact that the sources for this book
include just under fifty unpublished document collections from loca-
tions in Prince Edward Island to British Columbia, a large selection of
newspaper and periodical coverage of overseas tourism, and lengthy
lists published in the press of departures to and arrivals from overseas
indicates that during the period under consideration transatlantic tour-
ism was in no way atypical for middle-and upper-middle-class anglo-
phone Canadians. Furthermore, the common experiences of both
travel writers and tourists themselves, not to mention their commonly
expressed view that such experiences were desirable (indeed, almost
obligatory) to their sense of self, suggests a cultural significance and
meaning that numbers alone cannot capture.
My choice to examine a period of sixty years raises the question of
change over time, particularly change between the late 1870s and 1914.
In general, I treat the decades before the First World War as one signifi-
cant period and the 1920s as another, a chronological distinction that
warrants some explanation. Although not as rich in tourists’ diaries
and letters as I might have wished, the 1870s yielded numerous articles
about overseas tourism and ‘foreign lands,’ as well as lists of the peo-
ple who travelled back and forth across the Atlantic. The production of
tourist literature, published and unpublished, accelerated in the 1880s
and continued to grow until 1914; however, the list of sites to be seen
by travellers and the various stances they took on seeing them did not
differ radically over these decades. To be sure, the contexts in which
people visited Britain and Europe did not remain static. Over time, cer-
tain types of attractions were added to the Canadian tourist’s itinerary,
as imperial spectacles such as Queen Victoria’s jubilees, royal funerals
and coronations, and exhibitions grew in both number and scale. Later
on, in the 1900s the British women’s suffrage movement caught the
attention a number of Canadian women.
Where I found ‘difference,’ it resided in the perspectives and atti-
tudes held by the tourists themselves, difference more synchronic than
chronological. Some writers and diarists were ambivalent about, and
sometimes bored with, various aspects of ‘high culture,’ whether they
were exposed to it in the 1870s or in the 1900s, yet, the Mediterranean
coast was as dazzling in 1913 as it was in 1891. I made a very consid-
ered decision not to examine wartime discourses and practices. It
22 A Happy Holiday

would be possible to examine the experiences of Canadians stationed

overseas within the framework of tourism (leaves and furloughs in
Britain, for example, and soldiers’ diaries describe their impressions of
France and Belgium). The magnitude of such a project, however, not to
mention the specificities of the war, places it outside the realm of this
study’s possibilities. I pick up the narrative in the 1920s. As chapter 9
will demonstrate, relative to the period before the war, transatlantic
travel by anglophone Canadians in the 1920s embodied both continu-
ities and changes, an observation that permits some (albeit more tenta-
tive) suggestions concerning the prevalent arguments concerning
national and imperial identities in inter war Canada. Shifting forms of
modernity, meant shifts in the timbre – if not the actual content – of
tourists’ experiences, and yet there remained important continuities
with the late Victorian and Edwardian years. While tourists, such as
Kathleen Coburn in 1930, made the case for experiencing Britain and
Europe from a ‘Canadian’ perspective, the long-prevailing notion that
Britain held significant cultural and historical meanings for English-
Canadians persisted throughout the 1920s.
In organizing this book, I have used both chronology and some
recurring themes, such as history and imperial identity, landscape, pub-
lic space, and culture, framed within the borders of nation and conti-
nent: Scotland, England, Ireland, and Europe. This schema should not
be taken as somehow natural: these lines of demarcation were as much
imagined and constructed as any of the other types of relationships
examined in this book. There were many similarities in tourists’ percep-
tions of people and practices in Britain and Europe: often peasants in
Europe were viewed with the same cosmopolitan eye as agricultural
workers and rural residents in parts of England and Ireland. Porters
and guides in Ireland, Italy, and Switzerland tended to amuse, enchant,
irritate, or annoy in very similar ways. Yet for quite obvious reasons – a
basic but important one being linguistic distinctions – travel on the
Continent was not the same experience, nor did it have quite the same
meanings for anglophone Canadians, as did travel in Britain. Further-
more, not every Canadian tourist spent the same amount of time as
every other Canadian tourist in each of these countries. Virtually all of
these tourists went to see Britain, but a few of them, such as Toronto’s
Thomas Langton, preferred to spend most of their time in Italy, France,
and Switzerland, while some others apparently did not care to cross the
channel and spent all of their time in Britain.
 Introduction 23

Writing about ‘Abroad’: Sources and Authors

Given that so much of this book is based on two different groups of

sources, published versus unpublished, it seems appropriate before
taking the reader overseas to explore some of the distinctions between
these sources and the individuals who generated them. From the 1870s
on, the press in Halifax, Saint John, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, and
Victoria ran numerous articles and columns about places beyond Can-
ada’s borders. Such items, often unsigned, discussed ‘the state of
things’ – socioeconomic, cultural, and political – in a wide range of
countries, not all of which anglophone Canadians visited. Direct
accounts of their travels were contributed by people who had gone to
London, Naples, or Berlin, and were eager to share their impressions
and experiences and to inform future tourists of both the pitfalls and
the pleasures. Although for some articles the writer’s nationality was
unclear, in many the authors were self-identified ‘Canadians’ who
believed that their national identity gave them a particular perspective
on matters abroad.
This literature should not be read as a straightforward or uncompli-
cated documentary reportage of ‘other lands.’ For one thing – and this
should not be surprising – it helped construct and shape conceptions
of ‘nations’ and their ‘peoples’ and to order men, women, and chil-
dren, the spaces that they inhabited, and their social, cultural, and
political beliefs and practices under the rubric of nation. The anglo-
phone Canadian readership thus was invited to imagine the world as
an arrangement of easily identified places demarcated both by the offi-
cial means of the state – borders, currencies, and armies – and through
other, less formal but no less important mechanisms, such as food,
clothing, architecture, music, religion, and (especially) gender roles
and relations. Such conceptions of nation were important, both as
ways of thinking about the places so designated and because they
helped middle-class anglophone Canadians to define their own sense
of self within a larger context, even if this process, taking place within
the gendered and racialized contexts of imperial modernity, was an
ongoing, never-completed one.48 More specifically, this literature
addressed and helped shape ‘the tourist’ and the tourist’s destination.
Articles such as one entitled ‘The Progress of Italy’, published in 1878,
informed readers (New Brunswickers at least) that Italy, despite the
many obstacles placed in its way (French interference, internal strife,
24 A Happy Holiday

financial hardships brought about by war, and clerical opposition),

was making progress. Tourists were reportedly ‘flocking’ to its north
and central regions, to Turin, Milan, Genoa, Venice, and Florence, and
the long-standing jealousies of these rival cities were now being super-
seded by feelings of national unity. The ‘country’ was busy seculariz-
ing, as the government took control of estates of the religious orders
education, and the diffusion of ‘knowledge to promote commercial
progress.’49 Not all of this literature fell under the rubric of travel writ-
ing. Articles such as ‘Education in France’ or ‘Turkey’s Parliament’ also
appeared in the Saint John Daily telegraph in the 1870s. These were not
written in the self-conscious voice of the observing (and observant)
traveller, offering tips on ‘what to see’ and ‘how to see it,’ yet when
considered together and viewed as a continuum, such articles offered a
panoramic view of foreign lands, one that would educate readers who
might never leave home and provide useful background knowledge
for those who might.50 Armed thereby with facts and informed opin-
ions, English Canadians would be able to compete with American and
British tourists, showing themselves on the international stage to be in
possession of the social and cultural capital that marked them as deni-
zens of a modern, liberal nation.
Would-be travellers and tourists might educate and enlighten them-
selves about the places they planned to visit through other kinds of
print media. Baedeker’s and Ruskin’s guidebooks were used by many
anglophone Canadian travellers, although as we shall see, opinions
varied as to their utility and suitability. Furthermore, with Confedera-
tion the Dominion of Canada was established and from the 1870s on
newspapers ran more and more columns that offered the ‘Canadian’
perspective on overseas travel, with features such as the Montreal Daily
Star’s ‘Letters from London’ and the Saint John Daily Telegraph’s ‘A New
Brunswicker Abroad.’51 The Canadian Magazine, founded in 1893 and
catering predominately to upper-and middle-class anglophone Canadi-
ans, ran a number of this sort of article, as well as reports on various
attractions in Britain and Europe. Local newspapers and periodicals
covered group tours of anglophone Canadians overseas for sporting
competitions (lacrosse, shooting, and rowing), on institutionally spon-
sored excursions (the Manitoba Department of Education’s Teachers’
Trip of 1910, the church or university-run tours led by the Methodist
minister W.H. Withrow or Mount Allison’s Dr Borden), or on tours
sponsored by the newspapers themselves (Hamilton’s ‘Spectator Girls’
and the Toronto Daily Mail’s ‘Maple Blossom Girls’). Such articles gave
 Introduction 25

