[mayor] a chapter of CANADIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY 21 



In spite of the difficulties attendant upon the organization of an 

 infant colony, the first year of the new province gave it a not un- 

 favourable start. The harvest of 1791 was abundant and in the 

 following year immigrants began to pour in. Indeed the home 

 government at this time feared that immigration into Canada was 

 being overdone. ^^ Simcoe remarks upon "the poor and dispirited 

 state of too many of the population." ^^ Yet wages were high/^ 

 although capital, public as well as private, was scarce. Coins, 

 though very numerous in respect to character,^* were not plentiful 

 and exchange in kind was common. Many services were paid for in 

 kind as well as partly in kind and partly in money. 



It appeared to Simcoe and to others that the two pressing needs 

 of the province were people and capital. The country could not be 

 maintained as a political entity without people and the resources of 

 the country could not be exploited without men and money. The 

 immigration which was taking place was chiefly from the United 

 States; the attraction of gratuitous lands sufficed to draw many 

 who were indifferent upon the question of allegiance; of overseas 

 immigration there was little; the voyage was long and relatively 

 expensive. The increase in the population of England between 1790 

 and 1800, although greater than in the preceding decade, was scarcely 

 such as to justify belief in redundancy of population, yet deficient 

 harvests — -in each year between 1792 and 1795, in 1799, 1800 and 

 1804, impoverished the people and contributed to enormous increase 

 in the poor rates. ^^ There were numerous schemes for the diminution 

 of these through the organization of the labour of the poor, but prac- 

 tically all of the schemes, including Pitt's Plan of 1796, reverted to 

 the poor law doctrines of the reign of Elizabeth; they did not contain 

 any projects of emigration or of colonization. Such projects did not 

 come till a later period. 



The earliest attempt at colonization was not made on philan- 

 thropic grounds but probably through a mere caprice by a former 



"Dundas to Simcoe, July 12, 1792, p. 13. 

 i^Simcoe to Dundas, Sept. 20, 1793, p. 24. 



"Under 36 Geo. Ill, c. 1 (1796) (Provincial Parliament of Upper Canada), the 

 British guinea, the Portuguese Johannes and moidore and the American eagle were 

 legal tender in gold, and the British crown and shilling, the Spanish milled dollar 

 and pistareen, the French crown, and the French pieces of four livres, ten sols, of 

 thirty-six sols and of twenty-four sols Tournois and the American dollar were legal 

 tender in silver. 



i^See e.g., Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 8th éd., London, 187S, 

 p. 212. 



