a Jesuit priest
and a future archbishop, failed to achieve-more by diplomacy than their
generals had done by the sword. The Canadians seemed, content enough to
wear the British yoke. In the spring, when a British fleet arrived with
reenforcements, the American troops retired in haste and, before the
Declaration of Independence had been proclaimed, Canada was free from
the last of its ten thousand invaders.

The expedition had put Carleton's policy to the test. On the whole it
stood the strain. The seigneurs had rallied to the Government which had
restored their rights, and the clergy had called on the people to stand
fast by the King. So far all went as Carleton had hoped: "The Noblesse,
Clergy, and greater part of the Bourgeoisie," he wrote, "have given
Government every Assistance in their Power." But the habitants refused
to follow their appointed leaders with the old docility, and some even
mobbed the seigneurs who tried to enroll them. Ten years of freedom had
worked a democratic change in them, and they were much less enthusiastic
than their betters about the restoration of seigneurial privileges.
Carleton, like many another, had held as public opinion what were merely
the opinions of those whom he met at dinner. "These people had been
governed with too loose a rein for many years," he now wrote to
Burgoyne, "and had imbibed too much of the American Spirit of
Licentiousness and Independence administered by a numerous and turbulent
Faction here, to be suddenly restored to a proper and desirable
Subordination." A few of the habitants joined his forces; fewer joined
the invaders or sold them supplies--till they grew suspicious of paper
"Continentals." But the majority held passively aloof. Even when France
joined the warring colonies and Admiral d'Estaing appealed to the
Canadians to rise, they did not heed; though it is difficult to say what
the result would have been if Washington had agreed to Lafayette's plan
of a joint French and American invasion in 1778.

Nova Scotia also held aloof, in spite of the fact that many of the men
who had come from New England and from Ulster were eager to join the
colonies to the south. In Nova Scotia democracy was a less hardy plant
than in Massachusetts. The town and township institutions, which had
been the nurseries of resistance in New England, had not been allowed to
take root there. The circumstances of the founding of Halifax had given
ripe to a greater tendency, which las