Not a few of the leaders of the Loyalists had been men of great influence in the older colonies, and it is not surprising that almost from their arrival in what is now the Dominion of Canada, they began to agitate for representative government, and for the British institutions to which they had been accustomed. They were a liberty-loving people; and those who had settled on the St. Lawrence stoutly objected to being obliged to live under the French civil laws, which gave such satisfaction to their Gallic neighbours. They besieged the British government with petitions for a division of the Province, and for the benefit of British law; so in 1791 the old French Province was divided into Upper and Lower Canada. The newcomers thus gained the opportunity to build up a new province on British lines in the almost uninhabited western wilderness; and, having the opportunity, I think they did wonders with it. In a hundred ways, besides the determination not to accept any limitation of their political liberty, they showed their force and energy of character. The task that faced Canada’s first British pioneers was more strenuous than that which has faced any pioneers since, though the opening and subduing of a new land to the uses of civilized man is always a task that tests to the utmost the manhood and womanhood of those who essay it. The land was thickly covered with huge trees, and in many places the soil, which the sun’s rays could scarcely ever reach through the shadowy verdure of the woods, was cold and wet and swampy. When the Loyalists came, there were no roads in Upper Canada or New Brunswick. There were no steamboats on the lakes or rivers, no railroads even dreamed of. The monarchs of the forest appeared to those first settlers in the light of enemies, to be put out of the way by axe and fire as speedily as possible, and in many districts the land was savagely stripped bare of woods, in a fashion that those who have come after cannot help regretting. It was only the ashes of the majestic maples and beeches and walnuts which had any value in the eyes of the pioneers. Made into potash these would fetch a little ready money, hardly to be obtained in those early days for any other commodity. Even for wheat, only “store-pay” could usually be obtained, and but a small allowance of that, for the great world’s markets were utterly inaccessible to Canada’s early farmers, and the local demand was very small. It was the age of home industries, when every man was by turns builder of his own log-house; cabinet-maker of such rude attempts at chairs and tables as he could turn out; farmer of patches of grain amongst the slowly rotting stumps of forest trees; roadmaker, of ways “slashed” through the bush and stretches of corduroy over the swamps.