In the dawning light which already begins to rise in these remote abodes, much may be discovered of what promises a brighter day. Excepting the remnant of the old Canadians, who are a very inoffensive people, patient and cheerful, attached to monarchy, and much assimilated to our modes of thinking and living, these provinces are peopled, for the most part, with inhabitants possessed of true British hearts and principles. Veterans who have shed their blood, and spent their best days in the service of the parent country, and royalists who have fled here for a refuge, after devoting their property to the support of their honour and loyalty; who adhere together, and form a society graced by that knowledge and those manners which rendered them respectable in their original state, with all the experience gained from adversity; and that elevation of sentiment which results from the consciousness of having suffered in a good cause. Here, too, are clusters of emigrants who have fled, unacquainted with the refinements, and uncontaminated by the old world, to seek for that bread and peace, which the progress of luxury and the change of manners denied them at home. Here they come in kindly confederation, resolved to cherish in those kindred groups, which have left with social sorrow their native mountains, the customs and traditions, the language and the love of their ancestors, and to find comfort in that religion which has ever been their support and their shield, for all that they have left behind.[27] Footnote 27: It is needless to enlarge on a subject, to which Lord Selkirk has done such ample justice, who wanted nothing but a little experience and a little aid, to make the best practical comments on his own judicious, observations. It is by tribes of individuals intimately connected with each other by some common tie, that a country is most advantageously settled, to which the obvious superiority in point of principle and union that distinguishes British America from the United States, is chiefly owing. Our provinces afford no room for wild speculations, either of the commercial or political kind; regular, moderate trade, promising little beyond a comfortable subsistence, and agriculture, requiring much industry and settled habits, are the only paths open to adventurers; and the chief inducement to emigration is the possibility of an attached society of friends and kindred, finding room to dwell together, and meeting, in the depth of these fertile wilds, with similar associations. Hence, solitary and desperate adventurers, the vain, the turbulent, and the ambitious, shun these regulated abodes of quiet industry, for scenes more adapted to their genius.