detailed accounts of the places that had been visited and their histories
and offered suggestions for further reading, in the form of either travel
guides or histories. Many publications provided copious illustrations of
both the people and places that should be seen; this book features a
number of such photographs and sketches in an attempt to suggest
how middle-class anglophone Canadians’ visual sense might have
been aroused by the prospect of transatlantic travel. The Canadian
press played a significant role in shaping and promoting the desire to
travel overseas and the national and imperial memberships that such
travel facilitated.52 Although it existed primarily for the benefit of Brit-
ons who might be interested in investing in or emigrating to Canada,
the periodical Canada: An Illustrated Journal, founded by its editor Hugh
Allan in 1906, regularly published the names of Canadians about to
depart for overseas and from time to time ran articles about Britain, as
well as advertisements for London hotels and services.
It could not be said that spontaneity was actively discouraged (and,
as we shall see, the unexpected did occur). Nevertheless, this literature
insisted that tourists should be well prepared in order to appreciate
fully the landscape, monuments, architecture, and people they would
see. Possibly because the time spent overseas by many middle-class
English-Canadians was quite short the desire was so intense to arrive
there with clear agendas and a clear understanding of what to expect.53
Their desire to arrive well prepared also might be linked to middle-
class eagerness for efficiency, made more urgent by a sense of the
quickening pace of modernity, a sense exacerbated by technologies
such as steamships and rail travel. Travellers without dependants or
the demands of regular daily employment, such as young, single middle-
class women or wealthy middle-class men, sometimes were away for
as long as a year, but most middle-class tourists went for two or three
months. A minority spent only a few weeks overseas.
Whatever the length of time spent, though, most travel writers
would have been pleased by the Canadian Magazine’s tale of the four
young women whose plans to make ‘the grand tour’ for the summer of
1904 had gone awry and had to be postponed. Instead of despairing,
the young women decided that they would ‘visit’ London (a trip that
included Stratford-on-Avon, Oxford, and Warwick), France, Germany,
and Italy with the help of their friends’ ‘guide-books, collections of for-
eign photographs, and museum and art gallery catalogues.’54 They
also wrote to ‘a well-known man of learning for a list of the best books
to read in order to become thoroughly “acquainted” with the places
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 (2) The Comitia

An element in the restoration of the Republic by Augustus, after

the provisional government of the Triumvirate was over, was a
renewal of the life of the popular assemblies.[1757] But it was
impossible that their purely local character could be reconciled with
the imperial interests of the day, or that their popular character
should be consistent with the rule of the Princeps and his nobility.
For a moment they remained to a certain extent a reality, and
throughout the Principate they exercised the shadow of power which
was sufficient to express the still surviving theory of popular
sovereignty.
From the first a considerable portion of the powers of the comitia
had been transferred wholly to the Princeps; for to him belonged the
rights of declaring war, of making peace, and of forming alliances;
[1758] while the criminal jurisdiction which the people exercised at
the end of the Republic was no longer necessary, for while the more
definite portion of it was handed over to the quaestiones,[1759] the
more indefinite now fell under the extraordinary cognisance of the
Senate. Legislative power tended to centre more and more in the
Princeps and Senate, and it is only during the first century that
enactments are mentioned which have the true forms of leges and
plebiscita.[1760] The right of election was the most permanent of the
popular prerogatives. Under Augustus the people still chose its
magistrates, although the choice was considerably influenced by the
Princeps;[1761] and after Tiberius in the first year of his reign had
caused all the real elements of election—the profession, the
nomination, the vote—to be transferred to the Senate,[1762] the
formal renuntiatio of the successful candidates (an integral part of
the election)[1763] still continued to be made to the people down to
the third century.[1764] It is only in respect to the consulship that
there is a doubt whether, during the first century a.d., more than the
mere announcement of the result was not effected in the comitia.
The evidence is conflicting, but the indications of a formal popular
control of these appointments are on the whole outweighed by those
which refer to the Senate the real elements of election—rendered
nugatory at times by the way in which the Princeps exercised his
powers of nomination.[1765] There can be little question, however,
that in the later Principate the consular, like all other, elections were
vested in the Senate. The survival of the comitia into the third
century, whether for the purpose of the renuntiatio or for that of
ratifying the powers of the Princeps, was no mere mass-meeting
informally assembled. The stately forms of the Republic were
preserved, and when the centuries were assembled the red flag still
flew from the Janiculum.[1766]

