This was our case, and our motive for emigrating to one of the British colonies can be summed up in a few words.

The emigrant’s hope of bettering his condition, and securing a sufficient competence to support his family, to free himself from the slighting remarks too often hurled at the poor gentleman by the practical people of the world, which is always galling to a proud man, but doubly so when he knows that the want of wealth constitues the sole difference between him and the more favoured offspring of the same parent stock.

In 1830 the tide of emigration flowed westward, and Canada became the great landmark for the rich in hope and poor in purse.  Public newspapers and private letters teemed with the almost fabulous advantages to be derived from a settlement in this highly favoured region.  Men, who had been doubtful of supporting their families in comfort at home, thought that they had only to land in Canada to realize a fortune.  The infection became general.  Thousands and tens of thousands from the middle ranks of British society, for the space of three or four years, landed upon these shores.  A large majority of these emigrants were officers of the army and navy, with their families:  a class perfectly unfitted, by their previous habits and standing in society, for contending with the stern realities of emigrant life in the backwoods.  A class formed mainly from the younger scions of great families, naturally proud, and not only accustomed to command, but to recieve implicit obedience from the people under them, are not men adapted to the hard toil of the woodman’s life.  Nor will such persons submit cheerfully to the saucy familiarity of servants, who, republicans at heart, think themselves quite as good as their employers.

Too many of these brave and honest men took up their grants of wild land in remote and unfavourable localities, far from churches, schools, and markets, and fell an easy prey to the land speculators that swarmed in every rising village on the boarders of civilization.

It was to warn such settlers as these last mentioned, not to take up grants and pitch their tents in the wilderness, and by so doing reduce themselves and their families to hopeless poverty, that my work “Roughing it in the Bush” was written.

I gave the experience of the first seven years we passed in the woods, attempting to clear a bush farm, as a warning to others, and the number of persons who have since told me, that my book “told the history” of their own life in the woods, ought to be the best proof to every candid mind that I spoke the truth.  It it not by such feeble instruments as the above that Providence works when it seeks to reclaim the waste places of the earth, and make them subservient to the wants and happiness of its creatures.  The great Father of the souls and bodies of men knows the arm which wholesome labour from the infancy has made strong, the nerves that have become iron by patient endurance, and He chooses such to send forth into the forest to hew out the rough paths for the advance of civilization.