AMOUNT AND EVIL OF RESERVED RENTS. 313 



and wishes of the emigrant who, coming with a small 

 capital, wishes to buy the fee-simple of a farm he can 

 thenceforth call his own. 



The reserved rent varies considerably. In the old 

 grants it is fixed at a mere nominal sum. The farms, as 

 I have already remarked, are long and narrow. They 

 are generally three lineal arp^nts in breadth, fronting 

 the road, and forty, thirty, or twenty, in depth. For 

 these lots, the reserved rent averages about twopence 

 sterling an acre ; but, in many recent concessions, it is as 

 high as fivepence sterling, or sixpence currency, an acre. 

 Added to the reserved twelfths, and other privileges of the 

 seigneur, this latter rent-charge is by no means a light 

 one in Canada. Such a money-charge, being fixed, 

 would not with us, in most places, seriously affect agri- 

 cultural improvement ; nor would it prove a serious 

 hindrance to the introduction of a better system of 

 culture in the exhausted flats of the St Lawrence, were 

 it not that the farmers are already very poor. This 

 small annual payment, therefore, is felt as a great 

 burden, and is a source of much and general complaint 

 — though I have not heard that they have actually, any- 

 where in Lower Canada, risen in special rebellion 

 against the payment of what must be considered to be 

 just debts, as their more enlightened and energetic 

 Protestant neighbours, the New Yorkers, lately did in 

 regard to the Renselaer rents. It is important, as 

 indicating the general feeling in regard to these 

 reserved rights, even among the French population, that 

 in the Eebellion of 1837, Dr Robert Nelson, in his 

 manifesto to the Lower Canadians, declared " for inde- 

 pendence, a republican government, the confiscation of 

 the crown and church lands and the possessions of the 

 Canada Company, the abolition of seignorial rights^ and 

 imprisonment for debt." This promised abolition was, 

 no doubt, intended as a bribe to those who had services 