(3) The Senate

It was through the Senate of the Principate that the idea of

popular sovereignty was most practically and even most formally
expressed; and, as the Principate claimed and even tried to be
nothing more than the extraordinary magistracy of a Republic, the
most infinite pains was taken with this body to give it dignity,
stability, and weight. We shall speak elsewhere of the senatorial
“order” which was created during the Principate; it was from this
order that the Senate was recruited, and the will of the Princeps
could be very distinctly asserted in the selection of members of the
great council. Entrance was, as in the Republic, chiefly through the
magistracy, the tenure of the quaestorship qualifying for a seat at
the board. When, therefore, the Senate became itself the electing
body, the principle of entrance was one of cooptation; and as the
Princeps did not, to any great extent, influence the selection of
quaestors by his commendatio,[1767] the principle was something
more than a mere theory. But we shall see that he often gave the
latus clavus which admitted to the senatorial order; we have seen
that he advanced to the military tribunate, which became one of the
qualifications for the quaestorship;[1768] he might also have
exercised an influence in the formal nomination of candidates for
this office; while his right of adlectio,[1769] when exercised with
reference to persons who had not been magistrates, gave him the
power of actually creating senators.
The qualifications for the Senate had reference to age, wealth,
and birth. As twenty-five was the minimum age for the quaestorship,
a man might be a senator at twenty-six.[1770] The census required,
though it varied from time to time during the reign of Augustus, was
finally fixed at a million sesterces.[1771] Ingenuitas was required—
Claudius even demanded free birth through three generations[1772]
—and it was counted one of the abuses of tyrannical rule when the
favour of Emperors admitted freedmen into the Senate.[1773] For a
time the council maintained its mainly Roman character, but “new
men” from Italy and the provinces crept in with the censorships of
Claudius and Vespasian,[1774] and the former Emperor even granted
admission to the Gallic Aedui, perhaps by an employment of his right
of adlectio.[1775] The reception of provincials finally became so
frequent that, to give them an Italian interest, it was decreed by
Trajan that one-third of their property must be invested in land in
Italy,[1776] a quota that was changed by Marcus Aurelius to one-
fourth.[1777]
Removal from the Senate belonged to the Emperor either as
censor, when he exercised the discretionary moral judgment which
had been associated with the Republican lectio,[1778] or in virtue of
that power of revision which, as we have seen, became associated
with the Principate.[1779] The chief grounds of exclusion were lack of
the requisite census, refusal to take the oath in acta Caesaris which
was demanded of senators as of magistrates,[1780] or condemnation
for crime. The Senate itself, in the exercise of its judicial power,
could add to the sentence which it inflicted on a senator the penalty
of expulsion from the house;[1781] it might even make this expulsion
a punishment for calumnious accusation.[1782] The revised list of the
Senate (album senatorium) was posted up publicly every year,[1783]
and the Emperor appeared at the head of this list as princeps
senatus.[1784] The number of the Senate was fixed by Augustus at
600,[1785] and, as there seems to have been little or no alteration in
the number of the quaestors, the size of the body into which they
passed may have been fairly constant. Augustus also instituted fixed
days for meeting. These regular meetings (senatus legitimi) took
place twice a month, on the Kalends and the Ides, except during the
autumn months of September and October, and attendance on these
days was compulsory.[1786] Even to these meetings, however, there
was a summons through an edict.[1787] Extraordinary sittings
(senatus indicti) could also be held whenever the magistrate deemed
them necessary.[1788] The presidency and summons belonged
chiefly to the consuls, but, as in the Republic, were possessed also
by the praetors and tribunes.[1789] When the Senate had been
summoned, the Princeps shared in the presidency as a magistrate,
and it is very questionable whether he ever appeared at the board in
the character of a simple senator.[1790] As a magistrate he might
address the house at any moment, and, during the early Principate
at least, custom dictated that there should be a pause at the
opening and at the close of a debate which the Princeps might fill up
with an expression of opinion if he pleased.[1791] We have already
noticed the singular privileges which he possessed in the matter of
bringing business before the house.[1792]
Amongst the powers of the Senate, that which was formally the
greatest was the creation and deposition of the Princeps. We have
already seen how this right was limited in practice;[1793] but its
nominal exercise was an expression of the view that the sovereignty
of the Roman people now found its chief exponent in the ancient
council. The same idea is expressed in the senatorial power of
dispensation from laws—whether in favour of the Princeps and
members of his house,[1794] or in administrative matters such as the
right of forming associations.[1795] The elective power which the
Senate enjoyed from the beginning of the reign of Tiberius[1796] is
also a sign of its perpetuating the powers of the people.
Over foreign administration, once the great bulwark of its power,
the Senate has now but little control. Although it still receives
messages of the victories of the Princeps, and grants him a triumph,
[1797] it has lost all independent rights of war, peace, and alliance.
But it receives envoys from the provinces which are under its
control,[1798] and from the towns of Italy,[1799] and, at least in the
first century of the Principate, it may act as the advising body of the
Princeps in spheres which pertain wholly to him. Tiberius consulted
the Senate on military questions;[1800] Vespasian waived an
embarrassing offer of help from the Parthians by urging them to
send an embassy to the Senate; and Decebalus, after his conquest
by Trajan, obtained his final terms of peace by the same means.
[1801] Such concessions were doubtless acts of grace on the part of
the Princeps, but they also represent a constitutional principle which
finally disappeared—the principle of consulting the representatives of
the people on questions that were of paramount interest to the
state.
The other powers of the Senate, which express its sovereignty or
its partnership of administration with the Princeps, we must reserve
for the next section, in which we shall attempt to illustrate the
theory of a dual control which pervades the constitution of the
Principate.

§ 5. The Chief Departments of the State; the

Dual Control of Senate and Princeps
We have already seen that, in the most essential fact of
sovereignty—the creation of the Principate—the Senate and people,
or rather the Senate as representing the people, was theoretically
supreme.[1802] The attribute of sovereignty that comes nearest to
this is the power of legislation, for it is one that the “determinate
human superior” generally retains in his own hands. The other
functions that are usually associated with the highest authority in a
community, such as the control of general administration,
jurisdiction, finance, cultus and coinage, may more easily be
delegated. If the delegation is temporary, there is no division of
sovereign power; if perpetual, there is such a division unless the
legislative power be thought of as capable of recalling the mandate.
We have already seen to what a large extent the people had
delegated its powers to the Princeps, and we have also seen that
this delegation was, in fact though not in theory, perpetual.[1803]
But, in the spheres of authority which we are now about to examine,
there is neither the theory of complete retention, nor that of
complete delegation, of sovereign power. The sovereign has partly
retained and has partly delegated in perpetuity every one of the
functions of government which we have enumerated, and this
singular dualism affects, not only the administrative, but even the
legislative activity of the state.
(i.) Legislation.—With respect to legislation it has already been
shown how the comitia still uttered their general mandates until a
period at least as late as the reign of Nerva.[1804] But, even before
the legislative power of the people became extinct, this power had
been passing to the Senate; and in the strict theory of the
constitution, true legislative authority is to be finally found only in
the great council which represents the people.
The origin of this senatorial legislation is doubtless to be sought in
the advice on legal points which the Republican Senate had often
tendered to the magistrate, and in the interpretation of customary
law or of enactments which often accompanied this advice.[1805] It
has, indeed, been noted that the senatus consulta of the Principate,
which prescribe general commands such as in the Republic would
have been the subject of leges, are often expressed in this advisory
form;[1806] decrees of the Senate never attained the formal
structure of a law;[1807] they also lack its imperative mode of
utterance, and for these two reasons they were never described as
