d it, no national hope hung over it, and a hundred years ago
Napoleon Bonaparte sold it to the new Western power--the United
States. As a nation the labours of France were finished in America on
the day that De Ramezay yielded up the keys of the city, and Wolfe's
war-worn legions marched through St. Louis Gate from the Plains of
Abraham.

Yet scores of thousands of the people of France remained in the city
and the province to be ruled henceforth by the intrepid race, with
which it had competed in a death-struggle for dominion through so many
adventurous and uncertain years. Victory, like a wayward imp of Fate,
had settled first upon one and then upon the other, and once before
1759 England had held the keys of the great fortress only to yield
them up again in a weak bargain; but the die was thrown for the last
time when Amherst securely quartered himself at Montreal, and Murray
at the Chateau St. Louis, where Frontenac and Vaudreuil had had their
day of virile governance. Never again was the banner of the golden
lilies to wave in sovereignty over the St. Lawrence, though the people
who had fought and toiled under its protection were to hold to their
birthright and sustain their language through the passing generations,
faithful to tradition and origin, but no less faithful to the Canadian
soil which their fame, their labour, and their history had made sacred
to them. Frenchmen of a vanished day they were to cherish their past
with an apprehensive devotion, and yet to keep the pact they made with
the conqueror in 1759, and later in 1774 when the Quebec Act secured
to them their religious liberty, their civic code, and their political
status. This pact, further developed in the first Union of the
English and French provinces in 1840, and afterwards in the
Confederation of 1867, has never suffered injury or real suspicion,
but was first made certain by loyalty to the British flag, in the War
of the American Revolution, and piously sealed by victorious duty and
valour in the war of 1812. The record of fidelity has been enriched
since that day in the north-west rebellion fomented by a French
half-breed in 1885, and in the late war in South Africa, where French
Canadians fought side by side with English comrades for the
preservation of the Empire.

These later acts of imperial duty are not performed by Anglicised
Frenchmen, for the pioneer race of Quebec are still a people apart in
the great Dominion so far as their civic a