CHAPTER VII 



JOSEPH KEELER, STUDENT OF EARLY CANADIAN HISTORY 



In the interval, Joseph Keeler had been busy on his now all- 

 engrossing subject. He took it to the club with him and at odd 

 moments, producing his volume of figures and statistics, would 

 discuss the topic with his business friends at Board meetings 

 and elsewhere. He devoured every available scrap of early 

 history and especially of the District he had grown to love and 

 look upon as his own. He learned from the old newspaper 

 files in the central library and from various blue books of the 

 manner in which a group of English, Irish or Scotch immigrants 

 would settle a whole township in one year and of how in the next 

 township a quite different class would come the year following. 

 He became acquainted too from standard Canadian histories 

 with the organization of the District Councils by the Bill of 

 Lord Sydenham in 1841, under which the wardens were nomi- 

 nated by the Governor, and with the rapid evolution of county 

 self-government completed by the Hon. Robert Baldwin's 

 Municipal Act of 1849, providing for complete township auton- 

 omy. He found too that the effects of the long struggle for 

 representative institutions had developed a strength and sturdi- 

 ness of thought and of independent action in the people of 

 Upper Canada, increased by the inrush of emigrants from Britain 

 who had witnessed the same fight there, resulting in the Reform 

 Bill of 1832, anb! later in the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845, 

 all which had resulted in the merging into one of the people here 

 to a degree and with a rapidity never before surpassed. 



Digging yet deeper, Mr. Keeler found a whole volume of 

 correspondence containing minutes of the Legislatures of both 

 Canadas and of several Boards of Trade, which existed even in 

 those early days, urging that free entry be given to Canadian 

 wheat into Britain and at the same time asking that American 

 wheat be admitted free to Canada for grinding, but that it 

 should be taxed in England, thereby supplying a preference 



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