leges. The highest degree of validity which the jurist could give them
was “the binding force of laws”;[1808] but this force was sufficient to
make them sources of the jus civile,[1809] and down to the third
century such general commands as tended to alter the fundamental
legal relations of Roman citizens to one another, were generally
expressed in the form of senatus consulta.
The Princeps, on the other hand, is not credited directly with any
power of legislation; but the faculty for making jus, which was
inherent in the imperium of every Roman magistrate, and especially
apparent in that of the praetor, was manifested by the Princeps in an
unexampled degree. His methods of utterance are through the edict,
the decree, and the rescript. The edictum is, like that of the praetor,
technically an interpretation of law; but the creative power
associated with interpretation is here pushed to its extremest limits,
and statute law supplemented this faculty inherent in the imperium
by explicitly declaring that whatever ordinances the Princeps might
lay down should (with certain limitations fixed by precedents) be
considered valid.[1810] Whether the edict of one Princeps bound his
successor must have depended to some extent on the degree of
formality in the utterance. Tiberius professes respect even for the
obiter dicta of Augustus;[1811] but this reverence was exaggerated,
and none but the formal edicts expressed in written form could, as a
rule, have been included in the acta. It is by no means certain that
even these were always included in the acta to which the oath was
taken;[1812] but if an edict had been recognised as valid by several
succeeding Principes and was then abandoned, some formal method
of repudiation seems to have been necessary.[1813]
The decretum was, in its strict sense, the sentence of the Princeps
when sitting as a high court of justice;[1814] as a res judicata it
necessarily possessed absolutely binding force for the case in which
it was issued, and prevented any renewal of this process; but, unless
formally rescinded in a succeeding reign, its validity as a precedent
seems not to have been questioned, and the words Caesar dixit
appeal to the jurists almost with the force of law.[1815]
The third mode of utterance is by means of the letter (epistola) or
rescript (rescriptum).[1816] These letters contained instructions
either on administrative or on judicial matters. In their first character
they might be addressed either to individual officials subordinate to
the Emperor or to the provincial diet,[1817] the scope of their
application depending on the Emperor’s discretion at the time of the
issue, and on the interpretation of the rescript after his death. In
matters of justice, whether addressed to the judge or to the litigant,
they might settle doubtful points of law or extend a principle to new
cases. The power of interpretation is at least as great in the rescript
as in the edict; but the rescript was the more powerful vehicle for
law-making. It kept the Princeps in constant touch with the
provincial world, and was the chief mode in which the uniformity of
its administration and its law was moulded. The rescripts also had,
on account of the precision and permanence of their form, a more
unquestioned validity, as perpetual enactments, than either the edict
or the decree. When the acta of an emperor are referred to, it is
chiefly these, together with the charters or privileges (leges datae,
beneficia) that he may have conferred on states, that are intended.
The rescripts might be elicited either by the consultatio of a doubtful
official who was subordinated, either as an administrator or as a
judge, to the Emperor, or they might be written in answer to the
petition (libellus, supplicatio) of one of the parties to a suit. In the
latter case they were often a convenient substitute for the personal
appearance of the appellant in the Emperor’s court.
The edicts, decrees, and rescripts came eventually to be described
as “imperial constitutions” (constitutiones principum), and although,
as we have seen, different degrees of permanence might attach to
each of these methods of utterance, to a jurist of the second century
they all had the force of law.[1818] From this category of enactments
with binding force one important class of imperial ordinances seems
formally to have been exempted. This class consisted of the
mandata, or general instructions which the Princeps gave to officials
subordinate to himself. In the early Principate they were for the
most part issued to the governors of Caesar’s provinces, but the
gradual encroachment of the Emperor’s powers on senatorial
administration led to the mandates being issued to proconsuls as
well. When the mandate dealt with a precise point of the jus civile
and was repeated by successive emperors, it doubtless came to have
the force of a rescript;[1819] but it was more often concerned with
the general administrative duties of subordinates, directing them in
the doubtful cases of the moment, and, therefore, not necessarily
laying down rules of perpetual validity. In one sense the mandate
stands higher than the rescript, for it is as a rule more general in
form, and a mandatum may be the result of a series of rescripta on
the same point; but in another sense it stands lower, since it was
understood that it might be recalled at any moment by the Princeps
who had issued it, and that it might not be observed by his
successor. The remarkable differences of treatment to which the
Christians were subjected during the Principate was due chiefly to
the fact that, so far as this treatment was a concern of the central
government at all, it was one directed by mandate.
A review of the powers of the Princeps as exercised through his
“constitutions” and his mandates shows that he was not regarded as
a true legislative authority, and that the binding force of his
ordinances was technically inferior to that possessed by decrees of
the Senate. But the theory of legislation was never of much practical
importance at Rome. The Romans had lived for centuries mainly
under the rule of interpreted or judge-made law, and now the
Roman world, enlarged and unified, looked for guidance, not to the
comitia, which were in decay, or to the Senate, whose contact with
the provinces was ever becoming less, but to the one interpreter
who was known to every judge and every litigant, and whose
utterances could be heard at the farthest ends of the earth. It was
the force of circumstances, not any constitutional theory, which
made the Princeps the highest of all legislative, because the greatest
of all interpreting, authorities.
 (ii.) Jurisdiction.—If we turn from the legislative to the judicial
sphere, we find the same theoretical assertion of a dual control. But
it is complicated in this instance by the fact that the Senate is not
the sole representative of the Republican side of the administration.
The state still asserts itself through old organs such as the praetors
and the judices, while it has acquired a new organ in the joint
activity of consuls and Senate. In a sphere parallel to theirs the
Princeps works, sometimes exercising a jurisdiction that is all his
own, at other times infringing on their powers, but always occupying
a position that exhibits him to the provincial mind as the highest
court in the Roman world. The jurisdiction of these several courts
must be treated in its separate aspects of civil and criminal, of
jurisdiction in the first instance and by way of appeal. The power of
reversing sentences and the right to pardon must also be
considered.
The civil jurisdiction of the Republic, with its division into jus and
judicium, continued during the greater part of the period of the
Principate, and the praetor still gave his legal rulings in the shape of
a formula which he submitted to a judex. But these judicia ordinaria
tended gradually to be replaced by the personal cognisance
(cognitio) of the magistrate, which, exercised on a limited scale by
the praetor during the Republic, became a feature of the Emperor’s
own jurisdiction from the very beginning of the Principate, and was
soon extended to provincial governors and to his great delegates,
the praefects. This jurisdiction was described as extra ordinem, and,
like the other form, it admitted of a distinction between magistrate
and judex. But the new judex extra ordinem datus[1820] is wholly
different in character from the judex ordinarius of the older form of
process. The new procedure does not admit the distinction between
jus and judicium; the judex is a true delegate, is appointed without a
formula, and decides on the law as well as on the facts of the case.
The sphere of the cognitio of the Princeps was probably unlimited in
theory, and may have been conferred on the first Emperor by
statute.[1821] It was a voluntary jurisdiction which any one might
request and which the Emperor might refuse. In case of such refusal
the case was taken by the praetor. The early Principes, however,
showed an unwillingness to interfere with the common-law
jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, and confined their attention to
cases of equity, such as those springing from matters of trust (fidei
commissum) and guardianship (tutela). But the number even of
these cases soon became too vast for the cognisance of the Emperor
and his occasional delegates, and we have seen how special praetors
were successively appointed to share in this equitable jurisdiction.
[1822]

