taine-Baldwin ministries and with the great political controversy during the administration of Sir Charles Metcalfe.

The author desires to express his sincere thanks for the very valuable assistance and useful suggestions received from Dr. James Bain, Librarian of the Toronto Public Library, and from Mr. Charles Gould, Librarian of McGill University. The author owes much also to the kindness of Dr. A. G. Doughty, C.M.G., Archivist of the Dominion Government.

McGill University,

July 31st, 1906.

STEPHEN LEACOCK.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

ROM the time of the surrender of Canada by

FRO

the capitulation of Vaudreuil at Montreal in 1760, the government of the province presented an unsolved problem, whose difficulties finally culminated in the outbreak of 1837. In the beginning the country was entirely French, an appanage of the British Crown by right of conquest. Its population, some seventy thousand in number, thinly spread along the valley of the St. Lawrence, was almost entirely an agricultural peasantry. Ignorant and illiterate as they were, they cherished towards their Church an unfailing devotion, while a stubborn pride of nationality remained with them as a heritage from the great country from which they had sprung. Of initial loyalty to the British Crown there could be no question. Still less could there be any question of self-government. Military rule was established as a necessity of the situation. Even when, in 1764, a year after the final treaty of cession, the purely military rule was superseded by the institution of an executive council, this body consisted merely of a group of officials appointed by the governor of the province. Nor is it to be said that this form of government was of itself an injustice. The

inhabitants of French Canada had known nothing of political rights1 or representative institutions. Only in rare cases had offices, favour, or promotion been bestowed upon native Canadians. Even the Church itself, in spite of its democratic tradition in favour of capacity and zeal, had withheld all superior offices from the children of the humble peasantry of the St. Lawrence. To have instituted among such a people a system of democratic self-government on the morrow of the conquest, could only have ended in chaos and disaster.

The government thus established by royal proclamation was systematized and consolidated by the British parliament through the Quebec Act of 1774.2 This statute established in Canada a province of magnificent extent. Northward it extended to the Hudson Bay Territory; on the south it bordered New England, New York, Pennsylvania and the Ohio; westward it reached to where all trace of civilization ended with the Mississippi River. The Ohio valley was already dotted here and there in its forests and open meadow lands with the cabins of adventurous settlers. Of the rest of Canada the valley of the St. Lawrence was the only occupied part. Thither had come already, since the conquest, a few British immigrants, for the most part small traders3 1 Kingsford, History of Canada, Vol. IX., pp. 190 et seq.

14 Geo. III., c. 83.

3 See V. Coffin, The Province of Quebec and the Early American Revolution (1896), Ch. II. pp. 303 et seq.