[gouriNor] ECONOMIC CONDITIONS OF THE PROVINCES 31 
make the best farmers, as was graphically shown in Mrs. Moodie’s 
“Roughing it in the Bush.” The Irish Catholics were in the majority 
of cases from the destitute classes, but they succeeded well eventually 
wherever they settled on the waste lands of Upper Canada, but a con- 
siderable number always chose the cities and towns. The sufferings of 
immigrants during the Atlantic voyage in ill-equipped, filthy, crowded 
ships, were terrible in days when governments took no precautions for 
the health and comfort of this class against the greed of shipowners. 
Disease ever claimed its victims in these pest ships, and in 1832 cholera 
was brought in this way into Canada, where many thousands of persons 
from Quebec to Sandwich, fell victims to this dread pestilence. 
An important event in the history of the settlement of the upper 
province was the establishment in 1826 of the Canada Land Company, 
under an imperial charter. The first secretary was John Galt, a famous 
liitérateur, who founded the “ royal city” of Guelph, in honour of the 
reigning dynasty, and whose own name is perpetuated in a prosperous 
and beautiful town of the fine western district where the company had 
purchased from the government great blocks of land. Another eminent 
man was the clever, eccentric Dr. Dunlop,—the founder of Goderich— 
who is immortalised in Noctes Ambrosiana and who contributed inter- 
esting sketches of Canadian life to Blackwood’s and Fraser's Magazines. 
Although the Canada Company, which still has an office in Toronto, was 
a factor in the settlement of the province, its possession of large tracts 
of the best land—some of which, like the Huron block, were locked up 
for years—was among the grievances against the government, who lent 
itself too readily to the schemes of speculators. 
An important influence in the early settlement of Upper Canada 
was exercised by one Colonel Talbot, who had been secretary to Lieu- 
tenant-Governor Simcoe, and had received large grants of land on the 
western peninsula between Erie and Ontario. He was the founder of 
the County of Elgin, and at least two hundred and fifty thousand people 
now live in the twenty-eight townships of what was once called the 
“Talbot Settlement.” Mrs. Anna Jameson, the wife of a vice-chan- 
cellor of Upper Canada, describes in her “ Winter Studies and Summer 
Rambles,” written in 1838, the home of this great proprietor—a Talbot 
of Malahide, one of the oldest families in the parent state. The Chateau 
—as she calls it, perhaps sarcastically—was a “long wooden building, 
chiefly of rough logs, with a covered porch running along the south 
side.” Here she found suspended “ among sundry implements of hus- 
bandry, one of those ferocious animals of the feline kind, called here the 
cat-a-mountain, and by some the American tiger, or panther which it 
more resembles.” In the hall “ sacks of wheat and piles of sheepskins lay 