The civil courts of appeal existing under the Principate are partly
due to a survival of the Republican principle of appellatio to a
magistrate with the right of veto, partly to the principle (new for
Rome, though not for the provinces) of delegated jurisdiction, and
partly to a wholly novel principle of an appeal which can completely
reverse the decisions of a lower court, which has its origin mainly in
an attempt at centralising the higher provincial jurisdiction in Rome.
From the decision of a judex in the judicia ordinaria there is now, as
formerly, no appeal to any authority, although, as we shall see, the
sentences of judices might, under certain conditions, be reversed by
the authority either of the praetor or the Princeps. From the decision
of the praetor in jure an appeal lies as before to an equal or higher
authority,[1823] and the veto in virtue of the major potestas or majus
imperium is naturally possessed by the Princeps. When we find
Tiberius present in the praetor’s court, he may be there for the
purpose of over-ruling that magistrate’s decisions.[1824] His presence
seems to show that the limitations of the old auxilium—which must
be offered in person[1825]—were preserved. Whether the veto was
pronounced in virtue of the imperium or in virtue of the tribunicia
potestas is a matter of indifference; how the veto operated is the
really important point. On the analogy of the Republican intercession
its effects should have been purely cassatory, and perhaps in the
early Principate this principle was observed. But it must be
remembered that the Princeps is in a very different position to the
vetoing consul or tribune of the Republic, or even to the Republican
praetor who presides over a department other than that which he
controls by his veto. These magistrates can negative a decision of a
lower court, but they cannot replace this negatived decision by a
positive judgment of their own. The Princeps, on the other hand, has
a theoretically unlimited power of civil jurisdiction.[1826] He can,
therefore, supplement his negative by a positive judgment, and this
unique combination of the power of vetoing and the power of
judging is almost unquestionably the basis of that appeal to Caesar
which leads to the reformation of a sentence. It is not improbable
that the appeal came to operate in this way even against the
praetor, although, even if it did not, the effect of Caesar’s veto would
really be reformatory. Even the tribunes of the Republic could put
pressure on a praetor to induce him to alter his formula,[1827] and
we can hardly imagine the praetor withstanding the suggestion
accompanying a veto pronounced by the holder of the tribunicia
potestas. The jurisdiction of the municipal towns of Italy was, so far
as it was “ordinary” jurisdiction, still under the control of consuls,
praetors, and tribunes, at least as late as the reign of Nero.[1828]
These municipal courts were technically those of the praetor
urbanus, and the Princeps probably interfered (if at all) with their
jurisdiction only through his control of the rulings of the praetor in
Rome. We shall trace elsewhere the mode in which the extraordinary
jurisdiction of one of Caesar’s delegates, the praefect of the city,
came to encroach on the ordinary jurisdiction of the Roman courts.
Another method of appeal springs from the principle of delegated
jurisdiction. Caesar, when he cares to exercise civil jurisdiction, can
perform it either personally or through mandataries, and there is
necessarily an appeal from the mandatary to the higher authority,
unless this authority distinctly asserts that no appeal will lie.[1829]
The appeal in such a case, if it is upheld, issues not merely in the
veto but in the reform of the sentence of the mandatary. Caesar
may, of course, employ such delegates as he pleases. Augustus used
the praetor urbanus and consulares for home and foreign
appellationes,[1830] a word which in this context probably means
simply “requests for cognisance” made to the Princeps. The imperial
jurisdiction in matters of trust (fidei commissa) was delegated to
consuls or to praetors.[1831] But, apart from this regular delegation,
the Emperor might instruct any one to be his judex extra ordinem,
when he did not care to take the case himself.
The appeal from provincial governors was, so far as the public or
senatorial provinces were concerned, the result of a conscious
striving after unity of administration, although it was not wholly
unconnected with Republican precedents; with respect to Caesar’s
provinces, it was a direct consequence of the fact that the governors
of these provinces were merely his legates, although the frequency
with which the appeal was allowed shows the same striving for a
centralised jurisdiction. The principle which in the early Principate
regulated appeals from the public provinces was that these should
come invariably to the Senate, and this principle of the dyarchy,
which tended to be disregarded, was emphatically restated by Nero
at the commencement of his reign.[1832] It was probably a
development of a Republican custom in accordance with which
certain important cases had been summoned from the provinces to
Rome by the consuls and Senate (Romam revocatio);[1833] but this
principle seems to have been now extended to include true cases of
appeal as well as cases of denial of jurisdiction. When such appeals
in civil matters came to Rome, it is probable that the Senate
delegated the hearing of them to the consuls.
The fact that this principle of the appellate jurisdiction of the
Senate required restatement in 54 a.d. prepares us for the ultimate
neglect into which it fell. It is certain that by the close of the second
and beginning of the third century, Caesar, or his great delegate the
praefect of the praetorian guard, is the universal court of appeal for
the whole provincial world. This result cannot be attached to any
power possessed by the Princeps over the proconsuls of the public
provinces; for the statement that he possessed maius imperium over
such governors[1834] can only mean that in any collision of authority
the Princeps is not inferior to the proconsul. The world-wide
appellate jurisdiction of the Princeps was a thing of very gradual
growth, and it originated, not from any idea of his prerogative, but
from the irresistible tendency of provincial governors, senatorial as
well as imperial, to refer their difficulties to the highest interpreting
authority in the Roman world, the Princeps and his consilium of
judicial advisers. It is no wonder that the man who became the
central source of law should also become the universal authority for
its interpretation in detail.
When we turn to criminal jurisdiction, we find that here too there
are three sources of jus. The Republic is represented by the
quaestiones perpetuae with their praetors and equestrian judices,
and also by the new criminal jurisdiction which has been attached to
the consuls and the Senate; the Principate is represented by the
jurisdiction of the Princeps and his delegates. The jurisdiction of the
quaestiones, so long as it continued,[1835] proceeded on the old
lines. They judged except where the case, through a request of the
parties accepted by a higher court, was exempted from their
jurisdiction. The higher courts, which might stop their jurisdiction by
accepting a case, were those of the Senate and the Princeps. Both of
these were high courts of voluntary jurisdiction, and no appeal was
permitted from one to the other.[1836] Voluntary jurisdiction is by its
nature difficult to define; but custom tended to limit the Senate’s
cognisance to certain classes of cases. These classes were
determined either by the position of the accused or the nature of the
offence. The Senate tried ordinary crimes, such as murder, adultery,
incest, when they were committed by the members of the upper
classes in society,[1837] and there was a growing feeling, which
subsequently obtained something like legal recognition, that a
senator should be tried by his peers.[1838] But the character of the
offence was the chief determinant of the Senate’s jurisdiction. Any
offence of a directly political character, even in the early Principate a
breach of a treaty by a foreign prince,[1839] tended to come before
it. It was the usual court for extortion or other misuse of powers by
provincial governors;[1840] it judged offences against the majesty of
the state;[1841] and when the majesty of the Princeps had become
identified with that of the state, it might be employed as a
convenient engine of judicial tyranny.[1842] Its utility was assisted by
the unlimited and arbitrary character of its jurisdiction. It interpreted
while it judged; it might extend the incidence of a law and frame
new penalties; it might even punish in cases where no penalty was
fixed by law;[1843] and the principle, forbidden in the quaestiones, of
uniting several crimes in the same charge, was here admitted.[1844]
This jurisdiction was technically, perhaps, a cognitio of the consuls.
[1845] But the Senate was their constant advising body, and the
sentence took the form of a senatus consultum. We shall soon see
how the Emperor’s presence at the board enabled him to influence a
jurisdiction which was technically independent of his control.
The voluntary jurisdiction of the Princeps in criminal matters was
theoretically unlimited, and could be exercised at any time or in any
place. It rested with him whether he would undertake the
cognisance (cognitionem suscipere) at the request of one of the
parties,[1846] or refer the case to the ordinary courts that is, to the
quaestio competent to try it. The relations of the two high courts of
voluntary jurisdiction to the ordinary court of necessary jurisdiction,
are admirably exemplified by the procedure adopted in the trial of
Piso for the murder of Germanicus (a.d. 19-20). It is at the outset
assumed that the case, which is one of poisoning, will come before
the special commission established by the lex Cornelia de veneficis.
But the Emperor’s cognisance is sought by the prosecutor, and
Tiberius and his consilium actually listen to the preliminaries of the
trial. But the Emperor soon sees how invidious it will be to
pronounce judgment in a case in which the murder of his own
nephew and adopted son is the subject of investigation, and he,
therefore, sends the matter unprejudiced to the Senate with a
request that they should exercise their voluntary jurisdiction—a
request which, coming from the Princeps, it was practically, although
not legally, impossible for the Senate to decline.[1847]
 But, although any request for cognisance might be listened to, the
Princeps usually confined his personal jurisdiction to certain spheres.
These included serious crimes committed by members of the upper
ranks in society, but especially offences committed by imperial
