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 to newly created justices of the peace, men
with "little French and less honour," "to whom it is only possible to
speak with guineas in one's hand," the change became flatly impossible.
Such an alteration, if still insisted upon, must come more slowly than
the impatient traders in Montreal and Quebec desired.

The British Government, however, was not yet ready to abandon its
policy. The Quebec traders petitioned for Murray's recall, alleging that
the measures required to encourage settlement had not been adopted, that
the Governor was encouraging factions by his partiality to the French,
that he treated the traders with "a Rage and Rudeness of Language and
Demeanor" and--a fair thrust in return for his reference to them as "the
most immoral collection of men I ever knew"--as "discountenancing the
Protestant Religion by almost a Total Neglect of Attendance upon the
Service of the Church." When the London business correspondents of
the traders backed up this petition, the Government gave heed. In 1766
Murray was recalled to England and, though he was acquitted of the
charges against him, he did not return to his post in Canada.

The triumph of the English merchants was short. They had jumped from the
frying pan into the fire. General Guy Carleton, Murray's successor and
brother officer under Wolfe, was an even abler man, and he was still
less in sympathy with democracy of the New England pattern. Moreover, a
new factor had come in to reenforce the soldier's instinctive preference
for gentlemen over shopkeepers. The first rumblings of the American
Revolution had reached Quebec. It was no time, in Carleton's view, to
set up another sucking republic. Rather, he believed, the utmost should
be made of the opportunity Canada afforded as a barrier against the
advance of democracy, a curb upon colonial insolence. The need of
cultivating the new subjects was the greater, Carleton contended,
because the plan of settlement by Englishmen gave no sign of succeeding:
"barring a Catastrophe sho