Loyalists

Light Artillery and Heavy Artillery are two categories that keep the august delegates at Geneva awake nights. The Canadian Army boasts still another subdivision: Medium Artillery. In St. John, N. B. last week a brigade of Medium Artillery was out in the bright May sunshine banging away a 21-gun feu de joie in honor of a great occasion: St. John's 150th Loyalist Day.

U. S. citizens are apt to forget that even at the end of the Revolutionary War nearly one-third of the population of the 13 States was still loyal to King & Country and, despite the provisions of the Treaty of Paris, suffered a white pogrom at the hands of their exultant Whig neighbors. On May 11, 1783, following arrangements between British General Carleton in New-York and the Governor of Nova Scotia, the "Spring Fleet" carrying refugees from New York dropped anchor at the mouth of the St. John River. Kept aboard their ships by high seas and driving rain, they did not land for a week. All summer long the Spring Fleet ferried back & forth until some 20,000 men, women and children had been transported. They were not the ordinary type of emigrant. The Spring Fleet carried De Peysters, Ludlows, Richards and Billopps of New York, Uphams and Coffins of Boston, Sayres and Pomfrets from Connecticut, Saunderses from Virginia and Lieut. Colonel Isaac Allen of the New Jersey Volunteers. Many of the U. S. refugees did not stay, moved southwest to the warmer, more fertile plains of Ontario, but those that did stay not only settled New Brunswick but won it separate government.

To honor the Loyalists last week came Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett, himself a descendant of the refugees of 1783, and the Lieut.-Governor of the Province. Besides the third New Brunswick Medium Brigade, oldest artillery organization in the British Dominions, the New Brunswick Dragoons paraded in their new scarlet tunics followed by white-capped bluejackets from the Canadian destroyers Saguenay and Champlain.

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