ground. The causes of disaffection continue to act on the minds of the reformers; and their hope of redress, under the present order of things, has been seriously diminished. The exasperations caused by the conflict itself, the suspicions and terrors of that trying period, and the use made by the triumphant party of the power thrown into their hands, have heightened the passions which existed before. It certainly appeared too much as if the rebellion had been purposely invited by the government, and the unfortunate men who took part in it deliberately drawn into a trap by those who subsequently inflicted so severe a punishment on them for their error. It seemed, too, as if the dominant party made use of the occasion afforded it by the real guilt of a few desperate and imprudent men, in order to persecute or disable the whole body of ther political opponents. A great number of perfectly innocent individuals were thrown into prison, and suffered in person, property, and character. The whole body of reformers were subjected to suspicion, and to harassing proceedings instituted by magistrates, whose political leanings were notoriously adverse to them. Severe laws were passed, under color of which individuals, very generally esteemed, were punished without any form of trial.”

We here again appeal to that portion of the American press which has been seen to disgrace itself by the fury with which it has joined in the hue and ery of the British Tory faction of the Canadas, whom the temporary success of combined fraud and force have enabled to place their foot on the neck of a prostrated, oppressed, and outraged people, at least to pay the poor atonement of a blush of shame for the dishonor they have cast on the memory of the fathers of our own Revolution, whose motives to rebellion were certainly never equal, in the immediate and galling pressure of the yoke of foreign dominion, to those which, in this very document, the official report of the Governor-General of the Canadasare shown to have impelled the party which has been unfortunately guilty of the crime of failure.

The most important practical question on which the various parties have been at issue, is stated to be that of the Clergy Reserves. By the Constitutional Act a certain portion (the one-eighth part) of the land in every township was set apart for the maintenance of a "Protestant Clergy." Under this denomination the clergy of the Church of England have claimed and enjoyed the sole benefit of the proceeds of the sales of these lands-a claim, naturally enough, strenuously contested by all the other "Protestant" sects, as well as very obnoxious to the large body of Catholics in the Province. It is scarcely necessary to say, that the Government party has always sustained the Church of England-that being an essential element of that Tory political creed which, transplanted to the ungenial soil of our North America, has been seen to produce such bitter fruits of mis-government and misery. On the other hand, "a great body of all Protestant denominations," says the Report, as well as the Catholics, "have either demanded the equal application of those funds to the purposes of all religious creeds whatsoever, or have urged the propriety of leaving each body of religionists to maintain its own establishment, to repeal or dis

regard the law, and to apply the clergy funds to the general purposes of the Government, or to the support of a general system of education." And the reader will not be surprised to be told that "two bills passed the last House of Assembly, in which the Reformers had the ascendancy, applying these funds to the purposes of education; and both these bills were rejected by the Legislative Council."

But this was not all. Though the clergy of that church (confessedly a "small community "_"probably not one-fourth of the population"—and relatively decreasing in numerical proportion, with the influx of emigration, as well as being "the church which, being that of the wealthy, can best provide for itself, and has the fewest poor to supply with gratuitous religious instruction") were thus an 66 endowed," they were not a "dominant priesthood." But the last act of Sir John Colborne before quitting the Government, in 1835, was the establishment of the fifty-seven rectories. Spreading over the Province a body of clergymen of this favored religious minority, possessing "all the spiritual and other privileges enjoyed by an English rector,"-for the most part "in precisely the same position as a clergyman of the established church of England." He must be a very infatuated admirer of “the bench of bishops," who will be surprised that this was "resented most warmly" by all the other teachers of religion in the country, thus "degraded to a position of legal inferiority to the clergy of the Church of England;" that it was, in the opinions of many, a "chief predisposing cause of the recent insurrection ;" and that it is "an abiding and unabated cause of discontent." "And it is equally natural," says Lord Durham, "that the English dissenters and Irish Catholics, remembering the position they have occupied at home, and the long and painful struggle through which alone they have obtained the imperfect equality they now possess, should refuse to acquiesce for themselves in the creation of a similar establishment in their new country, and thus to bequeath to their children a strife as arduous and embittered as that from which they have so recently and imperfectly escaped." The Report then proceeds to remark on the unanimity of opinion in the United States in favor of "the voluntary principle" in religion, which has naturally extended its influence, strengthened by "the example" of its success, over the tone of thought prevalent in the neighboring provinces; and freely admits that

