Congress had promised to protect the property of those Royalists who had fought on the losing side in the American Revolution, but for reasons beyond the control of Congress, that promise could not be carried out. It was not Congress but the local governments of each individual state that controlled property rights. In vain Congress recommended the States Governments to restore the property confiscated from the Royalists. The States Governments were in a condition of chaos, packed by jobbers and land-grabbers and the riffraff that always infest the beginnings of a nation. Instead of protecting the Royalists, the States Governments passed laws confiscating more property and depriving those who had fought for England of even holding office. It was easy for the tricksters who had got possession of the loyalists' lands to create a social ostracism that endangered the very lives of the beaten Royalists, and there set towards Canada the great emigration of the United Empire Loyalists. To Nova Scotia, to New Brunswick, to Prince Edward Island, to Ontario, they came from Virginia and Pennsylvania and New York and Massachusetts and Vermont, in thousands upon thousands. The story of their sufferings and far wanderings has never been told and probably never will, for there is little official record of it; but it can be likened only to the expulsion of the Acadians multiplied a hundredfold. To the Maritime Provinces alone came more than thirty thousand people. To the eastern townships of Quebec, to the regions of Kingston and Niagara and Toronto in Ontario came some twenty thousand more. It needs no {313} trick of fancy to call up the scene, and one marvels that neither poet nor novelist has yet made use of it. Here were fine old Royalist officers of New York reduced from opulence to penury, from wealth to such absolute destitution they had neither clothing nor food, nor money to pay ship's passage away, now crowded with their families, and such wrecks of household goods as had escaped raid and fire, on some cheap government transport or fishing schooner bound from New York Harbor to Halifax or Fundy Bay. Of the thirteen thousand people bound for Halifax there can scarcely be a family that has not lost brothers or sons in the war. Family plate, old laces, heirlooms, even the father's sword in some cases, have long ago been pawned for food. If one finds, as one does find all through Nova Scotia, fine old mahogany and walnut furniture brought across by the Loyalists, it is only because walnut and mahogany were not valued at the time of the Revolution as they are to-day. And instead of welcome at Halifax, the refugees met with absolute consternation! What is a town of five thousand people to do with so many hungry visitants? They are quartered about in churches, in barracks, in halls knocked up, till they can be sent to farms. And these are not common immigrants coming fresh from toil in the fields of