either patriotic or genealogical; and few attempts have
been made to tell their story in the cold light of
impartial history, or to estimate the results which have
flowed from their migration. Yet such an attempt is worth
while making--an attempt to do the United Empire Loyalists
the honour of painting them as they were, and of describing
the profound and far-reaching influences which they
exerted on the history of both Canada and the United
States.

In the history of the United States the exodus of the
Loyalists is an event comparable only to the expulsion
of the Huguenots from France after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes. The Loyalists, whatever their social
status (and they were not all aristocrats), represented
the conservative and moderate element in the revolting
states; and their removal, whether by banishment or
disfranchisement, meant the elimination of a very wholesome
element in the body politic. To this were due in part no
doubt many of the early errors of the republic in finance,
diplomacy, and politics. At the same time it was a
circumstance which must have hastened by many years the
triumph of democracy. In the tenure of land, for example,
the emigration produced a revolution. The confiscated
estates of the great Tory landowners were in most cases
cut up into small lots and sold to the common people;
and thus the process of levelling and making more democratic
the whole social structure was accelerated.

On the Canadian body politic the impress of the Loyalist