d on them as the most conspicuous examples of devotion to
connection with the British Empire, and loyal subjection to the
Crown.[12] Robinsons, Cartwrights, Ryersons, and a score of other
well-known families, proved, generation after generation, by their
sustained public capacity, how considerably the struggle for existence,
operating on sound human material, may raise the average of talent and
energy. The tendency of the Loyalists to conservatism was, under the
circumstances, only natural. Their possession, for a time, of all the
places in Upper Canada which were worth holding, was the consequence of
their priority in tenure, and of their conspicuous pre-eminence in
political ingenuity. Critics of a later date forgot, and still forget,
in their wholesale indictment of the Family Compact, that the Loyalist
group called by that name had earned their places by genuine ability.
If, like other aristocracies, they found it hard to mark the precise
moment for retirement before the rise of democracy, their excuse must
be found in their consciousness of high public spirit and their
hereditary talents for administration.

Politically and socially one may include among the Loyalists the
half-pay officers, from both {19} navy and army, whom the great peace
after Waterloo sent to Canada, as to the other colonies; and certain
men of good family, Talbots or Stricklands, who held fast by English
conservative tradition, played, where they could, the English gentleman
abroad, and incidentally exhibited no mean amount of public spirit.
Conspicuous among these was Colonel Talbot, who had come to Upper
Canada with Simcoe in 1793, and became there an erratic but energetic
instrument of empire. "For sixteen years," says Mrs. Jameson, writing
with a pardonably feminine thrill after a visit to the great man, "he
saw scarce a human being, except a few boors and blacks employed in
clearing and logging his land; he himself assumed the blanket coat and
axe, slept upon the bare earth, cooked three meals a day for twenty
woodsmen, cleaned his own boots, washed his own linen, milked his cows,
churned the butter, and made and baked the bread."[13] Yet, as
Strickland confesses, in his _Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West_, there
were few Talbots. "Many high-spirited gentlemen," he says, "were
tempted by the grants of land bestowed on them by the government, which
made actual settlement one of the conditions of {20} the grant. It
followed, as a ma