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 paradox, that to make Quebec British, it must be prevented from becoming English.If in later years the solidarity and aloofness of the French-Canadian people were sometimes to prove inconvenient to British interests, it was always to be remembered that this situation was due in great part to the deliberate action of Great Britain in strengthening French-Canadian institutions as a means of advancing what she considered her own interests in America."The views of the British Government in respect to the political uses to which it means to make Canada subservient," Marriott had truly declared, "must direct the spirit of any code of laws."The Quebec Act multiplied the area of the colony sevenfold by the restoration of all Labrador on the east and the region west as far as the Ohio and the Mississippi and north to the Hudson's Bay Company's territory.It restored the old French civil law but continued the milder English criminal law already in operation.
