tions, imprisonments, confiscations, and often
death, inflicted on the loyal adherents to the Crown of England in the
United States, and which drove the survivors among them to the
wilderness of Canada. The privations and hardships experienced by many
of these Loyalist patriots for years after the first settlement in
Canada, as testified by the papers in the subsequent chapter, were much
more severe than anything experienced by the Pilgrim Fathers during the
first years of their settlement in Massachusetts. These latter could
keep a "Harvest Home" festival of a week, at the end of the first year
after their landing in the Bay of Massachusetts; but it was years after
their arrival in Canada before the Loyalists could command means to keep
any such festival. The stern adherence of the Puritans to their
principles was quite equalled by the stern adherence of the Loyalists to
their principles, and far excelled by their sacrifices and sufferings.

Canada has a noble parentage, the remembrance of which its inhabitants
may well cherish with respect, affection, and pride.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 134: "Had we pursued a wise course, people of our own stock
would not have become our rivals in ship-building, in the carriage of
our great staples, in the prosecution of the fisheries, and in the
production of wheat and other breadstuffs. Nor is this all: we should
not have had the hatred, the influence and the talents of persons of
Loyalist origin to contend against in the questions which have and may
yet come up between us and England.

"Thus, as it seems to me, humanity to the adherents of the Crown, and
prudent regard for our own interests, required a general amnesty; as it
was, we not only dealt harshly with many, and unjustly with some, but
doomed to misery others, whose hearts and hopes had been as true as
those of Washington himself. Thus in the divisions of families which
everywhere occurred, and which formed one of the most distressing
circumstances of the conflict, there were wives and daughters, who,
although bound to Loyalists by the holiest ties, had given their
sympathies to the right from the beginning, and who now, in the triumph
of the cause which had their prayers, went meekly--as woman ever meets a
sorrowful lot--into hopeless, interminable exile." (Introductory
Historical Essay to Sabine's Sketches of the Loyalists of the American
Revolution, pp. 90, 91.)]

[Footnote 135: Preface to Colonel Sabine's Biographica