It was not surprising that they should cordially invite into their unoccupied territory the hardy and indomitable Highlander, the ingenious artizan in wood and iron, and the everlasting digger from Ireland, whose spade realized the moral of the fable, and in cultivating the earth seldom failed to turn up a mine of subsistence and wealth. But he must be permitted to plead for, he feared, a less favourite class of Colonists,—the sufering weavers and other manufacturers of the towns and villages of the West of Scotland. Without undervaluing the importance of those branches of industry in which they were habitually engaged, the fuctuations of demand for articles of manufacture, and the increasing use of machinery, exposed them to periodical want of employment, and consequent distress, increasing in severity at each successive return. At the present moment it was severe to the last degree, and there were hundreds, nay, even thousands of them, who had no resource left but Emigration. These men certainly did not possess the powerful muscle, the practising out-door labour, or the capacity of overcoming the immediate difficulties attendant on a new country, which were to be found in those who removed from other districts; but he could attest, from ample experience, that no class of men could surpass them in patient endurance of poverty and suffering, or in persevering industry in those branches to which they had been accustomed. They possessed further recommendations; most of them would carry with them numerous families, rejoicing to be delivered from the smoke, and confinement, and demoralizing influences of great towns and manufacturing villages; the development of whose stamina in the open air and healthy employment of agricultural labour, must render them in a few years a valuable acquisition to the districts in which they had settled, and the probable parents of a race inheriting the language, and moral feelings, and patriotism, of their ancestors. He could further assure the meeting that they would carry with them an earnest desire for the benefits of religious instruction and moral education to themselves and to their children. It had been most erroneously supposed that they were habitually indifferent to

these objects; if their attendance in public worship had been irregular, it arose from the national pride of Scotchmen, shrinking from mixing with their fellow-worshippers with a shabby and degraded exterior; and if they did not avail themselves of the advantages of education for their children, it was partly because the moderate cost of obtaining it pressed heavily on their means of subsistence, and partly because the demand for juvenile labour rendered the earnings of even the youngest an important element in the support of their family. He could assure the meeting that such men possessed all the feeling of parents, and children, and brothers, and sisters; that they desired, and in more favourable circumstances would eagerly grasp, at every opportunity of improving their own religious. character, and of obtaining a moral and religious education for their offspring. He was delighted to know that such advantages became every day more and more abundant in the British Colonies of North America. He was gratified to find that those young men, not a few of whom he had known, in every condition of life, repairing to the mother country for education, were now enabled to procure it, in every degree, from the elementary school up to the newly established college in the land to which they properly belonged, and their patriotic attachment to which, its association with the early cultivation of their minds, and their gradual attainments in knowledge, could not but gradually increase. It must be the desire of the present meeting, that such establishments should be multiplied, and become more prosperous, and under this impression he begged to move the resolution, in the full confidence that it would meet with their unanimous and most cordial approbation."

The second resolution having been committed to my charge, I rose and said :

"My Lord Provost, and Gentlemen,-I have been requested by the Most Noble the Marquis of Bute, Her Majesty's High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, to state, that the necessary presence of his Grace, at the General Assembly, alone prevented him from personally ex

pressing to this meeting his full approbation and concurrence in the objects of the Association, requesting, at the same time, that his name might be enrolled as one of its Vice-Presidents."

I then read a letter from his Grace to that effect, and said it was also a great pleasure to me to know that four gentlemen from the House of Assembly of Canada were then present, to support with all their power, a consolidation of interests intended to relieve the overpeopled districts of Great Britain by the Colonization of British North America, and that the Attorney-General from Eastern Canada, and my esteemed friends Sir Allan Macnab and Mr. Buchanan, were, although politically opposed, warmly united in this great undertaking. I then continued

"My Lord, and Gentlemen,-The painful narration which you have listened to, from the two preceding speakers, as to the melancholy state and condition of the labouring classes in Scotland, is, I fear, not limited to Scotland alone, but extends over many other portions of the United Kingdom. It is, however, with Scotland that we have now to deal; and really the harrowing statements as to this deep and general distress, would be calculated to fill the public mind with alarm and dismay, but that a remedy, at once national and desirable, is presented to our notice, in the extensive, fertile, and thinly peopled regions belonging to the British Crown in North America.

