e Capitulation of
Montreal in 1760 assured the Canadians of their property and civil
rights, and guaranteed to them 'the free exercise of their religion.'
The Quebec Act of 1774 granted them the whole of the French civil law,
to the almost complete exclusion of the English common law, and
virtually established in Canada the Church of the vanquished through
legal enforcement of the obligation resting upon Catholics to pay
tithes. And when it became necessary in 1791 to divide Canada into two
provinces, Upper Canada and Lower Canada, one predominantly English and
the other predominantly French, the two provinces were granted
precisely equal political rights. Out of this {8} arose an odd
situation. All French Canadians were Roman Catholics, and Roman
Catholics were at this time debarred from sitting in the House of
Commons at Westminster. Yet they were given the right of sitting as
members in the Canadian representative Assemblies created by the Act of
1791. The Catholics of Canada thus received privileges denied to their
co-religionists in Great Britain.

There can be no doubt that it was the conciliatory policy of the
British government which kept the clergy, the seigneurs, and the great
body of French Canadians loyal to the British crown during the war in
1775 and in 1812. It is certain, too, that these generous measures
strengthened the position of the French race in Canada, made Canadians
more jealous of their national identity, and led them to press for
still wider liberties. It is an axiom of human nature that the more
one gets, the more one wants. And so the concessions granted merely
whetted the Canadian appetite for more.

This disposition became immediately apparent with the calling of the
first parliament of Lower Canada in 1792. Before this there had been
no specific definition of the exact status of the French language in
{9} Canada, and the question arose as to its use in the Assembly as a
medium of debate. As the Quebec Act of 1774 had restored the French
laws, it was inferred that the use of the French language had been
authorized, since otherwise these laws would have no natural medium of
interpretation. That this was the inference to be drawn from the
constitution became evident, for the British government had made no
objection to the use of French in the law-courts. It should be borne
in mind that at this period the English in Canada were few in number,
and that all of them lived in the ci