Ir cannot fail to be of interest to British readers to trace the growth, and to speculate upon the prospects, of colonies the bulk of whose population are of British extraction, and which promise to be the favoured recipients of a large portion of the industry and enterprise of the most valuable classes of our own fellowcountrymen, who are daily leaving the land of their birth in search of a wider field and a better reward for their labour. We propose, therefore, to review the progress which our North American colonies have made during the past ten or twenty years in population, in commerce, and in agriculture; and, whilst doing so, we believe we shall be enabled to show that, vast and rapid as has been the growth of the neighbouring "United States" in everything which can conduce to the greatness, the wealth, and the social happiness and worth of a people, the growth of British America, within the past few years, at all events, has been even more rapid, and almost wonderful. Within the memory of the comparatively young amongst our readers, the population of British America was chiefly an alien one, composed of the French "residents of Lower Canada, chiefly located in the city of Quebec, and in the districts bordering upon the Gulf of St Lawrence, with a sprinkling of settlers from this country engaged in the lumber trade of New Brunswick, and the

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fisheries of Newfoundland and the Bay of Fundy. Upper Canada was an almost unexplored territory, into which only the adventurous trapper penetrated during the hunting season, returning at the fall to the Lower province to dispose of his peltries, and to locate himself for the winter months beyond the reach of attack from the Red Indians, whose cunning and revenge he had to dread in return for his trespasses upon their forests and prairies. Whilst, as late as 1831, the population of Lower Canada was 511,922 souls, that of Upper Canada numbered only, in 1830, 210,437 souls, of which the bulk were located in Montreal and along the banks of the St Lawrence to the mouth of Lake Ontario. The agricultural portion of this population were chiefly composed of small holders of partially cleared land on the lower banks of the Ottawa River-energetic, but humble men, living in log-huts, and cultivating just as much land as would subsist them, aided by the game won by their rifles during the season when their lumbering operations could be pursued. A few insignificant villages, which have since grown into thriving towns, supplied stores, at which the surplus products of their industry could be exchanged for clothing, and the few articles of comfort and necessity required by Europeans embarked in such a life of perhaps unaccustomed toil and occasional privation, and to

A