Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/479

Rh during the early days of British colonization. With the exception of three small reservations, intended for county towns, the island was divided into sixty-seven lots or townships of 20,000 acres. In one day sixty-five of these lots were disposed of by lottery before the Board of Trade and Plantations in London! The grants issued to the various allottees contained these among other conditions:

1. That the grantee of each township should place on the same, within ten years from the date of the grant, one person for every 200 acres, the settlers to be foreign Protestants, or persons who had resided in British America for two years previous to 1767.

2. That such portions of the land, where one third of the acreage was not so settled within four years of the date of the grants, should be forfeited.

3. That payment of quit-rent, varying from two to six shillings sterling per 100 acres, should be made by the allottees at the expiration of five years, payable annually on one half the grant; and, five years after that, payable on the whole.

On these terms the original proprietors took possession, and in the following year petitioned the British Government that the island might be given a separate government. To defray its expenses they proposed that a moiety of quit-rents due in five years should become payable in two—during May, 1769—payment of the remaining half to be postponed for twenty years. Trusting to the good faith and responsibility of the proprietors, a local government was accordingly established. This trust was disappointed. The quit-rents were not paid as agreed, and ten years after the grants had been conveyed the conditions of settlement had been complied with in but ten townships of the sixty-five. Nine others were settled in part, and all the remainder neglected. In no case were the settlers the foreign Protestants bargained for.

As time passed, the proprietors continued their disrespect for the conditions of tenure. The Legislature of the island constantly directed the attention of the Government at Westminster to the facts, and urged the escheat of the grants; holding, perhaps not very warrantably, that after escheat the tenants would enjoy their lands on better terms. Indulgence, however, was from time to time sought and received by the proprietors. Nevertheless, in 1802, the Colonial Secretary, in a dispatch to the governor of the island, ordered that such lands as were held by proprietors who had failed to perform their conditions of grant be escheated. Accordingly, the Legislature passed an act, the result of which would have been to revest in the crown nearly every acre in the colony. What became of this law is a mystery; it was sent from Charlottetown, the colonial capital, to London, for the royal allowance, and was never afterward heard of. In this same year (1802), the arrears of quit-rents had accumulated to £60,000; and the British Government, wishing to encourage the