cently--I can, I know--and save something too. We live much better
here than at home."[23]

More especially in the smaller towns, the externals must have presented
a steady and dull monotony--the jail and court-house, three or four
churches, a varying number of mean-looking stores including a liberal
proportion of taverns, and the irregular rows of private houses.

If lack of efficient public spirit, and social monotony, marked the
towns, the settlers in the bush were hardly likely to show a vigorous
communal spirit. They had their common life, building, clearing,
harvesting in local "bees," primitive assemblies in which work,
drinking, and recreation welded the primitive community together, and
the "grog-boss" became for a time the centre of society.[24] But the
average day of the farmer was solitary, and, except where politics
meant {29} bridges, roads, and material gifts, his outlook was limited
by the physical strain of his daily life, and work and sleep followed
too closely on each other's track to leave time for other things.
M'Taggart has a quaint picture of a squatter, which must have been
typical of much within the colony in 1839. He found the settler, Peter
Armstrong, "in a snug little cabin, with a wife, two children, some
good sleek grey cats, and a very respectable-looking dog. He had but
few wants, his health was aye good; there was spring water plenty just
aside him, and enough to make a good fire in winter, while with what he
caught, shot, gathered and grew in the yard, he lived well enough."
His relation to the state, secular and ecclesiastical, is best gauged
by his admission that when it came to marriage, he and his
wife--Scottish like himself--"just took ane anither's word on't."[25]
Crime, on the whole, considering the elements out of which the
community had been formed, was surprisingly little in evidence.[26] In
certain regions it had a natural fertility. Wherever the white trader
met the Indian, or rival {30} fur-traders strove in competition, the
contact between the vices of the two communities bred disorder, and
Canadian trading success was too often marked by the indiscriminate
ruin of the Indians through drink and disease.[27] At Bytown, where
the lumberers gathered to vary their labours in the bush with
dissipation, the community "was under the control of a very dangerous
class of roughs, who drank, gambled, and fought continually, and were
the terror of all well-disposed citizens."