or other public purposes, or the application of the funds to the use of all religious creeds.  The feeling against that church culminated in 1836, when Sir John Colborne, then lieutenant-governor, established forty-four rectories in accordance with a suggestion made by Lord Goderich some years previously.  While the legality of Sir John Colborne’s course was undoubted, it was calculated to create much indignant feeling among the dissenting bodies, who saw in the establishment of these rectories an evidence of the intention of the British government to create a state church so far as practicable by law within the province.  This act, so impolitic at a critical time of political discussion, was an illustration of the potent influence exercised in the councils of the government by Archdeacon Strachan, who had come into the province from Scotland in 1799 as a schoolmaster.  He had been brought up in the tenets of the Presbyterian Church, but some time after his arrival in Canada he became an ordained minister of the Church of England, in which he rose step by step to the episcopacy.  He became a member of both the executive and legislative councils in 1816 and 1817, and exercised continuously until the union of 1841 a singular influence in the government of the province.  He was endowed with that indomitable will, which distinguished his great countryman, John Knox.  His unbending toryism was the natural outcome of his determination to sustain what he considered the just rights of his church against the liberalism of her opponents—­chiefly dissenters—­who wished to rob her of her clergy reserves and destroy her influence in education and public affairs generally.  This very fidelity to his church became to some extent her weakness, since it evoked the bitter hostility of a large body of persons and created the impression that she was the church of the aristocratic and official class rather than that of the people—­an impression which existed for many years after the fall of the “family compact.”

The public grievances connected with the disposition of the public lands were clearly exposed by one Robert Gourlay, a somewhat meddlesome Scotchman, who had addressed a circular, soon after his arrival in Canada, to a number of townships with regard to the causes which retarded improvement and the best means of developing the resources of the province.  An answer from Sandwich virtually set forth the feeling of the rural districts generally on these points.  It stated that the reasons for the existing depression were the reserves of land for the crown and clergy, “which must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, and a hindrance to compact and good neighbourhood; defects in the system of colonisation; too great a quantity of lands in the hands of individuals who do not reside in the province, and are not assessed for their property.”  Mr. Gourlay’s questions were certainly asked in the public interest, but they excited the indignation of the official class