tter of course, that the majority of these persons
were physically disqualified for such an undertaking, a fact which many
deserted farms in the rear townships of the county in which I reside
painfully indicate."[14]

French Canadians and United Empire Loyalists constituted the stable
factors in Canadian public life; but the process of immigration, which
the years of rebellion checked only for a time, had by 1840 prepared
another element, and that the most incalculable and disturbing both
socially and politically. Indeed the real problem of Canadian public
life lay simply in the influence of the humbler class of immigrants on
existing administration and opinion. It was natural for the other
settlers and the governing class to regard the larger part of the new
population as beneath the political level. The very circumstances of
the emigrating process carried with them a suggestion of degradation.
Durham had embodied in his _Report_ the more flagrant examples of the
horrors of emigration;[15] but a later review, written in 1841, proves
that many of the worst features of the old system still continued.
There were still the privations, the {21} filth and the diseases of
this northern "middle passage," the epidemics and disorders inflicted
on the Canadian community as ship-load after ship-load of poor wretches
passed ashore at Quebec. On land their sorrows were renewed, for many
of them were paupers, and there was still no organized effort to
introduce the labourer to those who required his labour. More than one
half of the 12,000 who, according to the report of 1841, passed in that
year through Bytown locks, were considered objects of charity. Many of
them were common labourers with families, men who had little but their
physical strength as capital for the new venture; and cholera, typhus,
or smallpox had in many cases reduced even that to the vanishing point.
More especially among the Irish settlers, who, in these years and
later, fled in dismay from the distresses of Ireland, the misery
continued long after the first struggle. M'Taggart, who had his
prejudices, but who had unusually good opportunities for observation,
thought that a tenth of the poorer Irish settlers died during their
first two years in the country. He found them clumsy at their work,
accustomed to the spade and shovel, not to the axe, and maiming
themselves most fearfully, or even killing themselves, in their {22}
experiments in clearing the gro