The American colonists would have been angered in any case. But when they saw Canada proper made as unlike a 'fourteenth colony' as could be, and when they also saw the gates of the coveted western lands closed against them by the same detested Act—the last of the 'five intolerable acts' to which they most objected—their fury knew no bounds. They cursed the king, the pope, and the French Canadians with as much violence as any temporal or spiritual rulers had ever cursed heretics and rebels. The 'infamous and tyrannical ministry' in England was accused of 'contemptible subservience' to the 'bloodthirsty, idolatrous, and hypocritical creed' of the French Canadians. To think that people whose religion had spread 'murder, persecution, and revolt throughout the world' were to be entrenched along the St Lawrence was bad enough. But to see Crown protection given to the Indian lands which the Americans considered their own western 'birthright' was infinitely worse. Was the king of England to steal the valley of the Mississippi in the same way as the king of France?
It is easy to be wise after the event and hard to follow any counsel of perfection. But it must always be a subject of keen, if unavailing, regret that the French Canadians were not guaranteed their own way of life, within the limits of the modern province of Quebec, immediately after the capitulation of Montreal in 1760. They would then have entered the British Empire, as a whole people, on terms which they must all have understood to be exceedingly generous from any conquering power, and which they would have soon found out to be far better than anything they had experienced under the government of France. In return for such unexampled generosity they might have become convinced defenders of the only flag in the world under which they could possibly live as French Canadians. Their relations to each other, to the rest of a changing Canada, and to the Empire would have followed the natural course of political evolution, with the burning questions of language, laws, and religion safely removed from general controversy in after years. The rights of the English-speaking minority could, of course, have been still better safeguarded under this system than under the distracting series of half-measures which took its place. There should have been no question of a parliament in the immediate future. Then, with the peopling of Ontario by the United Empire Loyalists and the growth of the Maritime Provinces on the other side, Quebec could have entered Carleton's proposed Confederation in the nineties to her own and every one else's best advantage.
On the other hand, the delay of fourteen years after the Capitulation of 1760 and the unwarrantable extension of the provincial boundaries were cardinal errors of the most disastrous kind. The delay, filled with a futile attempt at mistaken Americanization, bred doubts and dissensions not only between the two races but between the different kinds of French Canadians. When the hour of trial came disintegration had already gone too far. The mistake about the boundaries was equally bad. The western wilds ought to have been administered by a lieutenant-governor under the supervision of a governor-general. Even leasing them for a short term of years to the Hudson's Bay Company would have been better than annexing them to a preposterous province of Quebec. The American colonists would have doubtless objected to either alternative. But both could have been defended on sound principles of administration; while the sudden invasion of a new and inflated Quebec into the colonial hinterlands was little less than a declaration of war. The whole problem bristled with enormous difficulties, and the circumstances under which it had to be faced made an ideal solution impossible. But an earlier Quebec Act, without its outrageous boundary clause, would have been well worth the risk of passing; for the delay led many French Canadians to suppose, however falsely, that the Empire's need might always be their opportunity; and this idea, however repugnant to their best minds and better feelings, has persisted among their extreme particularists until the present day.
CHAPTER IV — INVASION
1775
Carleton's first eight years as governor of Canada were almost entirely occupied with civil administration. The next four were equally occupied with war; so much so, indeed, that the Quebec Act could not be put in force on the 1st of May 1775, as provided for in the Act itself, but only bit by bit much later on. There was one short session of the new Legislative Council, which opened on the 17th of August. But all men's minds were even then turned towards the Montreal frontier, whence the American invasion threatened to overspread the whole country and make this opening session the last that might ever be held. Most of the members were soon called away from the council-chamber to the field. No further session could be held either that year or the next; and Carleton was obliged to nominate the judges himself. The fifteen years of peace were over, and Canada had once more become an object of contention between two fiercely hostile forces.
The War of the American Revolution was a long and exceedingly complicated struggle; and its many varied fortunes naturally had a profound effect on those of Canada. But Canada was directly engaged in no more than the first three campaigns, when the Americans invaded her in 1775 and '76, and when the British used her as the base from which to invade the new American Republic in 1777. These first three campaigns formed a purely civil war within the British Empire. On each side stood three parties. Opponents were ranged against each other in the mother country, in the Thirteen Colonies, and in Canada. In the mother country the king and his party government were ranged against the Opposition and all who held radical or revolutionary views. Here the strife was merely political. But in the Thirteen Colonies the forces of the Crown were ranged against the forces of the new Continental Congress. The small minority of colonists who were afterwards known as the United Empire Loyalists sided with the Crown. A majority sided with the Congress. The rest kept as selfishly neutral as they could. Among the English-speaking civilians in Canada, many of whom were now of a much better class than the original camp-followers, the active loyalists comprised only the smaller half. The larger half sided with the Americans, as was only natural, seeing that most of them were immigrants from the Thirteen Colonies. But by no means all these sympathizers were ready for a fight. Among the French Canadians the loyalists included very few besides the seigneurs, the clergy, and a handful of educated people in Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec. The mass of the habitants were more or less neutral. But many of them were anti-British at first, while most of them were anti-American afterwards.
Events moved quickly in 1775. On the 19th of April the 'shot heard round the world' was fired at Lexington in Massachusetts. On the 1st of May, the day appointed for the inauguration of the Quebec Act, the statue of the king in Montreal was grossly defaced and hung with a cross, a necklace of potatoes, and a placard bearing the inscription, Here's the Canadian Pope and English Fool—Voila le Pape du Canada et le sot Anglais. Large rewards were offered for the detection of the culprits; but without avail. Excitement ran high and many an argument ended with a bloody nose.