"The result of any determination on the part of the British government or Legislature to give one sect a predominance and superiority would be, it might be feared, not to secure the favored sect, but to endanger the loss of the colony; and, in vindicating the exclusive pretensions of the English church, to hazard one of the fairest possessions of the British Crown."

He urges the immediate settlement of this question, by leaving it solely to the local legislature.

The Catholics, who constitute "at least a fifth of the whole population of Upper Canada, appear to have peculiar additional causes of grievance." They are not only "wholly excluded from all share in the government of the country, and the patronage at its disposal," but the detestable institution of Orangeism, chiefly as an active and organized engine of political rather than of religious machinery, has been introduced into the country, and not only tolerated but encouraged by the Government party. On several occasions the election of government partizans has been procured, as it is asserted, by means of "a violent and riotous mob of Orangemen, who prevented the voters in the opposition interest. from coming up to the polls;" and when the Assembly presented to Sir Francis Head an address of remonstrance on the subject, the cool answer received was, simply, that "the Government of this Province has neither taken, nor is determined to take, any steps to prevent or discourage the formation or continuance of such societies."

The administration of justice is not so bad as in Lower Canada; there is a system of circuits, and still some integrity in juries; but there are general complaints against "the union of political and judicial functions in the chief justice," as also against the partizan system by which the sheriffs are appointed; and for similar reasons as in the Lower Province "the composition of the magistracy appears to be a serious cause of mischief and dissatisfaction." The Province is also "without any of those means by which the revenues of a country are developed, and the civilization of a people is advanced or upheld." A very considerable portion of it has "neither roads, post-offices, mills, schools, nor churches." The people" can seldom acquire wealth," and "with the exception of the laboring class, most of the emigrants who have arrived within the last ten years are poorer now than at the time of their arrival in the province." There is little inter-communication, and "no adequate system of local assessment to improve it;""nor can even wealthy land owners prevent their children from growing up ignorant and boorish, and from occupying a far lower mental, moral, and social position than they themselves fill." So that, after all, the state of things appears hardly much better in any point of view in the Upper than in the Lower Province; nor are the acknowledged evils in the condition of the latter to be ascribed to any peculiar cause in the character of the French population, but rather to the general repressive and deteriorative influence of colonial misgovernment under the "paternal and benign auspices" of British Toryism.

Carlyle, in his History of the French Revolution, makes the VOL. V. NO. XVIII.-JUNE, 1839.

LL

remark, that misrule always in the end both proves and explodes itself by bankruptcy. Upper Canada presents an unhappy illustration of its truth. The whole revenue of the Province, about £60,000, is hardly adequate to pay the interest of the public debt, upwards of a million-which has been sunk (with "great mismanagement, and perhaps no little jobbing") in publie works confessedly unprofitable, and some of which are now "almost suspended from the apparent inutility of completing them," a state of things which is ascribed, with what truth we have no means of judging, in a great degree, to the want of cooperation of the Legislature of the Lower Province.

