“The King can make a belted knight,
  A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that,”

it was not in his power to give permanency to an institution which, in its origin, was as independent as royalty itself, arising naturally out of the feudal system:  but which was utterly inconsistent with the genius and circumstances of a modern colony.  The sovereign might endow the members of such an aristocracy with grants of the lands of the crown to support their dignity, but what benefit could such grants be, even to the recipients, in a country covered with boundless forests and nearly destitute of inhabitants?  It is obvious that no tenants could be found to pay rents for such lands, or indeed even to occupy them, while lands could be purchased on easy terms in the United States, or in Canada itself.  Had this plan been carried out, Canada would have been a doomed country for centuries.

The strongest incitements to industry are required, those of proprietorship and ultimate independence, to induce settlers to encounter all the privations and toil of a new settlement in such a country.  A genuine aristocracy can only exist in a country already peopled, and which has been conquered and divided among the conquerors.  In such a state of things, aristocracy, though artificial in its origin, becomes naturalised, if I may use the expression, and even, as in Great Britain, when restrained within proper limits, highly beneficial in advancing civilization.  Be it for good or be it for evil, it is worse than useless to disguise the fact that the government of a modern colony, where every conquest is made from the forest by little at a time, must be essentially republican.

Any allusion to political parties is certainly foreign to the object of the preceding sketches; but it is impossible to make the British reader acquainted with the various circumstances which retarded the progress of this fine colony, without explaining how the patronage of the local government came formerly to be so exclusively bestowed on one class of the population,—­thus creating a kind of spurious aristocracy which disgusted the colonists, and drove emigration from our shores to those of the United States.

After the American Revolution, considerable numbers of loyalists in the United States voluntarily relinquished their homesteads and property, and came to Canada, which then, even on the shores of Lake Ontario, was a perfect wilderness.  Lands were of course granted to them by the government, and very naturally these settlers were peculiarly favoured by the local authorities.  These loyalists were generally known by the name of “tories,” to distinguish them from the republicans, and forming the great mass of the population.  Any one who called himself a reformer was regarded with distrust and suspicion, as a concealed republican or rebel.  It must not, however, be supposed that these loyalists were really tories in their political principles.  Their notions on such subjects were