CHAPTER X Our Fathers and Mothers Come In
THE PEOPLE who now streamed in through the open door, who were they? Mostly Eastern Canadians. But who were these Eastern Canadians? We must look back a hundred years to find out.
When most of the English colonists to the south broke away from the Empire, many thousands of them considered this violent action wrong; and, without any doubt, if the object to be achieved was self-government, it could and would have been won later on without secession, as other colonists won it.
Thousands of “United Empire Loyalists,” sacrificing everything, flocked over the border and made new homes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario. This inrush from the lost colonies was followed by a considerable immigration from the mother-country, and the human tide flowed more strongly than ever after the end of the war with Napoleon. The United Kingdom contained less than half her present population, yet she was supposed to be overcrowded. Scotland and Ireland especially were drained of their people, because the political economists could find nothing for them to do at home.
It is believed that in the early years of the nineteenth century 25,000 Scottish peasants settled on Cape Breton Island alone, while great numbers were taken to the southern parts of Nova Scotia, and various counties in Upper and Lower Canada were peopled almost entirely from the same source. The members of a clan, or the inhabitants of a district, commonly emigrated together, and took up homes together in the New World, under leaders chosen or accepted by themselves. In 1804, eight hundred Highlanders, evicted by landlords who wanted the land for sheep runs, came over and made a new Glengarry between the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, where the land would be their own. About the same time an Irish officer, Thomas Talbot, threw himself with the “go” of a cavalry charge into an emigration movement, and never rested till he had settled twenty-eight townships north of Lake Erie.
One Highland chief, the Macnab, not only sent a large company of his own clansmen to Canada at his own expense, but took up his abode among them on the township allotted him by the Government. Later, in the early thirties, we hear of 400 discharged Irish soldiers coming over in a body, with their old officers at their head, and forming a military camp in the Upper Canadian backwoods, till their united efforts had cut out the roads and fields and built the houses of a civilized settlement. In England, about the same time, Lord Egremont organized an expedition of 760 Sussex folk, who also made homes for themselves in Upper Canada, as Ontario then was called. The emigrant ships were thick on the Atlantic, and in four years 160,000 British emigrants landed on Canadian soil.