yal
and patriotic inhabitants of Canada.

I may perhaps be expected to add a few words on the chief public
occurrences which took place in Upper Canada after the war, but without
discussing any of the questions which they involved.

From 1791 to the close of the war in 1815, and for some years
afterwards, the Executive Government of the day commanded the votes of a
majority of the House of Assembly. Public questions and measures were
freely discussed; but no organized opposition appeared in the Assembly
against the Administration. Shortly after the close of the war, however,
the elements of discord began to be developed in the country. Many
discharged officers of the British army, at the termination of the long
European war, came to Canada with instructions from the Secretary of
State for the Colonies to the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada
(himself an English officer), to provide for them; and they were
appointed to all offices of emolument (with few exceptions), to the
exclusion of the old Loyalists and their descendants and other
inhabitants who had felled the wilderness, and made the country
valuable, and had borne the burden and heat of the war in its defence.
The administration of the Crown or Public Lands was sadly defective and
partial, giving whole blocks to friends and speculators, while the
applications of the legitimate settler were often rejected. It also
began to be complained of that these large blocks of land given to
individuals, and the one-seventh of the lands set apart as Clergy
Reserves, greatly impeded the settlement and improvement of the country;
that those who had occupied the Clergy Reserves on _leases_ were
required to pay higher rents on the renewal of their leases, or the
purchase of the Reserves, on account of their increased value created by
the labour of the tenants and their neighbours. A special Board of
Management was appointed for these Reserves in the interest of the
clerical claimants of them. The representatives of the Church of
Scotland claimed to share in the proceeds of the Clergy Reserves, and a
co-ordinate standing with the Church of England, as the endowed Church
establishment of Upper Canada. The other religious persuasions had not
the privilege of having matrimony solemnized by their own ministers, or
the right of holding a bit of ground on which to worship God, or in
which to bury their dead. It soon began to be claimed by the leaders of
the Church of England that the