Pale of Settlement

“ The memory of the sufferers in this war as well as that of their descendants still looks back upon them with regret, and abhorrence, and the page of history will consign their names to posterity, with the full weight of infamy they deserve. . . .
. . . our early land laws . . . allowed four hundred acres, and no more, to a settlement right. Many of our first settlers seemed to regard this amount of the surface of the earth, as the allotment of divine providence for one family, and believed that any attempt to get more would be sinful. ”

“ It is a work of time, expense, and difficulty to explore the windings of a coast; more an object for Government to accomplish, than for an individual to undertake. You conjecture that this is a desirable part of the continent to select for a settlement, but it may be long before this place shall be located, and a solitary settler would labour under many disadvantages in his isolation. ”

“ Were we dreaming?
"As for me and my friends," he said, "we shall sally forth to found a new Settlement, and to govern it by the ideas of the Past. No one in our Settlement will be obliged to work; but if he does not, he shall certainly starve. Nobody will inherit any share to anything except what he may win by struggle. ”

“ It is not my business to write the history of the Crown Colony administration, and therefore no time need be given to the many difficulties which faced the scheme, the mistakes made, and the hopeful results attained in certain cases. It is the problem itself which demands attention, and the adequacy or inadequacy of the policy which has been framed to meet it. Land settlement is from its very nature a slow business, with tardy fruits: twenty years hence we may be in a position to judge by results. ”

“ A further reason for the spreading out of the settlement arose from the fact that people would ask for a number of contiguous blocks to be reserved for themselves and their friends, and after the land had been reserved for them, only one or two blocks were taken up or cultivated. ”

“ This, together with the number of convicts, who after the expiration of their sentences remain with their respective families growing up under them, has so increased the population of free settlers, that the prosperity of the settlement, as a colony, has proportionally advanced ”

“ But above all this, the state and circumstances of our settlements render such a measure not only proper and eligible, but absolutely necessary. The English settlements, as they are at present circumstanced, are absolutely at a stand; they are settled up to the mountains: and in the mountains there is no where together land sufficient for a settlement large enough to subsist by itself, and to defend itself, and preserve a communication with the present settlements. ”

“ Augustine (like another Sallee!) That Den of Thieves and Ruffians ! Receptacle of Debtors, Servants and Slaves ! Bane of Industry and Society ! And revolved in our Minds all the Injuries this Province had received from thence, ever since its first Settlement : That they had, from first to last, in Times of profoundest Peace, both publickly and privately, by Themselves, Indians and Negroes, in every Shape molested us, not without some Instances of uncommon Cruelty. ”

“ As the product of mere fancy, such sweeping soldiers' settlement projects were bound to die a natural death. And yet they have not been without value. They created lively discussion, and called attention to our land problems, especially to the reclamation and colonization of unused lands by the people who want land and are fit to be farmers and to do hard land-pioneering work, be they returned soldiers, native farmers, or newly arrived immigrants. ”

“ In the formation of such a settlement, several thousand convicts could be employed advantageously for a series of years—in the erection of public buildings, whether of immediate necessity or of permanent utility; in the clearing of land for gardens and for agricultural purposes suited to the soil and climate; in the formation of roads, tanks, piers, bridges, &:c. The supplying of a settlement of this kind with the necessaries of life, by means of convict labour employed in the cultivation of land within the settlement itself, should not, I conceive, be attempted. ”

“ Of all the Imperial problems in process of evolution—for solution cannot be named in this connection, since finality in Empire-building synchronizes with an era of deterioration—none can be reckoned of greater moment than that redistribution of population within the nation to which is given the name of settlement or colonization. ”

“ Whether from the shelter which is afforded to the fugitives by the immense forests which overspread the most considerable part of this country, or whether the government of this settlement be radically defective, it is a certain fact, that its European settlers [4] are constantly exposed to the most violent ravages, and the most desperate outrage. ”

“ In its Moot, the common meeting of its villagers for justice and government, a slave had no place or voice, while the last was originally represented by the lord whose land he tilled. The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in the body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill or the sacred tree where the community met from time to time to deal out its own justice and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman and tithing-man chosen for its governance. ”

“ The settlement believes that just as men deprived of comradeship by circumstances or law go back to the brutality from which they came, so any class or set of men deprived of the companionship of the whole, become correspondingly decivilized and crippled. ”

“ The awful current of human life was flowing in a great stream past the Settlement House, and those who had work were hurrying to it in a vast throng. But thousands were going down in the midst of that current, clutching at last hopes, dying literally in a land of plenty because the boon of physical toil was denied them. ”

“ The farms and homes of the devastated settlement lay a plundered wreck, and the owners complained bitterly of the dawdling and timidity of the Imperial officers, who on their side accused the settlers of unreason in refusing to remove their families, of insolence to Native allies and prisoners, of want of discipline, and of such selfish greed for compensation from Government that they would let their cattle be captured by natives rather than sell them to the commissariat. ”

“ A settlement has not only taken a pledge towards those thus injured, but it is placed where the motive-power for the fulfilment of such a pledge is constantly renewed. Propinquity is an unceasing factor in its existence. ”

“ The Mark of the primitive settlement, in which no one had an exclusive property, and which remained unimproved, uncivilised, and imperfectly subject to public authority, is described as "unsafe, full of danger; death lurks in its shades, and awaits the incautious or hostile visitant." [6] It presents the germ of those evils which attained their full development in the Marches of Mercia and Wales. ”

