people made it unwise, if not impossible, to do so. When, for
example, jury trial was broached, the peasants professed to be
quite unable to understand why the English should prefer to have
matters of law decided by tailors and shoemakers rather than by a
judge; and as for a legislature, they frankly confessed that
assemblies "had drawn upon other colonies so much distress, and
had occasioned so much riot and bloodshed, that they had hoped
never to have one."

The Act of 1774 relieved the situation by restoring French law in
civil affairs, abolishing jury trial except in criminal cases,
rescinding the grant of representative government, and confirming
the Catholic clergy in the rights and privileges which they hard
enjoyed under the old regime. This would have aroused no great
amount of feeling among New Englanders and Virginians if the new
arrangements had been confined to the bounds of the original
province. But they were not so restricted. On the contrary, the
new province was made to include the great region between the
Alleghanies and the Mississippi, southward to the Ohio; and it
was freely charged that a principal object of the English
Government was to sever the West from the shore colonies and
permanently link it with the St. Lawrence Valley rather than with
the Atlantic slope.

At all events, the Quebec Act marked the beginning of civil
government in the great Northwest. On November 9, 1775, Henry
Hamilton appeared as Lieutenant-Governor at the new capital,
Detroit. Already the "shot heard round the world" had been fired
by the farmers at Lexington; and Hamilton had been obliged to
thread his way through General Montgomery's lines about Montreal