Description

You know particulars, I believe,
no living man but myself could
have laid open to you of bygone
misrule and peculation, from
which the proprietors and their
interests have suffered; you know
the inane stupidity of the cry for
'free land', and you know the
parties, not tenants, who have
most loudly, and for their own
private sinister ends, raised and
re-echoed it, ad nauseam.
This bitter tirade from Robert Bruce
Stewart to Lieutenant Governor
W. F. C. Robinson, written at the close
of 1873, came near the end of a long
struggle. The largest resident proprietor
on Prince Edward Island, owning
more than 67,000 acres, Robert Bruce
was forced to sell the majority of his
land in 1875 to the Prince Edward
Island government. He fought against
this moment nearly all his life. He had
struggled against vast odds, against
reality itself, hoping to keep alive the
Stewart vision inherited from his father.
This dream encompassed hopes for a
large, landed proprietorship of great
prestige and wealth. It proved an Old
World dream, inappropriately transplanted
in a New World and a new age.