NEW ORGANIZATION OF THE LAND-OFFICE.
IN the preceeding book we have disclosed the history
and practice of the land office under the proprietary
government, intermixing therewith such occasional sketches of the
general history of the province as seemed necessary to
convey a full and clear knowledge of the rise, progress, and
nature of this establishment, the operations of which
blended themselves with public affairs of every kind; for, it is
hardly necessary to observe that the province was originally
nothing but a great land market, in which the institutions of
civil government, and the advancement of social and political
objects, were of necessity to be preceded by the encrease of
a population beginning with a handful of adventurers; that
this encrease depended principally on the encouragement held
out to emigrants, and the modes and degrees of that
encouragement on the sole will of an individual. The conditions
of plantation, therefore, which opened this market, and
proposed the inducements to emigration are the foundations not
merely of a particular system or branch of public affairs,
but of the province itself and all its establishments; and, in
this view of the matter, I found it both proper and necessary
to take a glance at their more general results while I
displayed their effects in relation to the particular subject which I
had undertaken to explain. It remains now to treat of land
affairs under a different aspect and different circumstances:
the land office is now a regular governmental establishment,
holding a place among others; connected with some of them,
and branching in common with all, from the constitution and