servants or by the officers of the army.[1848] The Emperor might, of
course, delegate this jurisdiction, although the delegation of special
cases seems to have been unusual.[1849] On the other hand, the
regular delegation of certain kinds of offences is frequent enough,
and is the basis of the criminal jurisdiction of the Emperor’s servants,
the various praefects who presided over the city, the praetorian
guard, the corn-supply, and the watch.[1850]
A peculiar right of the Princeps to try cases from the provinces in
which the lives of Roman citizens were involved may, perhaps, have
grown up during the Principate. It certainly does not exist during the
early portion of this period. Instances of the maintenance of the
Republican principle, that capital charges against Roman citizens
should be sent to Rome, are indeed furnished by such cases as
those of the Bithynian Christians in the reign of Trajan,[1851] and
perhaps of St. Paul’s appeal in the reign of Nero;[1852] and perhaps
such a demand for a trial at Rome was accompanied by a request,
usually accepted, to be tried before the Princeps; but there are as
many instances which prove the unlimited jurisdiction of the
provincial governor, at least when dealing with ordinary crimes. Thus
Marius Priscus scourged and strangled a Roman knight in the
province of Africa, and Galba, when governor of Tarraconensis,
crucified a guardian, who was a Roman citizen, for poisoning his
ward.[1853] There are, however, signs that the right to kill (jus
gladii), if this expression refers to ordinary as well as to military
jurisdiction, was specially given by the Emperor at least to the
administrators of his own provinces,[1854] which shows that the
frequent requests of one who stood “before Caesar’s judgment seat”
to be tried by Caesar had issued in some standing rule. At a later
time, when the universal criminal appeal to Caesar had grown up,
certain persons—senators, officers, and decurions—are exempted
from capital or severe penalties pronounced by provincial governors,
[1855] and this jurisdiction, reserved for the Princeps, was exercised
by the praefectus praetorio without appeal.
The Princeps was (especially in the early Principate) by no means
a universal court of criminal appeal for the whole Roman world.
There was no appeal to him from the quaestiones perpetuae,
although he may have had some right of rescinding the inequitable
judgments of such courts (in integrum restitutio); nor is there
theoretically any appeal from the Senate, although the Princeps
possesses, through the tribunicia potestas, a practical power of
rescinding the judgments of that body.[1856] In the matter of
jurisdiction delegated to his praefects, the appeal lies unless he wills
it away, as he does in favour of the praefectus praetorio. With
respect to the provinces, the principle of the dual control, which we
have illustrated with reference to civil jurisdiction,[1857] must have
originally been supposed to hold good with reference to criminal
jurisdiction as well; but the dyarchy was, in this particular, ultimately
dissolved. By the end of the second century Caesar, represented in
most cases by his inappellable praetorian praefect, was the highest
court of criminal appeal for the whole Roman world.
Besides the right of appeal, there is in most political societies a
power residing somewhere which is, or approximates to be, a power
of pardon. It is sometimes regarded as a signal attribute of
sovereignty, but somewhat improperly, since the power of rescinding
sentences or of ordering a new trial may reside in a mere executive
authority, such as a court of cassation, which possesses none of the
other attributes which we usually associate with a sovereign. In the
constitution of the Principate it is certainly not regarded as a
sovereign right, for the power is limited and, like most of the
manifestations of public life, is theoretically divided between the
organs of the Republic and the Princeps.
The Senate possessed no general power of pardon beyond the
right, inherited from the Republic, of annulling charges and thus
releasing people, who are on their trial, on certain public and festal
occasions.[1858] This right of declaring abolitiones publicae was one
expression of its right of amnesty.[1859] But the Senate had besides,
as a high court, the right of rescinding its own former sentences (in
integrum restitutio).[1860] It might also be occasionally consulted by
the Princeps on the advisability of his rescinding the sentences of
the imperial courts—those, as a rule, which had been pronounced by
former Emperors.[1861] But such consultation was not a right of the
Senate, but merely a concession of the Emperor.
The Emperor, in his relation to the courts of Rome, possessed the
full power of restitutio only over his own sentences and those of his
predecessors in office.[1862] He had no right of interference in the
way of restitutio with the judgments of the Senate, for the power
which he possessed, of preventing the reception of the charge[1863]
or the execution of the judgment, was merely a practical and
accidental consequence of the application of the tribunician power to
a decree of the Senate.[1864] Nor is there any distinct evidence of his
possessing the power of rescinding the sentences of the quaestiones
perpetuae, although interference with these on equitable grounds is
not improbable, and seems, where permitted, to have taken the
form of consent to a new trial (retratactio).[1865] With respect to the
ordinary civil courts, the praetor possessed the power of equitable
restitution,[1866] but there is evidence that the Princeps, also as a
court of equity, might rescind inequitable sentences both of ordinary
judices and of centumviri.[1867]
The Princeps also possessed a power of quashing indictments
(abolitio), which does not seem to have been confined to his own
jurisdiction, but to have been extended to other criminal courts as
well.[1868] Its origin may be explained on two grounds. The first
depends on the fact that it was possible to have any case brought to
the Emperor’s court, on the request either of the prosecutor or of
the accused. The Emperor might, after listening to the preliminaries,
refuse to hear such a case without “remitting” it to another court,
[1869] and it is very improbable that any other authority would listen
for a moment to a prosecution to which the Emperor had declined to
attend. The dismissal of the case by the Princeps was practically a
power of abolition; but the right might have been exercised even
more directly. Republican history furnishes an instance of a tribune
prohibiting the president of a quaestio from receiving a charge,[1870]
and it is obvious that the tribunicia potestas of the Princeps might
have been exercised in the same way to impede the first step in the
jurisdiction of every criminal court.
With respect to the provinces, just as the criminal appeal finally
passes to the Emperor,[1871] so the revision of the sentences of the
local courts, where revision is suggested by the judge,[1872] as well
as the infliction of punishments denied to the judge—such as the
capital penalty on decurions or deportation on any one[1873]—centre
finally in the hands of the Princeps. All right of revision and
restitution is not, indeed, denied to the provincial governor,[1874] but
while this was finally restricted by certain well-defined rules, the
Emperor’s power of restitution appears ultimately to have been
unlimited. “This power might be so employed by the Emperor as to
take the form of a free pardon,[1875] but theoretically it was merely
an equitable assistance. As a legally unlimited power of rescinding
sentences, it approaches very nearly to a power of pardon; but it is
an executive duty rather than a sovereign right, and we search in
vain in the Principate for a power of pardon regarded as an admitted
constitutional right of a sovereign.”[1876]
(iii.) Administration.—The principle of a dual control is as manifest
in administrative matters as in any other. The spheres of
administration are Rome, Italy, and the Provinces. With respect to
the first two it is clear that one of the few justifications for the
maintenance of Republican government was that, by leaving the
ordinary administrative duties connected with Rome and Italy to the
Senate and ordinary magistrates, it enabled the Princeps to
concentrate his attention on his proper sphere, the foreign and
provincial world. But even the provinces did not deserve the
undivided attention of the Princeps. Those whose administration
presented no special difficulties, and which required no military
force, might still be left to the care of the Roman people. This
division of responsibility might have continued a reality had the
Principate continued to be what it was in origin—a provisional
government by an individual who had little personal assistance at his
command. But as this rule gradually assumed the form of a huge
government department, overshadowing all others, with an
organised civil service which replaced the assistance furnished by
freedmen and slaves, it not unnaturally tended to encroach on the
Republican spheres of administration. The motive for the tendency
was chiefly the fact that the Princeps was, in the eyes of all men, not
the head of a department but of the state, and a responsibility,
which he would gladly have disclaimed, for the acts of all officials,
even those of Republican departments, was thus thrust upon him.
[1877] There is no particular ground for believing that the Princeps
managed departments such as Rome or Italy better than the
Republican officials. The important fact was that public opinion
forced him to manage them, whether for good or ill.
(iv.) Finance.—Finance at Rome was always so intimately bound
up with provincial control, that the division of the provinces into
public and imperial implied of itself the existence of two separate
financial departments. The Senate still asserts control over the
aerarium, and gives instructions to the guardians of the chest. The
qualification of these guardians varied from time to time. The
dictator Caesar had in 45 b.c. given the charge to two aediles, but
quaestors seem again to have been the presidents of the
treasury[1878] until Augustus in 28 b.c. instituted two praefecti aerarii
Saturni, chosen yearly from the ex-praetors by the Senate.[1879]
Even this change was short-lived, and the praefects were soon
replaced by two of the praetors of the year who received their
provincia by lot.[1880] Claudius in 44 a.d. restored the Republican
method of administration through quaestors; but these were no
longer to be annual officials designated by lot, but to be chosen by
the Emperor for a period of three years.[1881] Finally under Nero (56
a.d.) the elements of the Augustan and the Claudian arrangements

