32 The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. 



yet the rate for the decade, 1841-1851, was 104 per cent. He 

 further learned with surprise that this rate of increase exceeded 

 that in the most rapidly developing western state, Ohio, which 

 had in 1850 some 1,980,427 of population; but whose increase 

 in ten years had been only 33 per cent, while what was even more 

 marvellous was that the wheat acreage of Upper Canada, though 

 but seven-twelfths that of Ohio, had raised 12,675,630, or 16.25 

 bushels per acre, as compared with a total of 14,487,351 in 

 Ohio." 



The professor was, however, too keenly analytical to imagine 

 that this remarkable development of Upper Canada was due 

 solely to the repeal of the Corn Laws, which favored the United 

 States equally with Canada, although the Imperial Parliament 

 did in 1843 put a protective duty on wheat coming into Canada 

 from the United States. Very properly he found this marvel- 

 lous increase in population due to the choosing by the unemployed 

 population of the Mother country of emigration as perhaps the 

 lesser of two evils, a forlorn hope, indeed, since it meant an 

 ocean voyage often as long as two months under conditions on 

 shipboard, which today dare hardly be recorded. John Morley, 

 writing of the situation in England, says, 



"Commerce was languishing. Distress was terrible. Poor 

 Law rates were mounting and grants-in-aid were extending 

 slowly from the factory districts to the rural. 'Judge,' then said 

 Peel, ' whether we can with safety retrograde in manufactures/ J 



"Then came the failure of the potato crop in Ireland and the 

 famine and distress attendant upon it, forcing emigrants to the 

 United States, Canada and Australia, to the number of 1,494,786 

 from 1840 to 1850 and in 1847 alone there were 109,680 who 

 came to Canada. But along with the poverty and misery of the 

 poor emigrant on leaving Britain came disease and death in this 

 terrible year; the quarantine at Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence 

 saw 5,424 victims of ship fever buried, with physicians and 

 clergy laid beside them, while hundreds more died at the marine 

 hospitals at Quebec, and Montreal and en route to towns farther 

 inland. In 1849 cholera served to fill in the details of this 

 picture of misery, this being the year succeeding the 'Year of 

 Revolutions,' when all Europe was an armed camp in ceaseless 

 agitation due to sudden alarms from every side. The decade 



