alue. Such progress was inevitable, for though these
huge reservations tended to keep back the country, settlers obtained
grants of adjoining lands, and their labours could not fail to increase
the value of all contiguous territory. The Home District, including the
most valuable portion of Upper Canada, was especially afflicted by these
wholesale reservations, but every part of the Province was more or leas
crippled by them.

The ruling faction and their favourites, not satisfied with the enormous
direct and indirect grants of lands which they managed in one way and
another to obtain, availed themselves of every opportunity to buy up
land which had been granted to persons who had expended their little all
on their properties, and had thereby become impoverished. Among these
latter were many half-pay officers and others of good birth but limited
means, who had sought homes for themselves in the Canadian wilderness.
Not a few had been compelled to sell their commissions in order to
obtain the wherewithal to settle themselves and their families on the
lands granted to them. Finding themselves cut off from society, and
ill-suited to face the privations of pioneer life, they became
discouraged, and sold their lands for whatever meagre price they could
get. The land-jobbers were ever on the alert to buy up these tracts at a
few shillings an acre, not with any intention of settling upon or
improving them, but solely for the purpose of holding them for an
increased value. The grants to the children of U. E. Loyalists were the
constant subjects of bargain and sale, and wrought great evil to the
Province without producing any corresponding benefit to the recipients.
Very few of the lots so granted were ever occupied by the grantees, most
of whom were young persons of both sexes who resided with their parents,
and had no inclination to set up for themselves in the wilderness. These
grants were frequently sold at ridiculously low prices. From two to five
pounds was an ordinary price for a lot of two hundred acres. Mr. John
Radenhurst, who was Chief Clerk in the office of the Surveyor-General
for many years, is entitled to speak on this subject with authority. In
his evidence taken before Lord Durham's Commissioner, in 1838, he states
that the general price paid by speculators for the two-hundred-acre lots
granted to sons and daughters of U. E. Loyalists was "from a gallon of
rum up to perhaps six pounds." In answer to another questi