internal management, and weakened from other evil influences, Upper Canada now pines in comparative decay; discontent and poverty are experienced in a land supremely blessed with the gifts of nature; dread of arbitrary power wars, here, against the free exercise of reason and manly sentiment; laws have been set aside; legislators have come into derision; and contempt from the mother-country seems fast gathering strength to disunite the people of Canada from their friends at home." Notwithstanding these long, involved, awkwardly-constructed sentences, there is no more accurate picture to be found anywhere of the effect of the pernicious administration of affairs in the Public Lands Office at York in 1818. Twenty years later Lord Durham found it not much improved.[40] Another hydra-headed monster which ate into the very vitals of the commonwealth was the provision for the clergy, known as the Clergy Reserves. This was perhaps the greatest of all the curses imposed upon Upper Canada by the Constitutional Act, for its ill effects were both direct and incidental. It not only tended to stop the march of progress, but it created a degree of sectarian animosity and hatred little calculated to inspire respect for Christianity in the breasts of the secular portion of the community, and it disturbed the public tranquillity for nearly two generations. By the thirty-sixth section of the Act of 1791, power was given to reserve out of all future grants of land in Upper and Lower Canada, as well as in respect of all past grants, an allotment for the support of "a Protestant Clergy." It was provided that this allotment should be "equal in value to the seventh part of the lands so granted." By the thirty-seventh section, the rents, profits and emoluments arising from the lands so appropriated were to be applicable solely to the maintenance and support of a Protestant Clergy. By subsequent sections provision was made for the erection and endowment by the Lieutenant-Governor, under instructions from the Crown, of parsonages or rectories, one or more in every township or parish, according to the establishment of the Church of England, and for the presentation of incumbents, subject to the bishop's right of institution. By section forty-two it was enacted that no Provincial statute varying or repealing these provisions should receive the royal assent until thirty days after it had been laid before both Houses of Parliament in Great Britain. These famous enactments were destined to produce more discord and heartburning than all the other clauses of the Constitutional Act combined. They were destined to make the Church of England more cordially detested in this Province by persons without the pale of her communion than she has ever been in any other part of the world. They were destined to set one Legislative faction against another in such fierce array that the public business frequently had to be suspended.