door to Canada was open. Great stores of ammunition and a hundred
and twenty guns, which in due course were used against the
British at Boston, fell into American hands.

About Canada Washington was ill-informed. He thought of the
Canadians as if they were Virginians or New Yorkers. They had
been recently conquered by Britain; their new king was a tyrant;
they would desire liberty and would welcome an American army. So
reasoned Washington, but without knowledge. The Canadians were a
conquered people, but they had found the British king no tyrant
and they had experienced the paradox of being freer under the
conqueror than they had been under their own sovereign. The last
days of French rule in Canada were disgraced by corruption and
tyranny almost unbelievable. The Canadian peasant had been
cruelly robbed and he had conceived for his French rulers a
dislike which appears still in his attitude towards the
motherland of France. For his new British master he had assuredly
no love, but he was no longer dragged off to war and his property
was not plundered. He was free, too, to speak his mind. During
the first twenty years after the British conquest of Canada the
Canadian French matured indeed an assertive liberty not even
dreamed of during the previous century and a half of French rule.

The British tyranny which Washington pictured in Canada was thus
not very real. He underestimated, too, the antagonism between the
Roman Catholics of Canada and the Protestants of the English
colonies. The Congress at Philadelphia in denouncing the Quebec
Act had accused the Catholic Church of bigotry, persecution,
murder, and rebellion. This was no very tactful appeal for
sympathy to the sons of that France which was still the eldest