REMARKS ON THE AWARD OF 18C0. 113 property, and the duty of obedience to imperial edicts relating to the soil,—edicts of -which any civilized country might well he ashamed, and to which no parallel can be found in the voluminous annals of the colonial possessions of an em¬ pire on which the sna never sets. While immigrants to other portions of America obtained good land in fee-simple for the merest trifle, aud were working their way to competence And independence, the farmers of Prince Edward Island , weighed down by rent, were doomed to clear the forest and improve the land, finding themselves in many cases, in their •old age, no richer than on their arrival in the country, with no prospect before their families but hard work, and with no hope of a permanent or adequate return. Happily, the fearful difficulties encountered by the early settlors do not exist'—at least in the same degree—now ; and by dint of economy, hard work, and self-denial, not a few have attained to comparative comfort and independence. The commissioners say: " the grievances of the island have sprung from the injudicious mode in which the lauds were originally given away." That is only half the truth. The Crown had the abstract right to grant the land in blocks of twenty thousand acres each; but the Crown had not the right, after the conditions on which the land had been allotted were published, and its good faith had been com¬ mitted to the fulfilment of these conditions by the owners on pain of forfeiture, to permit their violation without the infliction of the penalty. Thousands, on the faith of these conditions being honestly implemented, had staked their prospects in life. The original immigrants would not have come to Prince Edward Island as tenants while they might have obtained free laud elsewhere, unless compen¬ satory advantages had been offered. These advantages were implied in the conditions of settlement attached to the