OUR ISLAND STORY 51

tence; that he would be “dismayed at the thought of being de- prived of the fruits of the labor of his manhood, whether from heavy arrears of rent which he was unable to pay or from the proprietors’ refusal to grant a sufficiently long tenure to ensure to his family the profits of his labor when probably in the decline of life." Long leases should, the Lieutenant Governor advised, be granted at the rate customary in the colony, the rent to be paid in produce at the market price; and when long leases were objected to,purchase in fee simple at twenty years purchase, should be allowed, or payments for improvements at a fair valuation should be censured at the end of the term.

This representation seems to have made a strong impression upon the minds of the officials in England. Lord Glenelg, the Secretary of State, forwarded a copy of the dispatch, together with other documents bearing upon the Land Question of this colony, to Lord Durham who was then Governor General of British North America. Among those documents was a report of a. joint committee of the Island Legislature in which it was shown that the Island Government had, in the preceding twelve years, expended £56,506 in the construction of roads and bridges, £15,556 in the construction of public buildings and wharves, and £56,562 for other local purposes—to the great advantage of the landed proprietors, the value of whose estates had thereby been largely increased, V

Commenting upon the information contained in these docu- ments Lord Durham, in a despatch to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, dated at Quebec on the 8th of October, 1858,

remarked that “the great bulk of the Island is still held by ab-

sentees who hold it as a sort of reversionary interest which requires no present attention but may become valuable some day or other through the growing want of the inhabitants. But, 8 in the meantime, the inhabitants of the Island are subject to the greatest inconvenience—nay, to the most serious injury—from the state of the property in land. The absent proprietors neither improve the land themselves nor will let others improve it. They retain the land and keep it in a state of wilderness. Your Lordship can scarcely conceive the degree of injury inflicted

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