her slight, upright figure--erect as any soldier's to
her dying day--almost matched her husband's stalwart form
in dignity of carriage.

The Quebec Act of 1774--the Magna Charta of the
French-Canadian race--finally passed the House of Lords
on the 18th of June. The general idea of the Act was to
reverse the unsuccessful policy of ultimate assimilation
with the other American colonies by making Canada a
distinctly French-Canadian province. The Maritime Provinces,
with a population of some thirty thousand, were to be as
English as they chose. But a greatly enlarged Quebec,
with a population of ninety thousand, and stretching far
into the unsettled West, was to remain equally
French-Canadian; though the rights of what it was then
thought would be a perpetual English-speaking minority
were to be safeguarded in every reasonable way. The whole
country between the American colonies and the domains of
the Hudson's Bay Company was included in this new Quebec,
which comprised the southern half of what is now the
Newfoundland Labrador, practically the whole of the modern
provinces of Quebec and Ontario, and all the western
lands between the Ohio and the Great Lakes as far as the
Mississippi, that is, the modern American states of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

The Act gave Canada the English criminal code. It recognized
most of the French civil law, including the seigneurial
tenure of land. Roman Catholics were given 'the free
Exercise' of their religion, 'subject to the King's