Unhappily the great bane of the province was the inordinate use of liquor.  “The erection of a church or chapel,” says Mrs. Jameson, “generally preceded that of a school-house in Upper Canada, but the mill and the tavern invariably preceded both.”  The roads were of the most wretched character and at some seasons actually prohibitory of all social intercourse.  The towns were small and ill-built.  Toronto, long known as “muddy little York,” had a population of about 10,000, but with the exception of the new parliament house, it had no public buildings of architectural pretensions.  The houses were generally of wood, a few of staring ugly red brick; the streets had not a single side-walk until 1834, and in 1838 this comfort for the pedestrian was still exceptional.  Kingston, the ancient Cataraqui, was even a better built town than Toronto, and had in 1838 a population of perhaps 4500 persons.  Hamilton and London were beginning to be places of importance.  Bytown, now Ottawa, had its beginnings in 1826, when Colonel By of the Royal Engineers, commenced the construction of the Rideau Canal on the chain of lakes and rivers between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence at Kingston.  The ambition of the people of Upper Canada was always to obtain a continuous and secure system of water navigation from the lakes to Montreal.  The Welland Canal between Lakes Erie and Ontario was commenced as early as 1824 through the enterprise of Mr. William Hamilton Merritt, but it was very badly managed; and the legislature, which had from year to year aided the undertaking, was obliged eventually to acquire it as a provincial work.  The Cornwall Canal was also undertaken, but work was stopped when it was certain that Lower Canada would not respond to the aspirations of the West and improve that portion of the St. Lawrence within its direct control.  Flat-bottomed bateaux and Durham boats were generally in use for the carriage of goods on the inland waters, and it was not until the completion of a canal system between the lakes and Montreal, after the Union, that steamers came into vogue.

The province of Upper Canada had in 1838 reached a crisis in its affairs.  In the course of the seven years preceding the rebellion, probably eighty thousand or one half of the immigrants, who had come to the province, had crossed the frontier into the United States, where greater inducements were held out to capital and population.  As Mrs. Jameson floated in a canoe, in the middle of the Detroit River, she saw on the one side “all the bustle of prosperity and commerce,” and on the other “all the symptoms of apathy, indolence, mistrust, hopelessness.”  At the time such comparisons were made, Upper Canada was on the very verge of bankruptcy.