26 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



province. It was fortunate for tlic formative stage of the legal and 

 legislative history of Nova Scotia that there was at the council board and 

 on the judicial bench a man of such varied acconij)lishments and such 

 high legal acquirements as Chief Justice Belcher. 



The New England element, which was represented b}' so able a man 

 as Chief Justice Belcher, had not only considerable intluence in the early 

 establishment of the province, but must also be credited for the publica- 

 tion of the tirst news])aper. On the 23rd March, 1752. John Bushell, of 

 Boston, printed the tirst issue of the Halifax Gazette^ the pioneer in 

 journalism, since it appeared twelve years before the Quebec Gazette. 

 Its chief interest lies in the fact of its earl}* publication, and not in its 

 being an enterprising and interesting medium of news. It was soon 

 superseded as a journal by newspapers in a true sense, and it became 

 in the course of time the purely oflicial gazette of the province ' 



VI. Coming of the United Empire Loyalists.— By 1783 the legislative 

 and legal institutions of Nova Scotia were fully organized, and the 

 province received a large accession of loyal population from the old 

 thirteen cohtnies, then recognized as the independent federal republic of 

 the United States. In 1784 there were in the province, according to the 

 most trustworthy statistics available, about forty-three thousand souls, of 

 whom over twenty -eight thousand represented "the new inhabitants '" or 

 loyalists and disbanded troops, who had taken part in the late war. The 

 "old British inhabitants," or the immigration previous to 1783, are given 

 at fourteen thousand. Only four hundred Acadian -French were living at 

 that time in the country. Of the loyalists, nearly ten thousand were 

 already settled on the St. John River, and eight thousand in the county 

 of Shelburne, where they had very bitter experiences. The new popula- 

 tion also included besides black servants or slaves a large number of fugi- 

 tive negroes, many of whom were deported to Africa at a later time by the 

 imperial authorities. The province was now commencing to emerge from 

 its early difficulties. The dykes, which had fallen to pieces in many places 

 after the expulsion of the industrious and ingenious people who had 

 constructed them, had been partly repaired, and the amount of products 

 raised on the old French farms was yearly increasing. The scattered 

 settlements of the })rovince had few means of communication with each 

 other except by water or '' blazed " paths through the woods. In the 

 whole peninsula there was only one great road, that leading from Halifax 

 to Windsor, through Cornwallis and llorton, and thence along the coast 

 of the Bay of Fundy to Annapolis Eoyal. But the " old inhabitants " 

 generally, after the experience of a quarter of a century, were beginning 



'See an interesting paper on "Early Journalism in Nova Scotia," by J. J. 

 Stewart, in Coll. of N. S. Hist. Soc., 1H87-S8, vol. VI. Also Bourinot's "Intellectual 

 Development of tlie Canadian People," Toronto, ISS], and in Cnnadidu Monflily, 

 1881. .Mr. Stewart refers to the presence of the famous printer, Thomas, of Boston 

 for some time in Halifax. 



