“The system of Clergy Reserves was established by the act of 1791, commonly called the Constitutional Act, which directed that, in respect of all grants made by the Crown, a quantity equal to one-seventh of the land so granted should be reserved for the clergy. A quantity equal to one-seventh of all grants 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. There have been appropriated for this purpose 300,000 acres, which legally, it is manifest, belong to the public. And of the amount for which Clergy Reserves have been sold in that Province, namely, £317,000 (of which about £100,000 have been already received and invested in the English funds,) the sum of about £45,000 should belong to the public.
“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 one-fifth of such reserves. The result has been the appropriation for the clergy of 673,567 acres, instead of 446,000, being an excess of 227,559 acres, or half as much again as they ought to have received. The Lower Canada fund already produced by sales amounts to £50,000, of which, therefore, a third, or about £16,000, belong to the public. If, without any reform of this abuse, the whole of the unsold Clergy Reserves in both Provinces should fetch the average price at which such lands have hitherto sold, the public would be wronged to the amount of about £280,000; and the reform of this abuse will produce a certain and almost immediate gain to the public of £60,000. In referring, for further explanation of this subject, to a paper in the appendix which has been drawn up by Mr. Hanson, a member of the commission of inquiry which I appointed for the colonies. I am desirous of stating my own conviction that the clergy have had no part in this great misappropriation of the public property, but that it has arisen entirely from heedless misconception, or some other error, of the civil government of both Provinces.”
“The great objection to reserves for the clergy is, that those for whom the land is set apart never have attempted, and never could successfully attempt, to cultivate or settle the property, and that, by special appropriation, so much land is withheld from settlers, and kept in a state of waste, to the serious injury of all settlers in its neighborhood. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that this is the only practice by which such injury has been, and still is, inflicted on actual settlers. In the two Canadas, especially, the practice of rewarding, or attempting to reward, public services by grants of public land, has produced, and is still producing, a degree of injury to actual settlers which it is difficult to conceive without having witnessed it. The very principle of such grants is bad, inasmuch as, under any circumstances, they must lead to an amount of appropriation beyond the wants of the community, and greatly beyond the proprietor’s means of cultivation and settlement. In both the Canadas, not only has this principle been pursued with reckless profusion, but the local executive governments have managed, by violating or evading the instructions which they received from the Secretary of State, to add incalculably to the mischiefs that would have arisen at all events.
“In Upper Canada, 3,200,000 acres have been granted to “U. E. Loyalists,” being refugees from the United States, who settled in the province before 1787, and their children; 730,000 acres to Militia men; 450,000 acres to discharged Soldiers and Sailors; 225,000 acres to Magistrates and Barristers; 136,000 acres to Executive Councillors, and their families; 50,000 acres to five Legislative Councillors, and their families; 36,900 acres to Clergymen, as private property; 264,000 to persons contracting to make surveys; 92,526 acres to officers of the Army and Navy; 500,000 acres for the endowment of schools; 48,520 acres to Colonel Talbot; 12,000 acres to heirs of General Brock, and 12,000 acres to Dr. Mountain, a former Bishop of Quebec; making altogether, with the Clergy Reserves, nearly half of all the surveyed land in the province. In Lower Canada, exclusively of grants to refugee loyalists, as to the amount of which the Crown Lands’ Department could furnish me with no information, 450,000 acres having been granted to Militiamen, to Executive Councillors 72,000 acres, to Governor Milne, about 48,000 acres, to Mr. Cushing and another, upwards of 100,000 acres (as a reward for giving information in a case of high treason), to officers and soldiers 200,000 acres, and to “leaders of townships” 1,457,209 acres, making altogether, with the Clergy Reserves, rather more than half of the surveyed lands originally at the disposal of the Crown.
“In Upper Canada, a very small proportion (perhaps less than a tenth) of all the land thus granted, has been even occupied by settlers, much less reclaimed and cultivated. In Lower Canada, with the exception of a few townships bordering on the American frontier, which have been comparatively well settled, in despite of the proprietors, by American squatters, it may be said that nineteen-twentieths of these grants are still unsettled, and in a perfectly wild state.
“No other result could have been expected in the case of those classes of grantees whose station would preclude them from settling in the wilderness, and whose means would enable them to avoid exertion for giving immediate value to their grants; and unfortunately, the land which was intended for persons of a poorer order, who might be expected to improve it by their labor, has, for the most part, fallen into the hands of land-jobbers of the class just mentioned, who have never thought of settling in person, and who retain the land in its present wild state, speculating upon its acquiring a value at some distant day, when the demand for land shall have increased through the increase of population.
