long trial. From the very beginning the men on the spot, the soldier Governors of Canada, urged an entirely contrary policy on the Home Government, and the pressure of events soon brought His Majesty's Ministers to concur.

As the first civil Governor of Canada, the British authorities chose General Murray, one of Wolfe's ablest lieutenants, who since 1760 had served as military Governor of the Quebec district. He was to be aided in his task by a council composed of the Lieutenant Governors of Montreal and Three Rivers, the Chief Justice, the head of the customs, and eight citizens to be named by the Governor from "the most considerable of the persons of property" in the province.

The new Governor was a blunt, soldierly man, upright and just according to his lights, but deeply influenced by his military and aristocratic leanings. Statesmen thousands of miles away might plan to encourage English settlers and English political ways and to put down all that was French. To the man on the spot English settlers meant "the four hundred and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders" who had come in the wake of the army from New England and New York, with no proper respect for their betters, and vulgarly and annoyingly insistent upon what they claimed to be their rights. The French might be alien in speech and creed, but at least the seigneurs and the higher clergy were gentlemen, with a due respect for authority, the King's and their own, and the habitants were docile, the best of soldier stuff. "Little, very little," Murray wrote in 1764 to the Lords of Trade, "will content the New Subjects, but nothing will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here, but the expulsion of the Canadians, who are perhaps the bravest and best race upon the Globe, a Race, who cou'd they be indulged with a few priviledges wch the Laws of England deny to Roman Catholicks at home, wou'd soon get the better of every National Antipathy to their Conquerors and become the most faithful and most useful set of Men in this American Empire."*

Certainly there was much in the immediate situation to justify Murray's attitude. It was preposterous to set up a legislature in which only the four hundred Protestants might sit and from which the seventy thousand Catholics would be barred. It would have been difficult in any case to change suddenly the system of laws governing the most intimate transactions of everyday life. But when, as happened, the Administration was entrusted in large part to newly created justices of the peace, men with "little French and less honour," "to whom it is only possible to speak with guineas in one's hand," the change became flatly impossible. Such an alteration, if still insisted upon, must come more slowly than the impatient traders in Montreal and Quebec desired.

The British Government, however, was not yet ready to abandon its policy. The Quebec traders petitioned for Murray's recall, alleging that the measures required to encourage settlement had not been adopted, that the Governor was encouraging factions by his partiality to the French, that he treated the traders with "a Rage and Rudeness of Language and Demeanor" and—a fair thrust in return for his reference to them as "the most immoral collection of men I ever knew"—as "discountenancing the Protestant Religion by almost a Total Neglect of Attendance upon the Service of the Church." When the London business correspondents of the traders backed up this petition, the Government gave heed. In 1766 Murray was recalled to England and, though he was acquitted of the charges against him, he did not return to his post in Canada.

The triumph of the English merchants was short. They had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. General Guy Carleton, Murray's successor and brother officer under Wolfe, was an even abler man, and he was still less in sympathy with democracy of the New England pattern. Moreover, a new factor had come in to reenforce the soldier's instinctive preference for gentlemen over shopkeepers. The first rumblings of the American Revolution had reached Quebec. It was no time, in Carleton's view, to set up another sucking republic. Rather, he believed, the utmost should be made of the opportunity Canada afforded as a barrier against the advance of democracy, a curb upon colonial insolence. The need of cultivating the new subjects was the greater, Carleton contended, because the plan of settlement by Englishmen gave no sign of succeeding: "barring a Catastrophe shocking to think of, this Country must, to the end of Time, be peopled by the Canadian race."

To bind the Canadians firmly to England, Carleton proposed to work chiefly through their old leaders, the seigneurs and the clergy. He would restore to the people their old system of laws, both civil and criminal. He would confirm the seigneurs in their feudal dues and fines, which the habitants were growing slack in paying now that the old penalties were not enforced, and he would give them honors and emoluments such as they had before enjoyed as officers in regular or militia regiments. The Roman Catholic clergy were already, in fact, confirmed in their right to tithe and toll; and, without objection from the Governor, Bishop Briand, elected by the chapter in Quebec and consecrated in Paris, once more assumed control over the flock.

Carleton's proposals did not pass unquestioned. His own chief legal adviser, Francis Maseres, was a sturdy adherent of the older policy, though he agreed that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an Assembly and suggested some well-considered compromise between the old laws and the new. The Advocate General of England, James Marriott, urged the same course. The policy of 1768, he contended eleven years later, had already succeeded in great measure. The assimilation of government had been effected; an assimilation of manners would follow. The excessive military spirit of the inhabitants had begun to dwindle, as England's interest required. The back settlements of New York and Canada were fast being joined. Two or three thousand men of British stock, many of them men of substance, had gone to the new colony; warehouses and foundries were being built; and many of the principal seigneuries had passed into English hands. All that was needed, he concluded, was persistence along the old path. The same view was of course strenuously urged by the English merchants in the colony, who continued to demand, down to the very eve of the Revolution, an elective Assembly and other rights of freeborn Britons.

Carleton carried the day. His advice, tendered at close range during four years' absentee residence in London, from 1770 to 1774, fell in with the mood of Lord North's Government. The measure in which the new policy was embodied, the famous Quebec Act of 1774, was essentially a part of the ministerial programme for strengthening British power to cope with the resistance then rising to rebellious heights in the old colonies. Though not, as was long believed, designed in retaliation for the Boston disturbances, it is clear that its framers had Massachusetts in mind when deciding on their policy for Quebec. The main purpose of the Act, the motive which turned the scale against the old Anglicizing policy, was to attach the leaders of French-Canadian opinion firmly to the British Crown, and thus not only to prevent Canada itself from becoming infected with democratic contagion or turning in a crisis toward France, but to ensure, if the worst came to the worst, a military base in that northland whose terrors had in old days kept the seaboard colonies circumspectly loyal. Ministers in London had been driven by events to accept Carleton's