were combined[1882] in the provision that two ex-praetors should be

appointed as praefects of the treasury, but that these should be
named, generally for three years, by the Princeps.[1883] The fact
that the Princeps appointed the guardians of the public chest was by
no means an assertion that he controlled its funds, and, although his
indirect influence on the aerarium was unquestionably great, this
treasury still remained in principle under the direction of the Senate
alone. Even in the second century it voted a loan to Marcus Aurelius
for carrying on a war.[1884]
The Princeps was rendered financially independent of the Senate
through the possession of his own treasury (fiscus or fiscus
Caesaris),[1885] into which flowed the revenues from his own
provinces, certain dues owed by the public provinces, and some
extraordinary revenues, such as the confiscated goods of
condemned criminals or lapsed inheritances (bona damnatorum,
bona vacantia), in the claim to which the fiscus finally replaced the
aerarium. The Princeps was the owner of the fiscus, but was
regarded as a trustee of the wealth which it contained. To sue the
fiscus was to sue the Princeps; but, although he was the sole subject
of rights in relation to this treasury, he did not regard the money
which it contained as though it were his own private property. Even
in the early Principate there is evidence of the existence of crown
property (patrimonium or patrimonium privatum), the use of which
for private purposes was vested in the Princeps.[1886] The
patrimonium doubtless commenced by being the strictly personal
property of the first family of Caesars, and much of it was acquired
by bequest;[1887] but, when the Principate had ceased to be
hereditary in the Julian line, it seems to have been looked on as
crown property, which was heritable only by the successor to the
throne. The bequeathal of this property, which was implied when the
Princeps selected an heir, might thus be regarded as a mode of
designation; although, if the destined heir did not succeed, the
patrimonium passed to his successful rival. It was probably due to
the uncertainty of the tenure of the patrimonium that with Septimius
Severus we find the creation of a new aggregate of private property,
the res privata,[1888] the administration of which was kept quite
distinct from that of the patrimonium. All Caesar’s property, whether
held in trust for the state or for the crown, or applied to the needs of
his family, was equally administered by his own private servants. Of
these we shall speak when we deal with the functionaries of the
Princeps as a whole.
Another treasury under imperial control, which served a public
purpose, was that established for supplying pensions to discharged
soldiers. The want of it had been severely felt in the last years of the
Republic, when the mercenary army looked for its final rewards to
plunder or the political influence of its generals; and, when Augustus
created a professional army by the introduction of the long-service
system, he found it necessary to establish a pension fund for those
who had given twenty of the best years of their life to the practice of
arms. The result was the aerarium militare, which the Emperor
endowed with a large capital,[1889] and to which, as fixed sources of
revenue, the two taxes of the vicesima hereditatum and the
centesima rerum venalium were assigned.[1890] The administration
of this chest was given to three praefects (praefecti aerarii militaris),
who remained three years in office, and were chosen from ex-
praetors, originally by lot but later by the Princeps.[1891]
(v.) Cultus.—In matters of religion and worship the dyarchy is
again apparent. So far as the state had a religious head, the
Princeps, in virtue of the chief pontificate, occupied this position, and
we have seen the influence which this headship gave him.[1892] But
the Senate had not lost all its control over the cultus of the
community or its right to pronounce on foreign worships, when their
social merits or their legality were in question. It is the Senate that is
consulted on the growth of Egyptian and Jewish worship at Rome,
[1893] and on the right of asylum in the provinces.[1894] Claudius
questions it on the subject of the restoration of the college of
haruspices,[1895] and Aurelian asks it for a pontifex to dedicate the
great temple of the sun-god at Palmyra.[1896] So far as the
appointment to the great priestly colleges was not controlled by the
Princeps, the gift of this honour was now in the hands of the Senate.
(vi.) Coinage.—The right of coinage, although its possession by a
state may be taken as a mark of sovereign rights being enjoyed by
that community, is scarcely a significant mark of the sovereignty
within a state. Whether the Senate or the Princeps possessed this
right would make little difference to the theory of the constitution.
As a fact, the right was possessed by both powers, and was an
additional illustration of the principle of the dyarchy. From the year
15 b.c. the Princeps undertakes the gold and silver coinage, the
Senate that of copper. The possession of the latter was a privilege in
so far as the exchange value of copper was higher than its intrinsic
value, and payments of any amount could be made in what was
really a token currency.[1897]
We have now exhibited the system of dual control as it existed in
all the chief departments of the state. It would be easy to prove that
in almost every particular it might be made a fiction. The senatorial
power of legislation is directed to so large an extent by the imperial
initiative that the oratio of the Princeps is sometimes cited in place
of the decree of the Senate to which it gave birth;[1898] the
independence of senatorial jurisdiction is often infringed by the
tribunician power of the Emperor, while his authority is directly or
remotely in conflict with that of the other courts at every turn; his
praefects tend to usurp the administration of Rome and Italy, while
his procurators are a check on the activity of the proconsuls of the
public provinces; his influence over the aerarium can be asserted
whenever he cares to take the trouble to initiate or support in the
Senate the proposal of a grant of money to himself.[1899] But such a
control of departments, if wisely asserted, by no means rendered the
dyarchy nugatory. Under a judicious prince the Republican
constitution was sufficient for its own sphere in perhaps ninety-nine
cases out of every hundred; because in the hundredth some
pressure was felt from the head of the state, we cannot pronounce
the dyarchy to be a fiction. If the control by the Princeps is brutally
and unwisely, however legally, asserted, he is by common consent
not a Princeps but a tyrant. We must judge the Principate by its best
names, by a Nerva, a Trajan, a Marcus Aurelius, an Alexander, a
Decius. In the reigns of all these princes the dyarchy is a living thing.
If it is objected that it becomes a living thing merely through a
concession of the Princeps, the answer is that this concession was
certainly not pictured by these Emperors to themselves as an act of
grace, but was regarded as mere obedience to the constitution; and
to maintain the theory that a constitution which demands obedience
from the wise is a palpable fiction because it cannot enforce
obedience on the headstrong, is to wring a strange admission from
political science.

