The proposition, which was the result of a request by Lord Walsingham, the postmaster general, for an expression of Knox's views, was based on the sound principle that, until the post office provided facilities adequate to the requirements of the correspondence which passed between England and North America, it could never compete successfully with the number of private ships continually crossing the Atlantic. Knox pointed out that there was only a monthly service between England, Halifax and New York, and that, at the very best, five months must elapse before an answer could be returned to a letter written in England and addressed to any of the interior parts of British North America. The plan Knox unfolded to Walsingham was to have a fleet of fast sailing vessels ply between England and Caplin bay, Newfoundland. At Caplin bay there would be other vessels awaiting the British packets, and, on their arrival, one of these would set off with the mails for Halifax and Rhode Island, and another for Bermuda and Virginia, each vessel returning by its own route, to Caplin bay. These services were to be looped together by auxiliary services, and connected with other lines further south, until Great Britain, Newfoundland, Canada, the United States and the West Indies were all bound together by an elaborate system of intercommunication, which would give an exchange of mails, between all the parts three times a month. This scheme, it is needless to say, was never carried into execution. The results of the war had other important consequences for Canada, besides that of forcing upon Quebec and the Maritime provinces the first of the series of steps in the direction of common action, which led eventually to confederation. When peace was concluded in 1783, the disbanded soldiers and other adherents of the British cause came and settled in Canada, and there was an early demand for postal accommodation in the newly peopled districts. The first settlement in Upper Canada was at Niagara, where four or five families took up land in 1780. These were reinforced in 1784, by a number of the men of Butler's Rangers, and at the end of that year, the settlement was increased to over six hundred. Americans came over in large numbers, and between them and the steady stream inwards of loyalists, the district from Niagara to the head of the lake at Hamilton was rapidly settled. A gentleman travelling through that part of the province in 1800 remarked that it was all under settlement.[141] At the other end of the province, settlement was going forward with much rapidity. From the eastern boundary westward as far as the township of Elizabethtown, near the present site of Brockville, there was a continuous line of settlers. The extreme east was taken up by Highland Scotch as far as Dundas county, and the western part of this county was occupied by Germans. Both Highlanders and Germans came from the same district on the Mohawk river in New York state.