But if fewer came in across the border, many more sailed from
across the seas. Not again until the twentieth century were the
northern provinces to receive so large a share of British
emigrants as came across in the twenties and thirties. Swarms
were preparing to leave the overcrowded British hives. Corn laws
and poor laws and famine, power-driven looms that starved the
cottage weaver, peace that threw an army on a crowded and callous
labor market, landlords who rack-rented the Connaughtman's last
potato or cleared Highland glens of folks to make way for sheep,
rulers who persisted in denying the masses any voice in their own
government--all these combined to drive men forth in tens of
thousands. Australia was still a land of convict settlements and
did not attract free men. To most the United States was the land
of promise. Yet, thanks to state aid, private philanthropy,
landlords' urging and cheap fares on the ships that came to St.
John and Quebec for timber, Canada and the provinces by the sea
received a notable share. In the quarter of a century following
the peace with Napoleon, British North America received more
British emigrants than the United States and the Australian
colonies together, though many were merely birds of passage.

The country west of the Great Lakes did not share in this flood
of settlement, except for one tragic interlude. Lord Selkirk, a
Scotchman of large sympathy and vision, convinced that emigration
was the cure for the hopeless misery he saw around him, acquired
a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company, and sought to
plant colonies in a vast estate granted from its domains. Between
1811 and 1815 he sent out to Hudson Bay, and thence to the Red
River, two or three hundred crofters from the Highlands and the