"This destitution, though not so immediately threatening as that which existed in the Highlands in 1836 and 1837, is still fearful, extensive, increasing, and menacing; and it must be obvious, that if the munificence which was then displayed, to arrest a temporary, though pressing emergency, had been exercised in the removal of the population, a recurrence of the calamity would have been altogether prevented. For many years prior to 1838, a very large voluntary Emigration had been going on annually to the British provinces in North America, and to Canada in particular. In the two years of 1831 and 1832, upwards of 100,000 Emigrants landed at Quebec: the events which subsequently occurred in Canada led to a vast diminution in this perennial supply. In 1838, there were not much above 2,000 Emigrants that season; and in 1839, urged

by many friends in the province, I came to Scotland, visiting Inverness, Glasgow, and other places, with the hope of restoring that confidence in Canada, without which it was vain to hope the tide of Emigration could be restored. In 1840, I received a pressing invitation from his Grace the Duke of Argyll to attend a meeting in this city, in order to co-operate with him, and the other large proprietors whose estates were overpeopled, in promoting Emigration to Canada. A Committee was then formed, and the question has not slumbered since. The absence of his Grace the Duke of Argyll, on this occasion, permits me to say, that his earnest solicitude to secure the happiness of the people who shall proceed to Canada from his estates, is every way worthy of his exalted name and character; and that the deep interest he has manifested in the prosecution of this question, has caused an equally warm feeling in Canada to co-operate and assist in any great measure of Colonization. On my return to Canada in 1840, a large association was formed in the city of Toronto, with branches in other portions of the province. This association met with the concurrence, and received the approbation of the late lamented Governor-General of British North America, who consented to become its patron. In the prospectus issued by that association, there is ample proof of the earnest desire of the proprietors in Canada to unite their efforts with those of their fellow-subjects in this hemisphere, to promote a large, beneficial, and comprehensive scheme of Colonization. They say the statistics of the country, and the inexhaustible capabilities of the land, are becoming thoroughly known; and, above all, the country is at peace, within and without, and men, by common consent, are uniting by a laudable attention to private good, to swell the aggregate of public prosperity. The Executive Government, too, is actively at work for the good of those under its protection, especially in the forming of roads, and rendering some of the most fertile tracts in the country accessible for settlement. It is making preparations on a grand scale for those who choose to avail themselves of its paternal aid. But great as is its power, and wise and benevolent as they may be who wield it, there is

still a vast amount of good connected with the Colonization of this country which circumstances have rendered it impossible for the local government to perform. It is precisely that deñciency which it is in the power of the Emigration Association to supply. An evil attendant upon the Colonization of Canada in times past is industriously represented as still existing in its aggravated forms, by those who would deter settlers from selecting this province as their home. It is urged that nearly all the lands within the settled precincts of the province have passed into the hands of private individuals; and that the new Emigrant must necessarily go far into the depths of the forest, remote from the peopled settlements, where, whatever may be the excellence of this land, he will be remote from markets, mills, or even roads, or the means of procuring labour or supplies, during the first years of his residence. These difficulties have existed to a great and disheartening extent, sometimes so as to induce the settler to abandon his possessions. It is true, also, that a great proportion of the land, especially in the older surveyed townships, comprehending the choicest locations, in the neighbourhood of roads and navigable waters, now belongs to private individuals—and it is this very fact that enables the Association to be of the most essential service. These tracts are at present unproductive to the owner.

“The Association are happy in knowing, for many of such proprietors are among its most zealous members, that such lands generally remain in their present profitless fertility, only because the hand of man is wanting to turn them into productive corn-fields and animated pastures; and that if their fellow-countrymen were here to make use of them, they would be happy to give them every aid which could tend to their future advantage; they are well aware that by a settlement and cultivation of a portion of their lands, the adjoining portions will become better worth the purchasing by future Emigrants, or by the settler himself when he shall become prosperous.' My object in reading this part of the prospectus, is to show that there is an earnest desire, and fixed intention amongst the landed proprietors in Canada to unite together with their fel