The commissioners felt that as the case of Prince Edward Island was exceptional, so must be the treatment. The application of the local government for a commission, and the large powers given to it by the Queen’s authority, presupposed the necessity of a departure from the ordinary legal modes of settling disputes between landlords and tenants, which the experience of half a century had proved to be inadequate. Finding that it was impossible to shut out of their inquiry, while on the island, the questions of escheat, quitrents, and fishery reserves,—the claims of the descendants of the original French inhabitants, Indians, and loyalists,—they thought it quite within the range of their obligations to express their opinions freely upon these branches of the general subject. The question of escheat, though apparently withdrawn from the scope of their inquiry by despatches from the colonial office,—received long after the opening of the commission,—could not be put aside. The discussion of the question was forced upon them from the day the court opened until it closed. The commissioners, therefore, thought it comported with their duty to express the conclusions at which they had arrived. In considering the best mode of quieting the disputes between the proprietors and their tenants, and of converting the leasehold into freehold tenures, the commissioners remarked that the granting of a whole colony in a single day, in huge blocks of twenty thousand acres each, was an improvident and unwise exercise of the prerogative of the Crown. There was no co-operation on the part of the proprietors in peopling the island. Each acted on his own responsibility, and while a few showed energy in the work, the great body of the grantees did nothing. The emigrants sent out by the few were disheartened by the surrounding wilderness owned by the many, who made no effort to reclaim it, or were tempted to roam about or disregard the terms of settlement by the quantity of wild land, with no visible owner to guard it from intrusion. By mutual co-operation and a common policy, the proprietors might have redeemed the grants of the imperial government from the charge of improvidence. The want of these indispensible elements of success laid the foundation of all the grievances which subsequently afflicted the colony.