Arguments urged against it.
On the other hand there was bitter and intelligible opposition to the annexation to Canada of ‘immense territories, now desert, but which are the best parts of that continent and which run on the back of all your ancient colonies’.[54] The decision which was now taken meant cutting off the existing English colonies from the West; and, in view of the other provisions of the Act, the incorporation of the new territories with Canada placed them under an administration in which there was at the time no element of self-government and which gave formal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church. It was, in short, or seemed to be, an admission that the old claim of Canada to the regions of the Ohio, against which, while Canada was still a French possession, the British Government and the British colonies had alike contended, was after all a valid claim; and it was, or seemed to be, a pronouncement that in years to come the future of the Western lands was to be shaped on Canadian principles and Canadian traditions, rather than on those which had moulded and inspired the ever-growing colonies of the British race.
It has been argued that true statesmanship would, in accordance with the plan which had been at one time contemplated, have constituted the territories beyond the 45th parallel a separate province under the Crown, separate alike from Canada on the one hand, and from Pennsylvania and Virginia on the other. This might possibly have been a preferable course; but, as subsequent experience showed in the case of Upper Canada, an inland colony, whose only outlet is through other provinces, is always in a difficult position; and the multiplication of communities in North America had already borne a crop of difficulties. Moreover, the particular circumstances of the time accounted for the decision which was taken, as they accounted also for the strong antagonism which that decision called forth. In the same session in which the Quebec Act was passed, the British Parliament had already enacted three punitive laws against the recalcitrant colony of Massachusetts; one closing the harbour of Boston; another altering the legislature, and giving to the governor the power of appointing and removing the judges, magistrates, and sheriffs; and a third empowering the trial of persons accused of capital offences in the discharge of their public duties to be held outside the limits of the province. If it was thought necessary thus to limit the liberties of one of the English colonies by Imperial legislation, it would have been hopelessly illogical to enlarge the borders of others among the sister communities; and if the only possible alternative was to keep the Western territories directly under the Crown, it was simpler, and involved less friction and debate, to attach them by a single clause in a Bill to the existing province of Quebec, than to treat them as a separate unit and to provide them with an administration and a legislature by a separate law. Furthermore, their annexation to Canada outwardly, at any rate, strengthened at a critical time the one province in America where the Crown still held undivided sway.
Sections in the Act which dealt with the religious question.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh sections of the Act dealt with religion. They provided for the free exercise of the Roman Catholic faith by the members of that Church, subject to the King’s supremacy as established by the Act passed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; but they substituted a simple oath of allegiance for the oath required by Queen Elizabeth’s statute, and they confirmed to the Roman Catholic clergy ‘their accustomed dues and rights’. Protestants were expressly exempted from these payments; but the Act provided that, from such dues as they would otherwise have paid, provision might be made for the encouragement of the Protestant religion and the maintenance of a Protestant clergy. In other words, freedom of religion was guaranteed, the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church was recognized by law, and the principle of concurrent endowment was introduced.
Other provisions of the Act.
The eighth section of the Act restored Canadian law and custom in civil matters, and confirmed existing rights to property, with the exception of the property of the religious orders. The eleventh section continued the law of England in criminal matters. The twelfth, laying down that it was at present inexpedient to call an Assembly, provided for a nominated Legislative Council, consisting of not more than twenty-three and not less than seventeen members, no religious test being imposed. The next section withheld from the council the power of taxation, such additional taxes as were deemed necessary being imposed by a separate Act of the Imperial Parliament.[55]
The Act embodied a compromise.
Such were the principal provisions of the Quebec Act. It embodied a fair and reasonable compromise. In part the Government retraced their steps; they restored Canadian civil law, they postponed indefinitely a representative legislature, but they gave what could under the circumstances be suitably and prudently given, religious toleration, trial by jury in criminal matters, and a council to which the Crown could call representatives of all creeds and interests. The Bill was attacked in the House of Opposition to it. Lords, and in the House of Commons; and, even after it had become law, in 1775, Lord Camden in the House of Lords, and Sir George Savile in the House of Commons, presented petitions from the British inhabitants of the province of Quebec against the Act and moved for its repeal. The corporation of London petitioned against it. The American colonists made it the text of the manifesto to the people of Canada, which has already been noticed.[56] In the debates in Parliament various points were taken. Fox argued that, as the Bill gave tithes to the Roman Catholic clergy, it was a money Bill, and should not have originated, as it did originate in the House of Lords. Others criticized the absence of any provision for the rights of Habeas Corpus,[57] and the abolition of trial by jury in civil cases; but the main attack was on the lines that the law gave formal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church, that it withheld popular representation, and that it extended these two unsound principles to new territories whose lot should rather have been cast with the English colonies. Reference was made to the case of the colony of Grenada, in which limited representation in the popular Assembly had been given to Roman Catholics; but the opponents of the Quebec Act had not the courage to declare for a popular Assembly for Canada, without any religious test, for it would have meant an almost exclusively Roman Catholic legislature. They Inconsistency of the opponents. were at one and the same time fighting for the Protestant minority and contending for popular representation, but Protestant claims and popular representation in Canada were hopelessly at variance. This made the case of the opposition weak, and this was the justification of the Act. Lord Chatham denounced it as a most cruel, oppressive, and odious measure. Burke tried to appeal to popular prejudice against the Canadian seigniors. He attacked them, and he pressed the claims of the Protestant minority on the ground of their commercial importance, descending to such clap-trap as that in his opinion, in the case in point, one Englishman was worth fifty Frenchmen. The tone of the opposition was unworthy of the men, but minds had been so embittered and judgements so clouded by years of wrangle and debate on the American question, that the Act for the better government of Canada was viewed by the opponents of the ministry and the partisans of the colonies mainly as a case of French against English, and Papists against Protestants. None the less, the Act was a just and generous measure, and, when Carleton returned to Canada in September, 1774, his reception by the leading French Canadians showed that they appreciated it. Because, when war came, the Canadians as a whole stood aloof in a quarrel which was no concern of theirs, and some of them joined the revolting colonies, it was argued in the English Parliament that the Act had not conciliated them, and therefore stood condemned; but history has proved that this view was not true. No one measure or series of measures can at once obliterate differences of race, language, and creed; but, passed as it was at a time of failures, recrimination, and bitterness, the Quebec Act stood and will to all times stand to the credit of English good sense, in dealing with the actual facts of a difficult position, and the feelings and prejudices of an alien people.