do. The incompetent
commander testified that he lent Allen twenty men for some rough work
on the lake. By evening Allen had them all drunk and then it was easy,
without firing a shot, to capture the fort with a rush. The door to
Canada was open. Great stores of ammunition and a hundred and twenty
guns, which in due course were used against the British at Boston, fell
into American hands.

About Canada Washington was ill-informed. He thought of the Canadians as
if they were Virginians or New Yorkers. They had been recently conquered
by Britain; their new king was a tyrant; they would desire liberty and
would welcome an American army. So reasoned Washington, but without
knowledge. The Canadians were a conquered people, but they had found
the British king no tyrant and they had experienced the paradox of being
freer under the conqueror than they had been under their own sovereign.
The last days of French rule in Canada were disgraced by corruption
and tyranny almost unbelievable. The Canadian peasant had been cruelly
robbed and he had conceived for his French rulers a dislike which
appears still in his attitude towards the motherland of France. For
his new British master he had assuredly no love, but he was no longer
dragged off to war and his property was not plundered. He was free,
too, to speak his mind. During the first twenty years after the British
conquest of Canada the Canadian French matured indeed an assertive
liberty not even dreamed of during the previous century and a half of
French rule.

The British tyranny which Washington pictured in Canada was thus not
very real. He underestimated, too, the antagonism between the Roman
Catholics of Canada and the Protestants of the English colonies. The
Congress at Philadelphia in denouncing the Quebec Act had accused the
Catholic Church of bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion. This was
no very tactful appeal for sympathy to the sons of that France which was
still the eldest daughter of the Church and it was hardly helped by
a maladroit turn suggesting that "low-minded infirmities" should not
permit such differences to block union in the sacred cause of liberty.
Washington believed that two battalions of Canadians might be recruited
to fight the British, and that the French Acadians of Nova Scotia, a
people so remote that most of them hardly knew what the war was about,
were tingling with sympathy for the American cause. In truth the
Canadian was not prepared to