42 The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. 



the Great Lakes, continued skirting the southern shores and 

 even pushing into every state east of the Mississippi. Large 

 land grants were given to railway promoters, and in Britain, 

 Germany and Sweden their agents were scouring every district to 

 secure immigrants to their lands, thereby to repair the damages 

 of the financial collapse which had followed the Peace of Paris, 

 1856. He found too that immigration had become the commer- 

 cial barometer in America, instead of the price of wheat as used 

 to be in England, as seen in the figures for these succeeding 

 years. Thus the immigrants for different years were: 



United States Upper Canada 



1851 267,357 42,605 



1852 . 244,261 38,873 



1853 230,885 34,522 



1854 . 193,065 43,761 



1855 103,414 17,966 



1856 111,837 16,378 



1857 126,905 21,001 



1858 59,716 9,704 



1859 70,303 6,689 



1860 119,928 9,786 



" But he found that another and wholly different set of forces 

 were now to affect the normal progress of commercial develop- 

 ment in the United States and to react disastrously upon Canada, 

 which for a moment was the seeming temporary gainer by the 

 Civil War, which broke out in 1861. North had met South in 

 fratricidal conflict and the energies of a nation of 32,000,000 

 were engaged in the most sanguinary war of the nineteenth 

 century. For the moment immigration to the States fell in 

 1862 to 64,191; but this did not react favourably upon Canada 

 which had only 12,717 in that year. The depression in business 

 already following over-speculation in railways in the United 

 States had encouraged that government to enter into a reciproc- 

 ity agreement in 1854 for ten years with Canada, which was 

 henceforth to become a doorway to the Northern States, and 

 horses sold at high prices and food supplies of every kind found 

 free access and at favourable returns during the four exhaust- 

 ing years which followed. In spite of the war, however, the 

 immigration to the States rose to 191,114 in 1864; remained at 