“In Upper Canada,” says Mr. Bolton, himself a great speculator and holder of wild land, “the plan of granting large tracts of land to gentlemen who have neither the muscular strength to go into the wilderness, nor perhaps, the pecuniary means to improve their grants, has been the means of a large part of the country remaining in a state of wilderness. The system of granting land to the children of U. E. Loyalists has not been productive of the benefits expected from it. A very small proportion of the land granted to them has been occupied or improved. A great proportion of such grants were to unmarried females, who very readily disposed of them for a small consideration, frequently from £2 to £5 for a grant of 200 acres. The grants made to young men were also frequently sold for a very small consideration; they generally had parents with whom they lived, and were therefore not disposed to move to their grants of lands, but preferred remaining with their families. I do not think one-tenth of the lands granted to U. E. Loyalists has been occupied by the persons to whom they were granted, and in a great proportion of cases not occupied at all.” Mr. Randenhurst says, “the general price of these grants was from a gallon of rum up to perhaps £6, so that while millions of acres were granted in this way, the settlement of the Province was not advanced, nor the advantage of the grantee secured in the manner that we may suppose to have been contemplated by government.” He also mentions amongst extensive purchasers of these grants, Mr. Hamilton, a member of the Legislative Council, who bought about 100,000 acres. Chief Justices Emslie and Powell, and Solicitor General Gray, who purchased from 20,800 to 50,000 acres; and states that several members of the Executive and Legislative Councils, as well as of the House of Assembly, were “very large purchasers.”
“In Lower Canada, the grants to “Leaders and Associates” were made by an evasion of instructions which deserve a particular description.
“By instructions to the Local Executive immediately after the passing of the Constitutional Act, it was directed that “because great inconveniences had theretofore arisen in many of the colonies in America, from the granting excessive quantities of land to particular persons who have never cultivated or settled the same, and have thereby prevented others more industrious, from improving such lands; in order, therefore, to prevent the like inconveniences in future, no farm-lot should be granted to any person being master or mistress of a family in any township to be laid out which should contain more than 200 acres.” The instructions then invest the governor with a discretionary power to grant additional quantities in certain cases, not exceeding 1,000 acres. According to these instructions 200 acres should have been the general amount, 1,200 the maximum, in special cases to be granted to any individual. The greater part, however, of the land (1,457,200 acres) was granted, in fact, to individuals at the rate of from 10,000 to 50,000 to each person. The evasion of the regulations was managed as follows: A petition, signed by from 10 to 40 or 50 persons, was presented to the Executive Council, praying for a grant of 1,200 acres to each person, and promising to settle the land so applied for. Such petitions were, I am informed, always granted, the Council being perfectly aware that, under a previous agreement between the applicants (of which the form was prepared by the then Attorney General, and sold publicly by the law stationers of Quebec), five-sixths of the land was to be conveyed to one of them, termed leader, by whose means the grant was obtained. In most cases the leader obtained the most of the land which had been nominally applied for by fifty persons.”
Upon this subject we further give as worthy of attention, although we will not endorse all that is said, the remarks made by Mr. Robert Gourlay in his “Statistical Account.” He says, “when we look back into the history of old countries, and observe how landed property was first established; how it was seized upon, pulled about, given away, and divided in all sorts of ways, shapes, and quantities; how it was bequeathed, burdened, entailed, and leased in a hundred forms; when we consider how dark were the days of antiquity,—how grossly ignorant and savage were our remote forefathers, we cannot be so much surprised at finding ourselves heirs to confusion; and, that, in these old countries, entanglement continues to be the order of the day. But when civilized men were quietly and peaceably to enter into the occupancy of a new region, where all could be adjusted by the square and compass; and when order, from the beginning, could have prevented for ever all possibility of doubt, and dispute, and disturbance; how deplorable is it to know, that in less than a life-time, even the simplest affairs should get into confusion! and so it is already in Upper Canada, to a lamentable degree. Boundaries of land are doubtful and disputed: deeds have been mislaid, lost, unfounded, forged: they have been passed again and again in review before commissioners: they have been blotted and blurred: they have got into the repositories of attornies and pettifogging lawyers; while courts of justice are every day adding doubt to doubt, delay to delay, and confusion to confusion; with costs, charges, cheating.