made a political
bulwark against rebellious America. The French colonists, a peaceable,
primitive folk, as attached to their religion as the Irish, and devoted
mainly to agriculture, retained, as long as they desired it, the old
French system of law known as the Custom of Paris and the free exercise
of their religion. Like the Irish, they were strongly monarchical and
strongly conservative in feeling, and as impervious to the Republican
propaganda emanating from their American neighbours as the Catholic
Irish always at heart remained to the revolutionary principles of Wolfe
Tone's school. Unmolested in their habits and possessions, they
philosophically accepted the transference from the Bourbon to the
Hanoverian dynasty, and became an indispensable source of strength to
George III. when that monarch was using his German troops to coerce his
American subjects and his British troops to overawe the Ulster
Volunteers.

In 1774, immediately before the outbreak of a war against which Ireland
was protesting, and in which, with the soundest justification, the
Irish-Americans, Catholic and Protestant, took such a prominent part
against the British arms, the Quebec Act was passed giving formal
statutory sanction to the Catholic religion, and setting up a nominated
legislative Council, whose members were subject to no religious test. In
Ireland it was not till six years later, and, as we have seen, by means
of precisely the same pressure--British fear of America--that the Irish
Protestant Volunteers obtained the abolition of the test for Dissenters,
while Catholics in Ireland were still little more than outlaws, and had
to wait for nearly sixty years for complete emancipation. The result of
the Quebec Act, together with the sympathetic administration of that
great Irishman, Sir Guy Carleton, was the firm allegiance of the French
Province in spite of an exceedingly formidable invasion, during the
whole of the American War, and even after the intervention of European
France. It is part of the dramatic irony of these occurrences that some
of the invading army was composed of Morgan's Irish-American riflemen,
and that one of the two joint leaders of the invasion was the
Irish-American, General Richard Montgomery, who fell at the unsuccessful
assault of Quebec on December 31, 1775.

In spite of Burke's noble appeal in the House of Commons, toleration in
the abstract had nothing to do with the treatment of the French
Catholics. Britis