How far any credit is to be given to this assertion will be left to your Lordship to determine after itis made to appear how much has been the real original expence of these Charters, for as to the Improvement of the Lands as the greatest part of those now Petition4 for are still uncultivated, certainly no claims can be made for money laid out on them. From the best informations I have been able to obtain from the Claimants themselves, there appears to have been a sum of money paid down on the taking out of the charter which varies much (occasioned as I suppose from the Situation of the Lands) and that the whole amount of these sums have

602 é CONTROVERSY RESPECTING THE

been from Twenty to forty Pounds New York Currency for each Township so that at an average, Thirty Pounds (about 17! sterling) may be deemed the real expence of a Township which was to include a Tract of Ground six Miles square, but very often took in a great deal more; it is very obvious that on this Plan,-the Expences of a Township being divided among sixty or seventy persons (according to the lists on the back of the Charters) must be very inconsiderable and not amount to a greater sum than about six shillings for each Proprietor, and if matters had been conducted Without Fraud, no Complaint would have been made at this day; But Governor Wentworth now imposed on by those Lists and the Parties engaged in taking out a number of Townships together have bought and sold, conveyed and reconveyed so often (without the least attention to any Settlement which should have been the principal concern) that after some hours examination of some of the Charters we have not been able to trace the Title through a number of intricate Deeds notwithstanding the charters were granted so lately and the Lands still uncultivated, so that the Council were under the necessity at last of giving it as their opinion to me that the Grants should be made to particular persons in each Charter, upon their entering into a Bond with good and sufticient seeurity to reconvey to the remainder of the Proprietors whom we could not at that time discover, the shares they were entitled to by the Charter; these shares consisting each of 350 acres were publicly sold here and in all the neighbouring Provinces for thirty shillings, and many persons who appeared before the Council to prove their Rights could shew no better Title than under such Deeds, which sum was so far from being an adequate consideration for the Land that it only served to sett the Fraud in a@ stronger light.