new continent.

The English colonies had twenty white men to one in Canada. Yet Canada
was long able to wage war on something like equal terms. She had the
supreme advantage of a single control. There was no trouble at Quebec
about getting a reluctant legislature to vote money for war purposes. No
semblance of an elected legislature existed and the money for war came
not from the Canadians, but from the capacious, if now usually depleted,
coffers of the French court at Versailles. In the English colonies the
legislatures preferred, of all political struggles, one about money
with the Governor, the representative of the King. At least one of the
English colonies, Pennsylvania, believing that evil is best conquered by
non-resistance, was resolutely against war for any reason, good or bad.
Other colonies often raised the more sordid objection that they were
too poor to help in war. The colonial legislatures, indeed, with their
eternal demand for the privileges and rights which the British House
of Commons had won in the long centuries of its history, constitute the
most striking of all the contrasts with Canada. In them were always the
sparks of an independent temper. The English diarist, Evelyn, wrote, in
1671, that New England was in "a peevish and touchy humour." Colonists
who go out to found a new state will always demand rights like those
which they have enjoyed at home. It was unthinkable that men of Boston,
who, themselves, or whose party in England, had fought against a
despotic king, had sent him to the block and driven his son from the
throne, would be content with anything short of controlling the taxes
which they paid, making the laws which they obeyed, and carrying on
their affairs in their own way. When obliged to accept a governor from
England, they were resolved as far as possible to remain his paymaster.
In a majority of the colonies they insisted that the salary of the
Governor should be voted each year by their representatives, in order
that they might be able always to use against him the cogent logic of
financial need. On questions of this kind Quebec had nothing to say. To
the King in France and to him alone went all demands for pay and honors.
If, in such things, the people of Canada had no remote voice, they were
still as well off as Frenchmen in France. New England was a copy of
Old England and New France a copy of Old France. There was, as yet, no
"peevish and touchy humour" at either Quebec or Ve