his rule, in that the years during which Craig was governor were years of much prosperity. It was at this time that, stimulated by Napoleon’s attempts to cut off Great Britain from the Baltic trade and by the Non Intercourse Acts of the United States, lumber became an important industry of Canada. It was at this time too, at the beginning of November, 1809, that a citizen of Montreal, John Molson, put the first steamer on the St. Lawrence, her passage from Montreal to Quebec taking sixty-six hours, during thirty of which she was at anchor. Craig himself contributed to improvement of communication in Lower Canada by constructing sixty miles of road which bore his name, and which linked the Eastern Townships, then being settled largely by immigrants from the United States, to the southern bank of the St. Lawrence over against Quebec. This road, which was carried out by the troops under the Quartermaster-General, afterwards Sir James Kempt, Administrator of Canada, was, as Craig wrote to his friend and secretary Ryland, much wanted ‘not merely for the purpose of procuring us the necessary supplies but for the purpose also of bringing the people to our doors’:[221] and it resulted in the price of beef falling in the Quebec market from 7½_d._ to 4½_d._ a lb.[222] It gave an outlet to Quebec to a fine agricultural district, and it opened a direct route to Boston from the capital of Canada. [Sidenote: Ryland’s mission to England.] When Craig wrote these letters to Ryland, the latter was in England. He had been sent by the governor to lay the views of the latter upon the political situation in Canada before the Home Government; and, reaching England at the end of July, 1810, he was active in interviewing ministers and supplying them verbally and by written memoranda with first-hand information. Ryland had gone out to America in 1781 as a paymaster in the army during the War of Independence; and, returning with Carleton at the end of the war, had been taken by him to Canada as confidential secretary. He continued to hold that office to successive governors for twenty years, until 1813, when Sir George Prevost, who followed Craig as Governor-General and with whom Ryland was not in harmony, suggested that other arrangements should be made for the secretaryship. Ryland then resigned his office of governor’s secretary but remained clerk to the Executive Council, living in the suburbs of Quebec, until his death in 1838. He seems to have been an able, honourable man, strongly opposed to the democratic party in Lower Canada, to the French and Roman Catholic section of the community. In England he was brought into relations chiefly with Lord Liverpool, who was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies[223] in the Percival ministry, having succeeded Lord Castlereagh in that office, and with the Under-Secretary of State, Robert Peel. Peel was then beginning his public life, and Ryland’s impression of him