“ I rode through this settlement about one year after the arrival of the settlers. There were a certain number of huts, intended finally to be homesteads, in the course of being built. A few tracks formed the so-called roads. Some of the bracken was disappearing. But the ready money which the settlers, or some of them, had brought out with them had been spent, and the outlook was anything 93 but cheerful. Further, the necessary conditions for the survey of the allotments—as required by the Government—had not been fulfilled. ”

“ Even with these there are occasional attempts at escape or mutiny.
When the war with France came to an end the young settlement was likely to lapse into complete decay; but in 1855 it was converted into the present convict station. ”

“ But, however admirably gifted by nature any situation may be deemed for the purpose of forming a new settlement, many weighty considerations must press upon the mind, and much privation will be endured, before any individual will determine to quit his native land, in search of ease or affluence in a distant uninhabited world. ”

“ Projects of mighty settlement, and of sudden population, however successful in the end, are always expensive to mankind. Above a hundred thousand peasants, we are told, were yearly driven, like so many cattle, to Petersburgh, in the first attempts to replenish that settlement, and yearly perished for want of subsistence. ”

“ Thus, wherever we trace mankind abandoning its home, in ancient or modern days, we find a selfish motive, a superstitious command, a love of wealth, a lust of power, or [Pg 19] a spirit of robbery, controlling the movement. The first adventurous effort towards the realization of actual settlement on this continent, was, as we have seen, made by the persecuted Huguenots, and was, probably, an attempt rather to fly from oppression, than to establish religious freedom. The first English settlement, also, was founded more upon speculation than on any novel or exalted principle. ”

“ The ‘penal settlement’ character of these colonies is a millstone round their necks, which effectually prevents their obtaining their rights of free institutions. Look at Swan River. Depend upon it that, poor as that colony is, her composition being free from penal settlementship, she commands infinitely greater attention in Britain, than does either this, or the great sister colony, with all its wealth. ”

“ Our lack of information is most probably due to the simple reason that the settlement, like all settlements of a new country, was a very gradual one, a few men coming over in the first instance for the purpose of trade either with Britons or Romans, or coming from the over-populated North to settle in a country which the paucity of archæological remains shows to have been thinly occupied. ”

“ They have not driven out, slain, or absolutely enslaved the anterior occupants, or divided off the soil among groups of their own cultivating families.... Their system of settlement was rather that of the Gothic tribes after their invasion of the Danubian provinces of the Roman empire, who, according to Finlay, ‘never formed the bulk of the population in the lands which they occupied, but were only lords of the soil, principally occupied in war and hunting.’ In a Rajput State of the best preserved original type, we still find all the territory ... ”

“ It would seem that the moral effect, upon each wave of rude invaders, of the more cultured, settled tribes whom they were destined to conquer, was enormous. Settlement, increased prosperity, expansion and conquest demanded some form of administration more elaborate than that which a general, a high-priest, and a council of elders could provide. ”

“ All settlement is necessarily a leap in the dark, but, so far as a proposal can be judged before it is put into practice, the present scheme offers good chances of success. There seems little doubt that it will receive full justice. ”

“ Unfortunately for them, though much to the advantage of the government, which acquired thereby a valuable tract of country for white settlement, they removed, in 1857, to their present place of abode. The change has proved highly detrimental to their interests and prospects. Their new reservation, the greater part poor in soil and seriously affected by wet seasons and frequent frosts, has never yielded them more than a meagre subsistence. ”

“ Some write for their former neighbours or the residue of their families, others push back to the old country, to conduct them out. Numbers who come to try their hands at a new settlement are wholly unfit for any place in this world, 151 new or old, unless it be to supply the requisite quota of evil, which in this imperfect state, adheres to all places. ”

“ Peaceful settlements—without the slightest provocation given, or even alleged to have been given—were attacked by savage fanatics, the women outraged, infants and young children ruthlessly slaughtered, the homesteads, created out of the wilderness by the labour of half a lifetime, given to the flames, implements and materials destroyed, the cattle and horses driven off as plunder. ”

“ But differ as they might in form of dress, in shape of weapons, in sense of subordination, these thousand settlers possessed in common a savage, half-fiendish itching for the meeting face to face with their long-dreaded foe, for a glimpse of the whilom Tory neighbor over the sight of their old familiar flint-locks; for these uncouth men, a short time since peaceful, phlegmatic farmers, dwelling content upon the little oases they had wrought out of the wilderness, are now transformed into little else than savages, and are longing with all their souls for the approaching fray. ”

“ A number of these land dealers said to the writer:
Well, it is up to the settler himself, either to succeed or to fail. If he fails, he has himself alone to blame, and he must give place to the settler who is able to succeed. There is no room for weaklings on my land or anywhere else in this world.
The results which follow in the wake of such land-settlement policies are described in the following extract from the letter of a county agent. He writes from a locality where many of the settlers are immigrants:
In some parts of this country ... ”

“ Still some of the finest portions of the state are yet unpenetrated—luxuriant wildernesses left in a state of nature; but these are being rapidly cleared, and there is room enough for another million of workers and a promising field for their speculations.{112} Let the settlers flock in as fast as they may, provided they come with an adequate supply of patience, industry, and discrimination in their choice of a settlement, a prosperous career may be assured to them ”