cking to think of, this Country must, to the
end of Time, be peopled by the Canadian race."

To bind the Canadians firmly to England, Carleton proposed to work
chiefly through their old leaders, the seigneurs and the clergy. He
would restore to the people their old system of laws, both civil and
criminal. He would confirm the seigneurs in their feudal dues and
fines, which the habitants were growing slack in paying now that the
old penalties were not enforced, and he would give them honors and
emoluments such as they had before enjoyed as officers in regular or
militia regiments. The Roman Catholic clergy were already, in fact,
confirmed in their right to tithe and toll; and, without objection
from the Governor, Bishop Briand, elected by the chapter in Quebec and
consecrated in Paris, once more assumed control over the flock.

Carleton's proposals did not pass unquestioned. His own chief legal
adviser, Francis Maseres, was a sturdy adherent of the older policy,
though he agreed that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an
Assembly and suggested some well-considered compromise between the old
laws and the new. The Advocate General of England, James Marriott, urged
the same course. The policy of 1768, he contended eleven years later,
had already succeeded in great measure. The assimilation of government
had been effected; an assimilation of manners would follow. The
excessive military spirit of the inhabitants had begun to dwindle, as
England's 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