ne may term
mud-weariness.[6] Local tradition still remembers with a sense of
wonder that Sydenham, eager to return to his work in Lower Canada, once
travelled by sleigh {12} the 360 miles from Toronto to Montreal in
thirty-six hours.

Off the main routes, roads degenerated into corduroy roads, and these
into tracks, and even "blazed trails "; while, as for bridges, cases
were known where the want of them had kept settlers who were living
within three miles of a principal town, from communicating with it for
days at a time.[7] And, as the roads grew rougher, Canadian conditions
seemed to the stranger to assert themselves more and more offensively,
animate and inanimate nature thrusting man back on the bare elements of
things. The early descriptions of the colony are crowded with pictures
of wretched immigrants, mosquito-bitten, or, in winter, half dead with
cold, struggling through mud and swamp, to find the land whither they
had come to evade the miseries of civilization, confronting them with
the squalor and pains of nature. Far into the Victorian era Canada,
whether French or British, was a dislocated community, with settlements
set apart from each other as much by mud, swamp, and wood-land, as by
distance. Her population, more particularly in the west, was engaged
not with political ideals, but in an incessant struggle {13} with the
forests; and the little jobs, which enabled the infant community to
build a bridge or repair a road at the public expense, must naturally
have seemed to the electors more important items of a political
programme than responsible government or abolition of the clergy
reserves. No doubt, in the older towns and cities, the efforts of the
earlier settlers had gained for their sons leisure and a chance of
culture; yet even in Toronto, the wild lands were but a few miles
distant, and, as Richardson saw it, London was "literally a city of
stumps, many of the houses being still surrounded by them."

Straggling along these 700 miles, although here and there concentrated
into centres like Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, Kingston, and
Toronto, was a population numbering well over a million, which from its
internal divisions, its differences in origin and disposition, and its
relation to the British government, constituted the central problem at
the time in British colonial politics. The French population formed,
naturally, the chief difficulty. Thanks to the terms of the surrender
in 1763