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."*

* This quotation and those following in this chapter are from
official documents most conveniently assembled in Shorn and
Doughty, "Documents relating to the Constitutional History of
Canada, 1759-1791", and Doughty and McArthur, "Documents relating
to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1791-1818".


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