§ 6. The Senatorial and the Equestrian Nobility

Although the authority of the Princeps rested virtually on the
support of the army, his position might have been unsafe, and would
have been embarrassing, had he not secured for the work of
administration at home and abroad an official class, that was
dependent to some extent on imperial creation and, therefore,
worked in harmony with himself. The old Republican nobility, so far
as it had not been extinguished, might be utilised; but it could be
employed only by being kept in fetters, and by power being given to
the Princeps to recruit its ranks at his will. We have already
considered his control of office, his right of adlectio, and his power
of creating Patricians. But a wider power, cognate to the gift of the
Patriciate, was needed, to make him the patenter of a nobility from
which alone senators and magistrates were to be chosen. Such a
power had been usurped by Augustus, and the recognition of a
“senatorial order” was its result. Perhaps in the later Republic society
had already recognised the right of the prospective senator to wear
the broad scarlet stripe (latus clavus) on his tunic, but the right
became more clearly defined with the commencement of the
Principate; and the laticlavii are prospective senators and holders of
Republican offices, either recognised as such by the Princeps or
endowed by him with the symbol of senatorial rank. The senator’s
son possesses the right to wear the latus clavus and to attend the
meetings of the curia, in which he will one day take an active part;
[1900] the eques to whom the symbol has been given may qualify for
the Senate through the vigintivirate and the quaestorship. The first
steps to office and to the Senate were, as we have seen, usually
through the army; but the young soldier who was destined for the
Senate differed, in service and in title, from his purely equestrian
compeer. The tribuni laticlavii[1901] are a special class of officers,
who may often have started their service, as mounted officers of the
legions, with the brevet rank of tribune, and whose service was
shorter than that of the other equites in order that they might be
qualified for the quaestorship by the age of twenty-five.[1902] The
possessors of the latus clavus must always have been expected to
pursue a senatorial career;[1903] by the time of Claudius they might
be compelled to this course, the penalty of refusal being the
deprivation of the broad stripe, but sometimes of equestrian rank as
well.[1904]
Great care was taken to preserve the dignity and purity of this
senatorial order. The latus clavus was granted only to those who
could trace free birth through four generations, and Claudius was
forced to excuse his conduct in giving it to a freedman’s son.[1905]
The Julian marriage laws prohibited marriage with freedwomen or
actresses, not only to senators, but to their sons, grandsons, and
great-grandsons.[1906] “The order” was reckoned to include the
wives of senators and all descendants in the male line,[1907]
together with adoptive children, until they were emancipated, and
even those natural children who had been emancipated.[1908] The
commercial disabilities of senators were perpetuated and sharpened.
The Republican prohibition that they should not be purchasers of
public contracts[1909] was renewed by an edict of Hadrian.[1910]
They were permitted to invest capital at a moderate rate of interest,
but at times even this was disallowed.[1911]
These disabilities were, however, to some extent compensated by
privileges. As the senators ceased to be purely Roman, the question
of their duties to their native states had to be considered, and the
rule was fixed that, while they were allowed to retain their domicile
of origin (origo), they owed no public duties (munera) to the cities of
their birth.[1912] We have already mentioned the growth of the
principle which reserved criminal jurisdiction on a senator to the
senatorial court.[1913]
In the early Principate there was no distinct title reserved for the
order, but after the close of the first century the epithet clarissimus
came to be applied to its members, and the title clarissima is even
given to women of senatorial rank.[1914] A distinction in office and
dignity but no distinction in rank separates the Princeps from the
senators. They are his “peers” (ὁμότιμοι),[1915] and this peerage is
chiefly shown in their sole participation in Republican offices. They
might, indeed, be delegates of the Princeps, but not his servants in
the sense in which the procurators were. Besides filling the regular
offices of state, senators possessed a monopoly of provincial
government, where the country governed was a true provincia and
not a department assigned temporarily or permanently to a
procurator or praefect; they were the sole commanders of the
legions, and, as Caesar’s nominees, they filled the office of praefect
of the city and the various commissionerships (curationes) for duties
which he had undertaken, such as the care of the water-supply, of
the roads, of public works, and of the banks and channel of the
Tiber (curatores aquarum, viarum, operum publicorum, alvei et
riparum Tiberis).[1916]
We have already spoken of the military training and attitude of
this nobility,[1917] and also of its gradually increasing provincial
character.[1918] Both these characteristics were in harmony with its
sphere of duties, which were mainly provincial. A successful member
of the order could have seen but little of Rome or Italy until his
declining years. If his early military service was real and not nominal,
[1919] he spent most of the years between eighteen and twenty-five
in the camps and on the frontiers. If he had shown military ability,
he might be sent back as an ex-quaestor to take command of a
legion, although such a legateship was usually reserved to men of
praetorian rank.[1920] The praetorship and consulship qualified him
for long terms of service in successive Caesarian provinces, and for
the annual governorship of those still under the control of the
Senate.[1921] This identification with provincial life was an
identification with the Principate, for there were few Republican
associations to impress the mind when the bounds of Italy had been
passed. The principles of selection, training, and habituation to
which this nobility was subject were thus directed to inspire it with a
belief in, if not with an enthusiasm for, the accepted order of things.
The second order which supported the throne and did the work of
the Empire was that of the Equites. The word eques has now, as in
the Republic, a dual signification. Tacitus employs it to describe the
capitalist class, presumably the possessors of a census of 400,000
sesterces,[1922] and it is obvious that current terminology did not
accept the restrictions which the Principate may have wished to
impose on the use of the term. It is uncertain what these restrictions
were, for literature and inscriptions mention two methods of
conferring equestrian rank, and it is not known whether these
methods—the gift of the rank through the gold ring and through the
public horse—were sometimes alternative or always concurrent. But
the grant of knighthood to freedmen is described as having been
effected by the gift of the gold ring[1923]—a gift which, as early as
the time of Hadrian, had come to confer free birth (ingenuitas)
merely and not equestrian rank,[1924] and it cannot be shown that
the public horse was always given to members of this class when
they were endowed with the insignia of knighthood.[1925] It is not
improbable, however, that when the gold ring had lost its earlier
signification and become merely a means of conferring free birth,
only one order of official equites was recognised, and that the title in
its proper sense was restricted to the order whose members had,
from the time of Augustus, been pre-eminently the bearers of the
name. This order was the old one of the equites equo publico, which
was reorganised and vastly extended in scale at the very beginning
of the Principate. We are told that even under Augustus the annual
parade might witness the appearance of five thousand knights,[1926]
and these could have been but a portion of the order, for many
members of the corps must have been detained on financial,
administrative, and military duties in the provinces. This increase in
numbers seems to have led to the abandonment of the old
centuriate organisation, for the equites of the Principate are grouped
in turmae and commanded by seviri.[1927] Selection for the order
was entirely in the hands of the Princeps,[1928] and probably any
one with the requisite qualifications—free birth, good character, and
a property of 400,000 sesterces—could get this patent of nobility
from the Emperor’s hands. At the times when the censorship was
revived in the person of the Princeps,[1929] the selection and
elimination of equites may have followed the rules prevailing under
the Republican system of revision;[1930] but, as the censorship was
no part of the constitution of the Principate, some department must
have existed from the first for the purpose of registering the names
of applicants. We find a permanent bureau eventually established for
this purpose. It bore the title a censibus equitum Romanorum, and
seems to have been a branch of the general department of petitions
(a libellis).[1931] Although this office was concerned primarily with
the duty of admission to the order, yet its holders must have pointed
out to the Princeps cases where the qualifications requisite for
knighthood had ceased to exist, and they must thus have acted as
the board that really controlled the tenure of the rank. The formal
control in this particular was, however, effected, now as in the
Republic, by a solemn and public act. The act, although a Republican
survival, was not employed with its Republican meaning. The parade
of the knights (transvectio equitum) on the Ides of July had, during
the Republic, been a mere procession; it was now given the
significance of the censorian review in the Forum,[1932] and became
the means of testing the qualifications of members of the order
(probatio equitum).[1933] The knights now passed on horseback, not
on foot; they could not ask for their discharge (missio), for the
tenure of their rank was no longer conditioned by military service,
although Augustus finally permitted all members of the age of thirty-
five, who were unwilling to continue in the corps, to return their
public horses;[1934] but the knights were still questioned and made
to give an account of their conduct,[1935] and those whose answers
were unsatisfactory were dismissed from the ranks.[1936] That
Augustus took this duty seriously is shown by the fact that he more
than once asked the Senate for committees, whether of three or ten
members, to assist him in the work.[1937] But, although this parade
is found in the reigns of subsequent Emperors,[1938] and can be
traced as late as the fourth century a.d.,[1939] the serious duty of
rejection was probably exercised more and more by the permanent
bureau which admitted to the order.
The eighteen centuries of Roman knights had, even at the end of
the Republic, never lost touch with the army. They had ceased to be
the citizen cavalry, but they were composed of the young nobility
who furnished the mounted officers of the legions. This secondary
military character was retained by the corps in the Principate; but it
had an additional significance as well. There can be no doubt that it
was from the equites equo publico that the Emperors chose those
members of the official hierarchy—procurators and praefects—who
were of equestrian rank. It is less certain whether this corps
furnished all the judices during the early Principate. Jurisdiction,
whether civil or criminal, was a burden (munus), and this may have
been imposed on all who possessed the requisite census, whether
they had made profession for the order or not.[1940]
 It was natural that an order thus definitely constituted, and which
became more rigid as time went on, should end by enjoying titles of
honour peculiar to itself. This stage had been attained by the second
century; but the titular designations are not strictly those of the
equestrian order, but of the grades of office to which it led. After the
reign of Marcus Aurelius the equestrian hierarchy was divided into
three classes; the first contained only the praefect of the praetorian
guard who was called vir eminentissimus; the second the other
equestrian praefects and higher procurators, who bore the title
perfectissimi; the third—the possessors of all other equestrian posts
—were egregii.[1941] The equestrian officers of the army were not
graduated on a similar scale of rank, and the municipal knights of
Italy are designated only by the old Republican and non-official
epithet of splendidi.[1942] The more definite, but equally non-official,
epithet of illustris may have been applied to individuals who
possessed the senatorial census and the latus clavus, but who were
passing through the equestrian service in the army (equestris
militia), which was preparatory to entrance into the Senate.[1943]
But the name more particularly designated men who, possessed of a
senatorial fortune, preferred to retain their equestrian rank, and
even perhaps any equites of fortune and dignity such as the holders
of the great praefectures.[1944]

§ 7. The Functionaries of the Princeps

The Princeps, since he is not a king, has neither magistrates nor
ministers subject to his will; but he possesses a number of delegates
and servants who assist in the performance of his vast duties of
administration. Some of these, such as the legates, praefects, and
curators, find analogies in the Republican constitution; others, such
as the procurators and secretaries of departments, are borrowed
from the organisation of a Roman household and are transferred
from the life of the palace to that of the state. We may neglect for
the moment the legates and provincial praefects, who will be