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" Such being the principles at stake and such the adverse interests involved, 

 both parties memorialized the government, each endeavoring to secure the 

 preponderance of their particular views. 



" The memorial in the shipping interest did not, however, correctly represent 

 the grounds upon which those who signed it really opposed the object sought for 

 by the producing interest. I would indeed be sorry to accuse gentlemen of their 

 standing and respectability of any intentional mis-statements, but yet, from being 

 ignorant of that branch of the trade with which they were not connected and of 

 the regulations by which it was governed they allowed themselves to be led into 

 a train of argument which raised entirely false issues, some erroneous informatiori 

 or misconception having led to the result that every paragraph in their memorial 

 conveyed either inferentially or directly some statement that could not be 

 sustained by facts. 



" They assumed in the first place that the ground rent was " a condition 

 agreed to by the license holders when they obtained the privilege of cutting, 

 etc.," which was not the fact as regards the great bulk of the trade, the timber 

 berths having been obtained without any such condition, and the ground rents 

 being an additional impost to which they have since been subjected. They next 

 stated that " of late years the bulk of the timber limits of the Crown have been 

 monopolized by a few houses," whereas, there had been no change by which this 

 could have been effected, the only change introduced for several years, having 

 been the very one they were seeking to maintain, establishing ground rents etc. 

 as the most efficient check upon monopoly which had yet been found. 



" I may here remark that the assumption that a great monopoly of the timber 

 territory existed was at best a chimera, as proved by the fact that there are upon 

 an average about nine hundred timber births under license in the hands of about 

 five hundred persons. The assertion, therefore, that there is monopoly where there 

 are five hundred competitors, each equally free to deal to a large or a small extent 

 as he sees fit, or his means will allow, needs no further contradiction. 



" There may indeed be some local monopolies, where persons of large means 

 buy up the lesser establishments in their vicinity ; but anything approaching a 

 general monopoly in this trade, under existing regulations, is impossible ; and, so 

 far as any local monopoly exists, it is not by the government that it has been 

 created or is sustained, but by the influence of capital, the application of which 

 for the purposes of trade the government cannot control. 



" The greatest local monopoly that has yet arisen in the trade was that which 

 existed a few years on the Saint Maurice, and there it arose from the influence of 

 capital at public competition, although the regulations on that occasion were 

 specially calculated to throw the trade of the territory into the greatest number 

 of hands possible. Capital, however, bore down all opposition for the moment, 

 and it is due to the firmness with which the government resisted repeated, most 

 urgent, and most influential appeals to relax the regulations that that monopoly 

 was ultimately broken up. 



" Indeed it may be truly said that the shipping branch of the trade, as carried 

 on at Quebec, bears much more the character of a monopoly than the producing 

 branch, the whole of the business arising from about five hundred competitors on 

 public lands, and perhaps an equally great number of producers on private lands, 

 being, so far as the business centres in Quebec, in the hands of about forty 

 shippers, nine or ten of whom do more than three-fourths of the whole business. 

 But this, in like manner, so far as it can be called a monopoly, is the result of 

 capital, and is not influenced by government, which can as little interfere to limit 

 the operations of the producer to one timber berth or a hundred timber berths- 

 as to limit the business of the shipper to one ship or a hundred ships. 



