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