[mayor] a chapter of CANADIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY 23 



undeveloped land grants. In 1819 some settlers went on the uplands 

 of the interior towards Lake Huron. One of the first of these groups 

 was a band of fugitives from Lord Selkirk's Red River Settlement, 

 who settled in what is now the county of Simcoe;^" and in 1820 a 

 group of Argyllshire Highlanders settled in Zorra (Oxford County). ^^ 

 There was within the immediately succeeding years some migration 

 into the upland region from Lower Canada and some immigration 

 direct or via the United States of Scots, Irish and Germans. These 

 settlers clustered together in groups and sometimes resented the 

 intrusion among them of any but settlers of their own race and their 

 own religion. 



From these details it will be gathered that the colonization of 

 Upper Canada between the cession to Great Britain in 1763 and the year 

 1830 was unorganized and sporadic. The experiment of giving grants 

 with the expectation of settlement had been shown to be a failure; 

 and the experiment of giving grants with settlement conditions 

 attached, a plan which was instituted in 1818, had not yet been in 

 practice for a sufficiently long period to demonstrate its utility or 

 otherwise. In effect, three-quarters of a century had elapsed and the 

 country was still very scantily inhabited. 



The slowness of this development is ascribed by Lord Durham 

 to the policy of the Government in respect to land grants. He 

 contrasts with much vivacity the "activity and bustle" of the United 

 States, the good roads and the numerous settlements, with the waste 

 and desolation of the British side of the line.^^ He vindicates the soil 

 and to some extent vindicates also the people; and he throws the 

 chief burden of blame upon the profuse, indiscriminate and variable 

 methods of granting public lands. The United States, on the other 

 hand, he says, had adopted a system which "combined all the chief 

 requisites of the greatest efficiency." This system was uniform and 

 had never been materially altered; it involved the sale of land at a 

 price which rendered the acquisition of new land easy, but at the 

 same time "restricted appropriation to the actual wants of the 

 settler." -^ Importance must be attached to contemporary judgments 

 by high authority, yet, on the one hand, it may be doubted whether 

 the land system of the United States was quite so uniform or successful 



^''Hunter, A. P., A History of Simcoe County, Barrie, Ont., 1909, vol. i, pp. 62, 

 et seq. 



^i^For a naïve account of the Zorra Highlanders see Mackay, Rev. W. A., B.A. 

 D.D., Pioneer Life in Zorra, Toronto, 1899. 



22Durham, Report, fo. edition, 1839, p. 74. 



23/6. 



