d have been much better employed in tilling the
land, for every acre cleared is real wealth; or by Americans who have
come over to cut down the timber and have returned to their own country
to spend the money. That the profits of the timber trade have been
great is certain; but have these profits remained in the Canadas?--have
the sums realised been expended there?--no; they have been realised in,
or brought over to England, shared among a few persons of influence who
have, to a certain degree, obtained a monopoly by the bonus granted, but
the Canadas have benefited little or none, and the mother-country has
received serious injury. That the parties connected with the Canada
timber trade will deny this, and endeavour to ridicule my arguments, I
am aware; and that they are an influential party I well know; but I
trust before I have concluded, to prove to every disinterested person,
that I am correct in my view of the case, and that the prosperity of the
Canadas is a very different question from the prosperity of the Canadian
timber merchants, or even the proprietors on the Ottawa.

When the protecting duty was first imposed, there was no idea of its
being a permanent duty: it was intended as an encouragement for ships to
go to Canada for timber, when it could not be got in the Baltic. It
was, in fact, a war measure, which should have been removed upon the
return to peace. The reason why it was not, is, the plea brought
forward, that the taking off the protecting duty would be a serious loss
to the emigrant settler, who would have no means of disposing of his
timber after he had felled it, and that the emigrant looked to his
timber as his first profits; moreover, that it gave employment to the
emigrant in the long winters. That those who have never been in the
country were led away by this assertion I can easily imagine, but I must
say that a more barefaced falsehood was never uttered. There are
varieties of emigrants, and those with capital speculate in timber as
well as other articles; but let us examine into the proceedings of the
emigrant settler, that is, the man who purchases an allotment and
commences as a farmer--for this is the party to whom the supposed
philanthropy was to extend. He builds his cottage and clears two or
three acres, that is, he fells the trees; as soon as he has done this,
if the weather permit, he burns them where they lie, the branches and
smaller limbs being collected round the trunks a