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.
After the American Revolution, considerable numbers of loyalists
in the United States voluntarily relinquished their homesteads and
property, and came to Canada, which then, even on the shores of
Lake Ontario, was a perfect wilderness. Lands were of course granted
to them by the government, and very naturally these settlers were
peculiarly favoured by the local authorities.
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