The new Governor had, indeed, a remarkable connection with the history of Quebec. In 1759 he had accompanied his friend James Wolfe to the siege of the city, and like his General, was wounded on the Plains of Abraham. He remained with Murray in Quebec during the trying winter of 1760, and fought in the battle of Ste. Foye. And now, after a brilliant campaign in the West Indies, the gallant soldier was returning to the fortress on the St. Lawrence at another critical moment in its history.
Events were rapidly moving to a crisis in the English colonies to the south. In spite of Burke and Pitt, England was blindly imperilling her possessions in America by the imposition of the Stamp Act, and a failure to realise that the Thirteen Colonies had long outgrown a state of tutelage, and were not prepared to accept legislation from the motherland. But as a preliminary measure of offence, the newly assembled congress determined to detach Canada from the British crown, and, naturally, they counted most of all upon disaffection among the French Canadian population. It is not possible to give in full the letter which George Washington despatched on this occasion to "The Inhabitants of Canada"; but the following is part of it:—
"Friends and Brethren—The unnatural contest between the English colonies and Great Britain has now risen to such a height that arms alone must decide it. The colonies, confiding in the justice of their cause, and the purity of their intention, have reluctantly appealed to that Being in whose hands are all human events....Above all, we rejoice that our enemies have been deceived with regard to you. They have persuaded themselves, they have even dared to say, that the Canadians were not capable of distinguishing between the blessings of liberty and the wretchedness of slavery;...but they have been deceived; instead of finding in you a poverty of soul and baseness of spirit, they see with a chagrin, equal to our joy, that you are enlightened, generous, and virtuous; that you will not renounce your own rights, or serve as instruments to deprive your fellow-subjects of theirs. Come then, my brethren, unite with us in an indissoluble union, let us run together to the same goal....Come then, ye generous citizens, range yourselves under the standard of general liberty, against which all the force and artifices of tyranny will never be able to prevail.
George Washington
."
The blandishments of the Thirteen Colonies, or "The Provincials," as they were called, found almost no response in Canada. Sir Guy Carleton had left nothing undone to foster loyalty in the hearts of the French Canadians; and the passing of the Quebec Act in 1774, which secured to them freedom of worship and confirmed their own system of jurisprudence, held the French fast to their allegiance at a time when disaffection would have been ruinous to the Empire.
Controversies still rage over the propriety of legalising the French language in a British dominion; but any one who examines well the circumstances which induced it must see that not only justice but military expediency required liberal treatment and wide consideration for seventy thousand subjects speaking an alien tongue, if the fruits of the Seven Years' War were not to be heedlessly thrown away. The solution of the language problem lies in the peaceful assimilation which time and growing population alone can bring. Almost a thousand years ago a Norman race was grafted upon a Saxon stock, and the blending of these elements has produced Great Britain, the strongest nation of the modern world. In Canada religious, industrial, and social conditions have as yet prevented definite fusion of the two races; but the march of events and the pressure of common interests must secure it in good time.