and when the Roman Catholic Church and the British Government
combined for years on a single object, it was little wonder they
succeeded. Nelson's victory at Trafalgar was celebrated by a Te
Deum in the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Quebec. In fact, as Craig
elsewhere noted, the habitants were becoming rather a new and
distinct nationality, a nation canadienne. They ceased to be
French; they declined to become English; and sheltered under
their "Sacred Charter"* they became Canadians first and last.

* "It cannot be sufficiently inculcated ON THE PART OF GOVERNMENT
that the Quebec Act is a Sacred Charter, granted by the King in
Parliament to the Canadians as a Security for their Religion,
Laws, and Property." Governor Sir Frederick Haldimand to Lord
George Germaine, Oct. 25, 1780.


The governors were not alone in this hostility to the mass of the
people. There had grown up in the colony a little clique of
officeholders, of whom Jonathan Sewell, the Loyalist Attorney
General, and later Chief Justice, was the chief, full of racial
and class prejudice, and in some cases greedy for personal gain.
Sewell declared it "indispensably necessary to overwhelm and sink
the Canadian population by English Protestants," and was even
ready to run the risk of bringing in Americans to effect this
end. Of the non-official English, some were strongly opposed to
the pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; but others, and
especially the merchants, with their organ the Quebec "Mercury",
were loud in their denunciations of the French who were
unprogressive and who as landowners were incidentally trying to
throw the burden of taxation chiefly on the traders.