forbearance and good feeling has been shown by the colonists under
    this trial.  Nothing can exceed the devotion of the nuns and Roman
    Catholic priests, and the conduct of the clergy and of many of the
    laity of other denominations has been most exemplary.  Many lives have
    been sacrificed in attendance on the sick and administering to their
    temporal and spiritual need.  But the aspect of affairs is becoming
    more and more alarming.  The panic which prevails in Montreal and
    Quebec is beginning to manifest itself in the Upper Province, and
    farmers are unwilling to hire even the healthy immigrants, because it
    appears that since the warm weather set in, typhus has broken out in
    many cases among those who were taken into service at the commencement
    of the season, as being perfectly free from disease.  I think it most
    important that the Home Government should do all in their power by
    enforcing the provisions of the Passengers’ Act, and by causing these
    facts to be widely circulated, to stem this tide of misery.

* * * * *

What is to be done?  Private charity is exhausted.  In a country where pauperism as a normal condition of society is unknown, you have not local rates for the relief of destitution to fall back upon.  Humanity and prudence alike forbid that they should be left to perish in the streets.  The exigency of the case can manifestly be met only by an expenditure of public funds.

[Sidenote:  The charge should be borne by the mother-country.]

But by whom is this charge to be borne?  You urge, that when the first pressure is past, the province will derive, in various ways, advantage from this immigration,—­that the provincial administration, who prescribe the measures of relief, have means, which the Imperial authorities have not, of checking extravagance and waste; and you conclude that their constituents ought to be saddled with at least a portion of the expense.  I readily admit the justice of the latter branch of this argument, but I am disposed to question the force of the former.  The benefit which the province will derive from this year’s immigration is, at best, problematical; and it is certain that they who are to profit by it would willingly have renounced it, whatever it may be, on condition of being relieved from the evils by which it has been attended.  Of the gross number of immigrants who have reached the province, many are already mouldering in their graves.  Among the survivors there are widows and orphans, and aged and diseased persons, who will probably be for an indefinite period a burden on Government or private charity.  A large proportion of the healthy and prosperous, who have availed themselves of the cheap route of the St. Lawrence, will, I fears find their way to the Western States, where land is procurable on more