The Canadian Dominion [21]
Church, and with a convert's zeal he labored to give it exclusive place and power. The opposition to the Family Compact was of a more motley hue, as is the way with oppositions. Opposition became potential when new settlers poured into the province from the United States or overseas, marked out from their Loyalist forerunners not merely by differences of political background and experience but by differences in religion. The Church of England had been dominant among the Loyalists; but the newcomers were chiefly Methodist and Presbyterian. Opposition became actual with the rise of concrete and acute grievances and with the appearance of leaders who voiced the growing discontent.
The political exclusiveness of the Family Compact did not rouse resentment half as deep as did. their religious, or at least denominational, pretensions. The refusal of the Compact to permit Methodist ministers to perform the marriage ceremony was not soon forgotten. There were scores of settlements where no clergyman of the Established Church of England or of Scotland resided, and marriages here had been of necessity performed by other ministers. A bill passed the Assembly in 1824 legalizing such marriages in the past and giving the required authority for the future; and when it was rejected by the Legislative Council, resentment flamed high. An attempt of Strachan to indict the loyalty of practically all but the Anglican clergy intensified this feeling; and the critics went on to call in question the claims of his Church to establishment and landed endowment.
The land question was the most serious that faced the province. The administration of those in power was condemned on three distinct counts. The granting of land to individuals had been lavish; it had been lax; and it had been marked by gross favoritism. By 1824, when the population was only 150,000, some 11,000,000 acres had been granted; ninety years later, when the population was 2,700,000, the total amount of improved land was only 13,000,000 acres. Moreover the attempt to use vast areas of the Crown Lands to endow solely the Anglican Church roused bitter jealousies. Yet even these grievances paled in actual hardship beside the results of holding the vast waste areas unimproved. What with Crown Reserves, Clergy Reserves, grants to those who had served the state, and holdings picked up by speculators from soldiers or poorer Loyalists for a few pounds or a few gallons of whisky, millions of acres were held untenanted and unimproved, waiting for a rise in value as a consequence of the toil of settlers on neighboring farms. Not one-tenth of the lands granted were occupied by the persons to whom they had been assigned. The province had given away almost all its vast heritage, and more than nine-tenths of it was still in wilderness. These speculative holdings made immensely more difficult every common neighborhood task. At best the machinery and the money for building roads, bridges, and schools were scanty, but with these unimproved reserves thrust in between the scattered shacks, the task was disheartening. "The reserve of two-sevenths of the land for the Crown and clergy," declared the township of Sandwich in 1817, "must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, a hindrance to a compact and good neighborhood."
A further source of discontent developed in the disabilities affecting recent American settlers. A court decision in 1824 held that no one who had resided in the United States after 1783 could possess or transmit British citizenship, with which went the right to inherit real estate. This decision bore heavily upon thousands of "late Loyalists" and more recent incomers. Under the instructions of the Colonial Office, a remedial bill was introduced in the Legislative Council in 1827, but it was a grudging, halfway measure which the Assembly refused to accept. After several sessions of quarreling, the Assembly had its way; but in the meantime the men affected had been driven into permanent and active opposition.
The leaders of the movement of resistance
The political exclusiveness of the Family Compact did not rouse resentment half as deep as did. their religious, or at least denominational, pretensions. The refusal of the Compact to permit Methodist ministers to perform the marriage ceremony was not soon forgotten. There were scores of settlements where no clergyman of the Established Church of England or of Scotland resided, and marriages here had been of necessity performed by other ministers. A bill passed the Assembly in 1824 legalizing such marriages in the past and giving the required authority for the future; and when it was rejected by the Legislative Council, resentment flamed high. An attempt of Strachan to indict the loyalty of practically all but the Anglican clergy intensified this feeling; and the critics went on to call in question the claims of his Church to establishment and landed endowment.
The land question was the most serious that faced the province. The administration of those in power was condemned on three distinct counts. The granting of land to individuals had been lavish; it had been lax; and it had been marked by gross favoritism. By 1824, when the population was only 150,000, some 11,000,000 acres had been granted; ninety years later, when the population was 2,700,000, the total amount of improved land was only 13,000,000 acres. Moreover the attempt to use vast areas of the Crown Lands to endow solely the Anglican Church roused bitter jealousies. Yet even these grievances paled in actual hardship beside the results of holding the vast waste areas unimproved. What with Crown Reserves, Clergy Reserves, grants to those who had served the state, and holdings picked up by speculators from soldiers or poorer Loyalists for a few pounds or a few gallons of whisky, millions of acres were held untenanted and unimproved, waiting for a rise in value as a consequence of the toil of settlers on neighboring farms. Not one-tenth of the lands granted were occupied by the persons to whom they had been assigned. The province had given away almost all its vast heritage, and more than nine-tenths of it was still in wilderness. These speculative holdings made immensely more difficult every common neighborhood task. At best the machinery and the money for building roads, bridges, and schools were scanty, but with these unimproved reserves thrust in between the scattered shacks, the task was disheartening. "The reserve of two-sevenths of the land for the Crown and clergy," declared the township of Sandwich in 1817, "must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, a hindrance to a compact and good neighborhood."
A further source of discontent developed in the disabilities affecting recent American settlers. A court decision in 1824 held that no one who had resided in the United States after 1783 could possess or transmit British citizenship, with which went the right to inherit real estate. This decision bore heavily upon thousands of "late Loyalists" and more recent incomers. Under the instructions of the Colonial Office, a remedial bill was introduced in the Legislative Council in 1827, but it was a grudging, halfway measure which the Assembly refused to accept. After several sessions of quarreling, the Assembly had its way; but in the meantime the men affected had been driven into permanent and active opposition.
The leaders of the movement of resistance