hen the reconstruction of parties
was going on, but it was really a successful movement for the
annihilation of old parties and issues, and for the formation on their
ruins of a new party which could gather to itself the best materials
available for the effective conduct of public affairs on the patriotic
platform of the union of the two races, of equal rights to all classes
and creeds, and of the avoidance of purely sectional questions
calculated to disturb the union of 1841.

The new government at once obtained the support of a large majority of
the representatives from each section of the province, and was
sustained by the public opinion of the country at large. During the
session of 1854 measures were passed for the secularization of the
reserves, the removal of the seigniorial tenure, and for the
ratification of the reciprocity treaty with the United States. As I
have only been able so far in this historical narrative to refer in a
very cursory manner to these very important questions, I propose now
to give in the following chapter a succinct review of their history
from the time they first came into prominence down to their settlement
at the close of Lord Elgin's administration in Canada.

CHAPTER VII

THE HISTORY OF THE CLERGY RESERVES, (1791-1854)

For a long period in the history of Canada the development of several
provinces was more or less seriously retarded, and the politics of the
country constantly complicated by the existence of troublesome
questions arising out of the lavish grants of public lands by the
French and English governments. The territorial domain of French
Canada was distributed by the king of France, under the inspiration of
Richelieu, with great generosity, on a system of a modified feudal
tenure, which, it was hoped, would strengthen the connection between
the Crown and the dependency by the creation of a colonial
aristocracy, and at the same time stimulate the colonization and
settlement of the valley of the St. Lawrence; but, as we shall see in
the course of the following chapter, despite the wise intentions of
its promoters, the seigniorial tenure gradually became, after the
conquest, more or less burdensome to the _habitants_, and an
impediment rather than an incentive to the agricultural development
and peopling of the province. Even little Prince Edward Island was
troubled with a land question as early as 1767, when it was still
known by the name St. John, given it in