ongenial duty of all true Britons. Craig and those who counseled him
were firmly convinced that the new subjects were French at heart. Of
the 250,000 inhabitants of Lower Canada, he declared, "about 20,000 or
25,000 may be English or Americans, the rest are French. I use the term
designedly, my Lord, because I mean to say that they are in Language, in
religion, in manner and in attachment completely French." That there
was still some affection for old France, stirred by war and French
victories, there is no question, but that the Canadians wished to return
to French allegiance was untrue, even though Craig reported that such
was "the general opinion of all ranks with whom it is possible to
converse on the subject." The French Revolution had created a great gulf
between Old France and New France. The clergy did their utmost to bar
all intercourse with the land where deism and revolution held sway, 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 Fre