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The Edinburgh Scotsman gives its readers some facts relative to the Province of New Brunswick, which show a well intended, but not altogether successful effort to get at the truth. While one cannot, in reading the short article – it would make about three quarters of a column of the Gleaner – point out anything which is incorrect, yet the article as a whole gives a wrong impression of the country. It tells us that: -
On the eastern side of the Province and in the centre of the country where the soil is poor, the land is covered with forests of spruce and pine, the wood of which in the shape of deals is exported in large quantities to Liverpool. On the St. John and its tributaries the soil rests on the upper silurian formations, and is remarkably fertile, about 1,000,000 acres of it being well adapted for settlement. All this land is at present covered with splendid virgin forests, composed chiefly of black birch, maple, beech, ash, elm, and other hard woods, in which, though the sound of the woodman’s axe is not altogether unfamiliar, little impression has yet been made by the hand of man. The woods, however, have suffered greatly from “blow-downs,” and have been repeatedly ravaged by fire-there being as yet no supervision of the forests worthy of the name, while in the science or forestry no instruction is given in any Government institution.
This is an attempt at accuracy which really misleads. The reader is left to infer, from an ambiguous sentence, that there is no good land in the eastern or centre of the province, and that in the whole province there is only 1,000,000 acers of good land, and this is on the upper St. John, much of it having been ravaged by fire. Then we have a reference to the Indians, who are said to be here in “a considerable number,” when as everyone knows the Indian population of the province is so small as not to be worth mentioning. Ten lines in the paragraph are devoted to the few wretched fragments of the aboriginal tribes, and five lines to the 40,000 French inhabitants. Then we are informed that a branch of railway “runs alongside the St. John river far into the forest region.” This is writing up the province with a vengeance. The tenor of the short article is favorable; but as we have said, it gives a wrong idea of the country, which the reader would conclude consisted of 17,000,000 acres of land, of which only 1,000,000 were fit for settlement and was inhabited chiefly by Indians and descendants of the old French settlers.