vanished. The old habit endured, however, of fear
of Canada. When, in 1774, the British Parliament passed the bill for the
government of Canada known as the Quebec Act, there was violent clamor.
The measure was assumed to be a calculated threat against colonial
liberty. The Quebec Act continued in Canada the French civil law and the
ancient privileges of the Roman Catholic Church. It guaranteed order in
the wild western region north of the Ohio, taken recently from France,
by placing it under the authority long exercised there of the Governor
of Quebec. Only a vivid imagination would conceive that to allow to
the French in Canada their old loved customs and laws involved designs
against the freedom under English law in the other colonies, or that
to let the Canadians retain in respect to religion what they had always
possessed meant a sinister plot against the Protestantism of the English
colonies. Yet Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the greatest mind in the
American Revolution, had frantic suspicions. French laws in Canada
involved, he said, the extension of French despotism in the English
colonies. The privileges continued to the Roman Catholic Church in
Canada would be followed in due course by the Inquisition, the burning
of heretics at the stake in Boston and New York, and the bringing
from Europe of Roman Catholic settlers who would prove tools for the
destruction of religious liberty. Military rule at Quebec meant, sooner
or later, despotism everywhere in America. We may smile now at the
youthful Hamilton's picture of "dark designs" and "deceitful wiles"
on the part of that fierce Protestant George III to establish Roman
Catholic despotism, but the colonies regarded the danger as serious. The
quick remedy would be simply to take Canada, as Washington now planned.

To this end something had been done before Washington assumed the
command. The British Fort Ticonderoga, on the neck of land separating
Lake Champlain from Lake George, commanded the route from New York to
Canada. The fight at Lexington in April had been quickly followed by
aggressive action against this British stronghold. No news of Lexington
had reached the fort when early in May Colonel Ethan Allen, with
Benedict Arnold serving as a volunteer in his force of eighty-three
men, arrived in friendly guise. The fort was held by only forty-eight
British; with the menace from France at last ended they felt secure;
discipline was slack, for there was nothing to