[Sidenote:  a scourge to the province.]

The immigration which is now taking place is a frightful scourge to the province.  Thousands upon thousands of poor wretches are coming here incapable of work, and scattering the seeds of disease and death.  Already five or six hundred orphans are accumulated at Montreal, for whose sustenance, until they can be put out to service, provision must be made.  Considerable panic exists among the inhabitants.  Political motives contribute to swell the amount of dissatisfaction produced by this state of things.  The Opposition make the want of adequate provision to meet this overwhelming calamity, in the shape of hospitals, &c., a matter of charge against the Provincial Administration.  That section of the French who dislike British immigration at all times, find, as might be expected, in the circumstances of this year, a theme for copious declamation.  Persons who cherish republican sympathies ascribe these evils to our dependent condition as colonists—­’the States of the Union,’ they say, ’can take care of themselves, and avert the scourge from their shores, but we are victims on whom inhuman Irish landlords, &c., can charge the consequences of their neglect and rapacity.’  Meanwhile I have a very delicate and irksome duty to discharge.  There is a general belief that Great Britain must make good to the province the expenses entailed on it by this visitation.  ‘It is enough,’ say the inhabitants, ’that our houses should be made a receptacle of this mass of want and misery:  it cannot surely be intended that we are to be mulcted in heavy pecuniary damages besides.’  The reasonableness of these sentiments can hardly be questioned—­bitter indignation would be aroused by the attempt to confute them—­and yet I feel that if I were too freely to assent to them, I might encourage recklessness, extravagance, and peculation.  From the overwhelming nature of the calamity, and the large share which it has naturally occupied of the attention of Parliament and of the public, the task of making arrangements to meet the necessities of the case has practically been withdrawn from the department of the Civil Secretary, and fallen into the hands of the Provincial Administration.  In assenting to the various minutes which they have passed for affording relief to the sick and destitute, and for guarding against the spread of disease, I have felt it to be my duty, even at the risk of incurring the imputation of insensibility to the claims of distress, to urge the necessity of economy, and of adopting all possible precautions against waste.  You will at once perceive, however, how embarrassing my position is.  A source of possible misunderstanding between myself and the colonists is furnished by these untoward circumstances, altogether unconnected with the ordinary, or, as I may perhaps venture to term them, normal difficulties of my situation.

     On the whole, all things considered, I think that a great deal of