The British government endeavoured, so far as it was in its power, to compensate the Loyalists for the loss of their property by liberal grants of money and land, but despite all that was done for them the majority felt a deep bitterness in their hearts as they landed on new shores of which they had heard most depressing accounts. More than thirty-five thousand men, women and children, made their homes within the limits of the present Dominion. In addition to these actual American Loyalists, there were several thousands of negroes, fugitives from their owners, or servants of the exiles, who have been generally counted in the loose estimates made of the migration of 1783, and the greater number of whom were at a later time deported from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone. Of the exiles at least twenty-five thousand went to the maritime colonies, and built up the province of New Brunswick, where representative institutions were established in 1784. Of the ten thousand people who sought the valley of the St Lawrence, some settled in Montreal, at Chambly, and in parts of the present Eastern Townships, but the great majority accepted grants of land on the banks of the St. Lawrence--from River Beaudette, on Lake St. Francis, as far as the beautiful Bay of Quinté--in the Niagara District, and on the shores of Lake Erie. The coming of these people, subsequently known by the name of "U.E. Loyalists"--a name appropriately given to them in recognition of their fidelity to a United Empire--was a most auspicious event for the British-American provinces, the greater part of which was still a wilderness. As we have seen in the previous chapters, there was in the Acadian provinces, afterwards divided into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, a British population of only some 14,000 souls, mostly confined to the peninsula. In the valley of the St. Lawrence there was a French population of probably 100,000 persons, dwelling chiefly on the banks of the St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal. The total British population of the province of Quebec did not exceed 2000, residing for the most part in the towns of Quebec and Montreal. No English people were found west of Lake St. Louis; and what is now the populous province of Ontario was a mere wilderness, except where loyal refugees had gathered about the English fort at Niagara, or a few French settlers had made homes for themselves on the banks of the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair. The migration of between 30,000 and 40,000 Loyalists to the maritime provinces and the valley of the St. Lawrence was the saving of British interests in the great region which England still happily retained in North America.