There Is No Middle Course For The Settler;
He Must Work Or Starve.
In North America there is another strong
incentive to improvement, to be found in the scarcity of labour;
and still more, therefore, than in Europe must every mechanical
contrivance which supersedes manual labour tend to increase the
prosperity of the inhabitants.
When these circumstances are duly
considered, we need no longer wonder at the rapid improvements in
labour-saving machinery, and in the means of internal communication
throughout the United States. But for the steam-engine, canals, and
railroads, North America would have remained for ages a howling
wilderness of endless forests, and instead of the busy hum of men,
and the sound of the mill and steam-engine, we should now have heard
nothing but
"The melancholy roar of unfrequented floods."
The scenes and characters presented to the reader in the preceding
pages, belong, in some measure, rather to the past than the present
state of Canada. In the last twenty years great changes have taken
place, as well in the external appearance of the country, as in the
general character of its inhabitants. In many localities where the
land was already under the plough, the original occupants of the
soil have departed to renew their endless wars with the giants of
the forest, in order to procure more land for their increasing
families where it could be obtained at a cheaper price. In the
back-woods, forests have been felled, the blackened stumps have
disappeared, and regular furrows are formed by the ploughman, where
formerly he had not time or inclination to whistle at his work. A
superior class of farmers has sprung up, whose minds are as much
improved by cultivation as their lands, and who are comfortably
settled on farms supposed to be exhausted of their fertility by
their predecessors. As the breadth of land recovered from the
forest is increased, villages, towns, and cities have grown up
and increased in population and wealth in proportion to the
productiveness of the surrounding country.
In Canada, it is particularly to be noted, that there is hardly
any intermediate stage between the rude toil and privation of the
back-woods, and the civilisation, comfort, and luxury of the towns
and cities, many of which are to outward appearance entirely
European, with the encouraging prospect of a continual increase
in the value of fixed property. When a colony, capable, from the
fertility of the soil and abundance of moisture, of supporting a
dense population, has been settled by a civilised race, they are
never long in establishing a communication with the sea-coast and
with other countries. When such improvements have been effected,
the inhabitants may be said at once to take their proper place
among civilised nations. The elements of wealth and power are
already there, and time and population only are required fully
to develope the resources of the country.
Unhappily the natural progress of civilised communities in our
colonies is too often obstructed by the ignorance of governments,
and unwise or short-sighted legislation; and abundance of selfish
men are always to be found in the colonies themselves, who,
destitute of patriotism, greedily avail themselves of this
ignorance, in order to promote their private interests at the
expense of the community. Canada has been greatly retarded in its
progress by such causes, and this will in a great measure account
for its backwardness when compared with the United States, without
attributing the difference to the different forms of government.
It was manifestly the intention of the British government, in
conferring representative institutions on Canada, that the people
should enjoy all the privileges of their fellow-subjects in the
mother-country. The more to assimilate our government to that of its
great original, the idea was for some time entertained of creating a
titled and hereditary aristocracy, but it was soon found that though
"The King can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that,"
it was not in his power to give permanency to an institution which,
in its origin, was as independent as royalty itself, arising
naturally out of the feudal system: but which was utterly
inconsistent with the genius and circumstances of a modern colony.
The sovereign might endow the members of such an aristocracy with
grants of the lands of the crown to support their dignity, but what
benefit could such grants be, even to the recipients, in a country
covered with boundless forests and nearly destitute of inhabitants?
It is obvious that no tenants could be found to pay rents for such
lands, or indeed even to occupy them, while lands could be purchased
on easy terms in the United States, or in Canada itself. Had this
plan been carried out, Canada would have been a doomed country for
centuries.
The strongest incitements to industry are required, those of
proprietorship and ultimate independence, to induce settlers to
encounter all the privations and toil of a new settlement in such
a country. A genuine aristocracy can only exist in a country
already peopled, and which has been conquered and divided among
the conquerors. In such a state of things, aristocracy, though
artificial in its origin, becomes naturalised, if I may use the
expression, and even, as in Great Britain, when restrained within
proper limits, highly beneficial in advancing civilization. Be it
for good or be it for evil, it is worse than useless to disguise
the fact that the government of a modern colony, where every conquest
is made from the forest by little at a time, must be essentially
republican.
Any allusion to political parties is certainly foreign to the object
of the preceding sketches; but it is impossible to make the British
reader acquainted with the various circumstances which retarded the
progress of this fine colony, without explaining how the patronage
of the local government came formerly to be so exclusively bestowed
on one class of the population, - thus creating a kind of spurious
aristocracy which disgusted the colonists, and drove emigration from
our shores to those of the United States.
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