French Canadians and United Empire Loyalists constituted the stable factors in Canadian public life; but the process of immigration, which the years of rebellion checked only for a time, had by 1840 prepared another element, and that the most incalculable and disturbing both socially and politically. Indeed the real problem of Canadian public life lay simply in the influence of the humbler class of immigrants on existing administration and opinion. It was natural for the other settlers and the governing class to regard the larger part of the new population as beneath the political level. The very circumstances of the emigrating process carried with them a suggestion of degradation. Durham had embodied in his _Report_ the more flagrant examples of the horrors of emigration;[15] but a later review, written in 1841, proves that many of the worst features of the old system still continued. There were still the privations, the {21} filth and the diseases of this northern "middle passage," the epidemics and disorders inflicted on the Canadian community as ship-load after ship-load of poor wretches passed ashore at Quebec. On land their sorrows were renewed, for many of them were paupers, and there was still no organized effort to introduce the labourer to those who required his labour. More than one half of the 12,000 who, according to the report of 1841, passed in that year through Bytown locks, were considered objects of charity. Many of them were common labourers with families, men who had little but their physical strength as capital for the new venture; and cholera, typhus, or smallpox had in many cases reduced even that to the vanishing point. More especially among the Irish settlers, who, in these years and later, fled in dismay from the distresses of Ireland, the misery continued long after the first struggle. M'Taggart, who had his prejudices, but who had unusually good opportunities for observation, thought that a tenth of the poorer Irish settlers died during their first two years in the country. He found them clumsy at their work, accustomed to the spade and shovel, not to the axe, and maiming themselves most fearfully, or even killing themselves, in their {22} experiments in clearing the ground.[16] Of all who came, the immigration agents thought the Lowland Scots and the Ulster Irishmen the best, and while the poorer class of settler lagged behind in the cities of Lower Canada, these others generally pushed on to find a hard earned living among the British settlers in the Upper Province. Some of them found their way to the United States. Others, faced with the intolerable delays of the land administration, took the risk of "squatting," that is, settling on wild land without securing a right to it--often to find themselves dislodged by a legal owner at the moment when their possession _de facto_ seemed established. The majority settled as small farmers in the more frequented districts, or became