ly to the region now known as New
Brunswick; a few went to the towns of the Quebec Province, for the
country lands on the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence were already
monopolized by the French "habitants"; the rest, estimated at 10,000, to
the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence and along the shores of the Lakes
Ontario and Erie, in short, to what we now know as the Province of
Ontario, and to what then became known as Upper Canada.

From this moment the three Canadas gain sharp definition. To the west
Upper Canada, exclusively American or, as we must now say, British in
character; next to the east, and cutting off its neighbour from the sea,
the ancient Province of Lower Canada, predominantly French, with a
minority of British traders in the two towns Quebec and Montreal; last
of all the Maritime Provinces, small communities with an almost
independent history of their own, although, like Upper and Lower Canada,
they eventually presented a problem similar fundamentally to the Irish
problem on the other side of the Atlantic. Prince Edward Island is the
closest parallel, for, besides the Catholic disabilities of 1770, in
1767 the whole of its land had been granted away by ballot in a single
day to a handful of absentee English proprietors, who sublet to
occupiers without security of tenure, with the result that a land
question similar to that of Ireland arose, which inflamed society and
retarded the development of the island for a whole century. Ultimately,
moreover, statesmen were driven to an even more drastic
solution--compulsory and universal State-aided land purchase.[22] Before
the period we have now reached, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island,
which was carved out of it, had been given rude systems of
representative Government, and New Brunswick, also at one time a part of
Nova Scotia, received a Constitution in 1784.

The great question after the American War was how to govern the two
contiguous Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, the one newly settled by
men of British race and Protestant faith, the other also under the
British flag, but overwhelmingly French and Catholic, both, in the
critical half-century to come, to be reinforced by immigrants from the
Old World, and to a large extent from misgoverned Ireland. But let the
reader once and for all grasp this point, that, once out of Ireland,
there ceases, not immediately, but in course of time, to be any racial
or political distinction between the different