In 1807 Parliament made provision for eight masters of grammar schools, one for each district, and at a salary of £100 currency ($400) for each master.
In the meantime emigration continued large. Many of the emigrants were from the United States. The troubles of '98 in Ireland were followed by a large Irish emigration to Canada; there were also a considerable number of Scotch and a few English emigrants; but the larger number of emigrants were from Ireland and the United States.[174]
The Legislature continued from session to session to pass Bills for the various improvements of the country; after doing which its members did not give much attention to politics, but devoted themselves to the culture and enlargement of their farms, of which their descendants are at this day reaping large advantages.[175]
Mr. McMullen, in his History of Canada, speaking of the year 1809, says:
"No civilized country in the world was less burdened with taxes than Canada West at this period. A small direct tax on property, levied by the District Courts of Session, and not amounting to £3,500 for the whole country, sufficed for all local expenses. There was no poor rate, no capitation tax, no tithes, or ecclesiastical rates of any kind. Instead of a road tax, a few days' statute labour annually sufficed. Nowhere did the working man find the produce of his labour so little diminished by exactions of any kind. Canada West literally teemed with abundance; while its people, unlike the early French and Americans, had nothing to fear from the red man, and enjoyed the increase of the earth in peace."
I have thus given a brief narrative of the formation of the government of Upper Canada, and of the first seventeen years of its operations, down to the period when the anticipated hostilities between Great Britain and the United States—the latter being the tools of Napoleon to rescue Canada from Great Britain—rendered preparation necessary on the part of the Loyalists of Canada to defend their country and homes against foreign invasion.
I have also given some account of the first settlement of the country, and the privations and hardships of the first settlers. But believing that a narrative from a single pen could not do justice to this subject, or could present to the reader, in so vivid and interesting a light, the character, sufferings, courage, and enterprise of our country's forefathers and founders, as narratives from themselves, with the diversity of style characteristic of communications from various sources, I have therefore inserted in Chapter XLI. those interesting papers transmitted to me from time to time, at my request, during the last twenty years.
FOOTNOTES:
[171] But the Indians were friendly to white settlers, as they have always been. Almost the entire Mohawk tribe, with other loyalist Indians, under their chief, Joseph Brant, followed the fortunes of their white loyalist brethren, and settled on their reservation on the Grand River. Brant had been educated in a Christian school in Philadelphia; had a comfortable home, and lived respectably on the Mohawk river before the American revolution; had entertained missionaries, and had assisted one of them in translating a part of the New Testament and Prayer Book into the Mohawk language. Colonel Stone, in his "Life of Brant" and the "History of the Border Wars of the American Revolution," has nobly vindicated the character of Brant, and of his brethren of the Six Nations, from the misrepresentations and calumnies of American historians. Brant was a member of the Church of England, and built a church in his settlement in 1786, in which was placed the first church bell ever heard in Upper Canada.
[172] "During Colonel Simcoe's administration he had been exceedingly careful with regard to the distribution of lands; but immediately on his departure, irregularities began to creep into the Crown Land Department, just as it had in Lower Canada, and great injustice was done to the actual settlers. Large tracts of the most eligible sites were seized upon by Government officials and speculators, and the actual settlers found themselves in many instances thrust into out-of-the-way corners, and cut off from intercourse with any near neighbours for want of roads." (Tuttle's History of the Dominion of Canada, Chap. lxxxiii., p. 387.)