3. The other Provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward's Island, and Newfoundland, present on the whole a spectacle in most respects analogous to the unhappy picture which the Report draws of the condition of the two larger ones-though both their sufferings and discontents differ greatly in degree from those of the latter, and though in these there is generally a much stronger sentiment of British loyalty. In New Brunswick the "official party" has had the good sense to succumb with a better grace to the liberal popular party; the consequence of which is a much greater degree of harmony and tranquillity than in any of the others. But, on the whole, in all of them like causes are found infallibly to produce like effects. "In all these provinces we find representative government coupled with an irresponsible executive; we find the same collision between the branches of the Government-the same abuse of the powers of representative bodies, owing to the anomaly of their position, aided by the want of good municipal institutions--and the same constant interference of the imperial administration in matters which should be left wholly to the Provincial governments." Nearly the whole of Prince Edward's Island, containing about a million and a half of acres of the richest soil, was alienated, in one day, to absentees resident in London, somewhat more than half a century ago, and the consequence is that only 100,000 acres are under cultivation. The cultivation of the remainder, the absent proprietors "neither promote nor permit." Major Head describes his journey through a great part of Nova Scotia as " exhibiting a melancholy spectacle of half the tenements abandoned, and lands every where falling into decay. Lands that were purchased thirty and forty years ago at five shillings an acre, are now offered for three." These provinces contain nearly 30,000,000 of acres, and though among the longest settled on the North American continent, have a population only of about 365,000 souls, giving only one inhabitant for every eighty As if it were the settled purpose of the British Government to keep its dependencies in a state of beggary and wretchedness, they are deprived of the benefit of the very mines of their Provinces.

acres.

The valuable coal mines of Pictou having been mortgaged to some jewellers in London to pay the debts of the late Duke of York, and the rich iron mines of Lower Canada, which could furnish all the colonies with iron ware, having been bestowed, for a mere nominal rent, on one of the favorites of the passing governor of the day. In Newfoundland there has long been the ordinary collision between the representative body on one side, and the Executive on the other. The representatives have no influence on the composition, or the proceedings of the Executive government, "and the dispute is now carried on, as in Canada, by impeachments of various public officers on one hand, and prorogations on the other."

4. The fourth section of the Report, which treats of the disposal of public lands and of emigration, we are compelled by our limits to pass over with a very slight notice. The only system and uniformity that have prevailed in relation to these subjects have been a system of mismanagement and a uniformity of profusion. It is needless to enter into its details; a thorough re-organization of the whole is urged, and its wisdom illustrated by reference to the example of the United States. With respect to the difference of the value of land on the respective sides of the frontier line, arising solely out of the difference of civil institutions, the Report says:

"Throughout the frontier, from Amherstburgh to the ocean, the market value of land is much greater on the American than on the British side. In not a few parts of the frontier this difference amounts to as much as a thousand per cent., and in some cases even more. The average difference, as between Upper Canada and the States of New York and Michigan, is notoriously several hundred per cent."

And the statement that full sixty per cent. of the emigrants into the Canadas from the United Kingdom are said to have removed to the United States, rather than remain in the colonial provinces, is amply justified by the following contrasted picture of the two sides of the frontier line, in respect to "every sign of productive industry, increasing wealth, and progressive civilization."

"By describing one side, and reversing the picture, the other would be also described. On the American side all is activity and bustle. The forest has been widely cleared; every year numerous settlements are formed, and thousands of farms are created out of the waste; the country is intersected by common roads, canals and railroads are finished, or in the course of formation; the ways of communication and transport are crowded with people, and enlivened by numerous carriages and large steamboats. The observer is surprised at the number of harbors on the lakes, and the number of vessels they contain; while bridges, artificial landing places, and commodious wharves are formed in all directions as soon as required. Good houses, warehouses, mills, inns, villages, towns, and even great cities, are almost seen to spring up out of the desert. Every village has its school-house and place of public worship. Every town has many of both, with its township buildings, its bookstores, and probably one or two banks and newspapers; and the cities, with their fine churches, their great hotels, their exchanges, court-houses and municipal halls, of stone or marble, so new and fresh as to mark the recent existence of the forest where they now stand, would be admired in any part of the old world. On the British side of the line, with the exception of a few favored spots where some approach to American prosperity is apparent, all seems waste and