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28 OUR ISLAND STORY

of their estates and to influence the Crown to refuse assent to acts of the Legislature passed for the purpose of relieving the ten- ants’ grievances and improving agrarian conditions. The Land Commission, appointed in 1860 to investigate these conditions and to suggest means of terminating the troubles by which the colony was beset, found that all the original grants were improvident: that all the grants had been liable to forfeiture on account of the breach, by the proprietors, of the provisions attached to them; and that all the lands involved might have been seized and sold by the Crown without dishonor or reproach. “But the British Government, having repeatedly confirmed the original grants," the proprietors had to be treated as the lawful posses- sors of the land they held.”

In the meantime, the immigrants who came to the Island were, for the most part, compelled to lease their holdings of land from the agents of the absentee proprietors, With few excep- tions they were, upon their arrival, very poor in respect to money, or this world’s goods. Many of them were literally forced to leave England, Scotland and Ireland in the famine conditions that prevailed throughout their mother countries. Before the advent of steamships they endured the seasickness and all the terrors of long tempestuous ocean voyages in sailing vessels that were not fitted for the transport of passengers. Some of the poorest of them had, when they arrived, little more than the much worn clothing in which they stood. The land they came to till was, for the most part, covered by forest. They were without implements of husbandry. The only tOOls procurable were the knife, the axe andthe hoe. With these they went to work. But first of all they had to come to terms with the prop- rietor’s agent, select their farms, and agree to pay rent, year by year, throughout terms extending in most cases to nine hundred and ninety-nine years.

The rent ranged from a shilling to two or three shillings per acre. If the lessee had not been compelled to conquer the forest, to maintain his family, to build his house and barn, to sow his seed among the stumps of trees, large and small, to harvest the yield with scythe, sickle and hoe,and to thresh his grain with a