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