d navigation laws which shut out foreign commerce from the St.
Lawrence and the Atlantic ports, and kept the carrying trade between
Great Britain and the colonies in the hands of British and colonial
merchants, by means of British registered ships. While colonists could
not trade directly with foreign ports, they were given a monopoly for
their timber, fish, and provisions in the profitable markets of the
British West Indies.

The character of the immigration varied considerably, but on the whole
the thrifty and industrious formed the larger proportion. In 1833 the
immigrants deposited 300,000 sovereigns, or nearly a million and a half
of dollars, in the Upper Canadian banks. An important influence in the
settlement of Upper Canada was exercised by one Colonel Talbot, the
founder of the county of Elgin. Mrs. Anna Jameson, the wife of a
vice-chancellor of Upper Canada, describes in her _Winter Studies and
Summer Rambles_, written in 1838, the home of this great proprietor, a
Talbot of Malahide, one of the oldest families in the parent state. The
chateau--as she calls it, perhaps sarcastically--was a "long wooden
building, chiefly of rough logs, with a covered porch running along the
south side." Such homes as Colonel Talbot's were common enough in the
country. Some of the higher class of immigrants, however, made efforts
to surround themselves with some of the luxuries of the old world. Mrs.
Jameson tells us of an old Admiral, who had settled in the London
district--now the most prosperous agricultural part of Ontario--and had
the best of society in his neighbourhood; "several gentlemen of family,
superior education, and large capital (among them the brother of an
English and the son of an Irish peer, a colonel and a major in the army)
whose estates were in a flourishing state." The common characteristic
of the Canadian settlements was the humble log hut of the poor
immigrant, struggling with axe and hoe amid the stumps to make a home
for his family. Year by year the sunlight was let into the dense
forests, and fertile meadows soon stretched far and wide in the once
untrodden wilderness. Despite all the difficulties of a pioneer's life,
industry reaped its adequate rewards in the fruitful lands of the west,
bread was easily raised in abundance, and animals of all kinds thrived.

Unhappily the great bane of the province was the inordinate use of
liquor. "The erection of a church or chapel," says Mrs. Jameson,
"generally