Читать книгу Highways of Canadian Literature онлайн

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In 1763 other groups of New Englanders, with their characteristic ideals, came to Nova Scotia. In 1783, 1785 and 1786, following the War of American Independence, thirty thousand United Empire Loyalists emigrated from the Atlantic States and settled in Nova Scotia; ten thousand settled in Lower Canada (Quebec); and twenty thousand settled in the district which later became the Province of Ontario. So that, in a period of twenty-five years, about one hundred thousand émigrés from the United States coast had become permanent residents of the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas. That is to say, the bases of Canadian civilization and culture, following the Fall of Montreal and beginning with the first Puritan Migration, were definitively the social, political, intellectual, and literary ideals of New England.

In 1749 there was a migration of English from the Motherland to Halifax. They founded the City of Halifax. These English émigrés, however, found conditions of life at Halifax so forbidding by way of hardships and so socially unsettling that many of them removed to Boston and to New York. Subsequently their descendants came from New England and New York to Halifax. It was they, not their fathers, who really founded the City of Halifax and did most for the development of commerce and culture in that community. Later, when Halifax became a British Military and Naval Station, it took on an English ‘air.’ But essentially its culture and commerce were of New England Puritan origin.