on, he states
that while millions of acres were granted in this way, the settlement of
the Province was not advanced, nor the advantage of the grantee secured
in the manner that may be supposed to have been contemplated by
Government. He mentions the Honourable Robert Hamilton, a member of the
Legislative Council, and the two Chief Justices, Elmsley and Powell, as
among the largest purchasers of these lands. Mr. Hamilton's acquisitions
amounted to about a hundred thousand acres.[39] Elmsley and Powell, in
addition to the five thousand acres which each of them had obtained for
nothing as members of the Executive Council, managed to acquire
quantities of land which, had they been brought together in one spot,
would have made a township of average size. Thus was monopoly
perpetuated and increased from year to year, and thus were large tracts
of the Provincial territory maintained in a state of primitive
wilderness.

Intimations of the gigantic abuses existing in the land-granting system
of Upper Canada were more than once sent across the Atlantic to the
Colonial Secretary, who instructed the Lieutenant-Governor to impose
certain regulations with a view to preventing the continuous repetition
of injustice. The Colonial Office, however, was more than three thousand
miles away, and means were easily found for evading any restrictions
imposed at such a distance. Some idea of the extent which the evil had
attained in the year 1818 may be derived from the two passages in that
very petition to the Prince Regent for which Mr. Gourlay was indicted at
Kingston and Brockville, as related in the preceding chapter. "The lands
of the Crown in Upper Canada," proceeds the petition, "are of immense
extent, not only stretching far and wide into the wilderness, but
scattered over the Province, and intermixed with private property
already cultivated. The disposal of this land is left to ministers at
home, who are palpably ignorant of existing circumstances, and to a
council of men resident in the Province, who, it is believed, have long
converted the trust reposed in them to purposes of selfishness. The
scandalous abuses in this department came some years ago to such a pitch
of monstrous magnitude that the Home ministers wisely imposed
restrictions upon the Land Council of Upper Canada. These, however, have
by no means removed the evil; and a system of patronage and favouritism,
in the disposal of the Crown Lands, still exists; altogether des