CANADA COMPANY GODERICH SETTLEMENT. 175 



and a vessel, a few tons burden, could not enter the mouth 

 of the harbour. 



I found the Canada Company very unpopular at Goderich, 

 although Dr Dunlop is a favourite amongst the settlers, who 

 are of the poorest class, and seemingly without industry or 

 energy of any kind. Indeed, when men despair of overcoming 

 their pecuniary difficulties, which must have been the case 

 with most of the first settlers, they are apt to become both 

 indolent and dissipated. The Canada Company charge 7s. 6d. 

 per acre for land, payable, with interest, by instalments ; and 

 when a specified extent is taken, part of the settler s travelling 

 expenses are allowed him out of the second instalment. This 

 is a most disadvantageous regulation for emigrants, being a 

 premium to purchase beyond their means of paying, and an un 

 profitable locking up, or perhaps rather transfer of capital, 

 which cannot by possibility fail of ending in ruin, as it hath 

 been proved by the whole history of American wood settlers, 

 that they find it difficult, for the first three years, with the 

 utmost industry, to do more than maintain their families. In 

 this case, the interest on the unpaid instalments is more than 

 the cleared part of the farm will yield of profit at the end of 

 five or six years, where a person trusts alone to his personal 

 labour for improving. When all the instalments are duly paid, 

 the price of the forest land, which seldom yields a blade of 

 grassland is totally unproductive, remains an overwhelming 

 burden on what is cleared. Dr Dunlop told me, that only 

 one of the original settlers continued to hold his land at the 

 time of my visit to Goderich, and alluded to a cause for their 

 removal, which I did not think likely to have produced the 

 effect. The first settlers at Goderich were people of limited 

 means, the majority of them paupers, and they soon became 

 so involved to the Company, as to induce them to leave the 

 district. Many of the recent purchasers, perhaps forty or 

 fifty of them, were working on the Company s roads while I 

 was present, which the Doctor told me was the only means by 

 which they could render payment. 



It seems bad policy in a nation overflowing with population 

 to sell a large though distant tract of land to speculators, like 

 the Canada Company, who must seek immediate gain, with- 



