for long keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, and a hindrance to compact and good neighbourhood; defects in the system of colonization; too great a quantity of land in the hands of individuals who do not reside in the province, and are not assessed for their property.”  The select committee of the House of Commons on the civil government of Canada reported in 1828 that “these reserved lands, as they are at present distributed over the country, retard more than any other circumstance the improvement of the colony, lying as they do in detached portions of each township and intervening between the occupations of actual settlers, who have no means of cutting roads through the woods and morasses which thus separate them from their neighbours.”  It appears, too, that the quantity of land actually reserved was in excess of that which appears to have been contemplated by the Constitutional Act.  “A quantity equal to one-seventh of all grants,” wrote Lord Durham in his report of 1839, “would be one-eighth of each township, or of all the public land.  Instead of this proportion, the practice has been ever since the act passed, and in the clearest violation of its provisions, to set apart for the clergy in Upper Canada, a seventh of all the land, which is a quantity equal to a sixth of the land granted....  In Lower Canada the same violation of the law has taken place, with this difference—­that upon every sale of Crown and clergy reserves, a fresh reserve for the clergy has been made, equal to a fifth of such reserves.”  In that way the public in both provinces was systematically robbed of a large quantity of land, which, Lord Durham estimated, was worth about L280,000 at the time he wrote.  He acknowledges, however, that the clergy had no part in “this great misappropriation of the public property,” but that it had arisen “entirely from heedless misconception, or some other error of the civil government of the province.”  All this, however, goes to show the maladministration of the public lands, and is one of the many reasons the people of the Canadas had for considering these reserves a public grievance.

When political parties were organized in Upper Canada some years after the war of 1812-14, which had for a while united all classes and creeds for the common defence, we see on one side a Tory compact for the maintenance of the old condition of things, the control of patronage, and the protection of the interests of the Church of England; on the other, a combination of Reformers, chiefly composed of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who clamoured for reforms in government and above all for relief from the dominance of the Anglican Church, which, with respect to the clergy reserves and other matters, was seeking a quasi recognition as a state church.  As the Puritans of New England at the commencement of the American Revolution inveighed against any attempt to establish an Anglican episcopate in the country as an insidious