in any way connected with the previous American measures, and the government evidently anticipated no serious opposition. With very slight notice it passed the Lords on the 17th of May, (apparently without a division), and on the 18th was brought to the Commons. But here it met with an unexpectedly vigorous opposition, its opponents, though few in numbers, stubbornly fighting every clause. Sir Thomas Mills, Receiver-General of the Province of Quebec, writes to Haldimand, June 14, 1774,' that "we have had as hard fighting and many more battles to establish government for Canada as there were to conquer it. You would be astonished at the opposition made to the bill; ten nights the House of Commons was kept till one o'clock in the morning successively. Every inch of the ground was argued and every word disputed."

We are fortunate in possessing of the debate on this occasion a fuller report than of any other part of this Parliament. This is from the shorthand notes of Sir Henry Cavendish, member of Lostwithiel, a supporter, (but not a slavish one), of the government. It will not be necessary to go fully into the discussion, however, as it may easily be imagined what line of battle would be assumed against such a measure by an opposition with Burke and Fox at its head. Though the battle was spirited the opposition seems soon to have become hopeless of effecting anything; and its efforts were more remarkable for fighting every inch than for serious or prolonged struggle at any one point." Lord North was on the whole conciliatory, showing no special love for or interest in the measure, but yet evidently determined to push its main provisions through. Very little indication is given that the bill was considered

1 Can. Arch., B. 27, p. 374.

* Long known as the Unreported Parliament. The earlier part is now supplied to us from the same source as that for the debate on the Quebec Bill. During this session the order for the exclusion of strangers was enforced with unusual vigour.

The chief contest was in the latter part of the discussion, on the matter of the jury system.

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to have any connection with the direct steps taken to repress America, the ministry taking no notice of the few and obscure hints dropped to that effect. A peculiar feature is the repetition by the Opposition of questions as to the authorship of the measure, the Crown lawyers being persistently taunted, (without drawing from them any vigorous disclaimer), with not being willing to father it, if not at heart opposed to it. In this connection the letter of Mills quoted from already is of great interest. The writer proceeds (from the point quoted above); "Much pain and trouble it has cost me. The Bill was first put in my hands containing ten sheets in folio, in my mind the shorter it was the better. The limits, the religion, the French law, and the Council,' they owe to me. My conscience, however, tells me that I was not only serving justice and country, but also doing justice to the conquered." Of equal interest are his continuing words as to the curious attitude of the ministry. "In the House of Lords I had not much trouble, but great difficulty in keeping Lord North and the Ministry steady and firm in the House of Commons. You would, however, have pitied them, for they were teased and harrassed to death. They were very negligent in studying the subject, which of course gave the others the best of the argument, and then they had to combat against all the popular topics, viz., the Popish religion, no juries, no assemblies, etc. Masères

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1 It is noticeable that June 8, 1769, the Secretary of the Board of Trade (Pownall) writes to the Treasury requesting that Receiver-General Mills be allowed to remain some time in England, as he can give useful information to the Lords of Trade respecting Quebec.

The main points, it will be noticed, over which controversy raged then and after. It will be seen later, however, that the origin of these was by no means so Minerva-like as it appeared to Mr. Mills.

Wedderbourne, the Solicitor-General, who had prepared a special report on Canadian affairs and claimed to have thoroughly studied the subject, brought forward in the argument as to the non granting of juries, the conduct of the juries of Quebec in the revenue trials of 1766 and 1769, as proof that the Canadians were not fit for the institution. Whereas the juries on both occasions are expressly stated by Masères to have been entirely English.

and Murray behaved infamously, Carleton and Hey exceedingly proper, steady and well." What degree of credit is to be given to any part of this self-inflated epistle it is impossible to enquire very closely. The animated character of the debate was kept till the close; the final word according to Cavendish being the vigorously expressed opinion of a thoroughly disgusted opponent that the speaker "should throw the Bill over the table, and somebody else should kick it out at the door."

Of considerable importance is it to observe the attenuated character of the House on this occasion. The total number of members at the time was 558, and the main divisions on this Bill were as follows: second reading, 105 to 29, final vote, 50 to 20. These numbers are undoubtedly much higher than during the actual debate, Cavendish noting on two occasions that only about 40 members were in the House. It is to be remembered that under these conditions the government support would belong to the most dependent, corrupt and unrepresentative part of this most corrupt and unrepresentative of Parliaments.' We need not follow the fortunes of the Bill through the slight opposition it met with, (from seven peers), on its return to the Lords, nor through the vigorous but unsuccessful attempt to repeal it in the following year. (Division in Commons, 174 to 86.) After a long labor and painful birth it had appeared for good or ill; it will now be necessary to examine its provisions more carefully, with a view to determining the ideas that inspired them and estimating their more immediate results.

B. History of Main Provisions.

The phrase used by Mills above," The limits, the religion, the French law, and the Council," is a succinct statement of the main subject matters of the new enact

1 See statements of Lecky (Vol. III, pp. 171, 173) that in 1770 192 members of the Commons held places under government, and that it was computed in 1774 that fully half of the members for England and Wales represented a total of only 11,500 voters.

ment; and in discussing them I shall adopt the same order both as logical and as the order of the Act itself.

a. Boundaries. First, therefore, as to the limits or boundaries of the newly defined Province. This part of the Act, though the most short lived,' might probably be contended to be the most noticeable and important with regard to the influence of the measure on the course of the American Revolution. The inclusion of the Western country within the limits of Canada, in connection with other provisions, was. taken as indicative of a settled and long-meditated design on the part of the English government to hinder the extension of the self-governing colonies by attaching the vast unsettled regions West and Southwest to the arbitrary government which that Act seemed to establish." There was the more likelihood of suspicion or irritation upon this point because of the fact that the final disposition of the western country had been in suspense since the peace, and because the first step of the imperial authorities with regard to it, in the Proclamation of 1763, had been by no means satisfactory to the older colonies. Modern writers have contended that the settled purpose of hindering the extension of these colonies by new and arbitrary measures, is clearly shown in that proclamation, and shown thus for the first time; that in

1 Repealed for the most part by the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, 1783, the Province of Quebec being then deprived of those parts which now form the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota.

2 The tenacity and attractiveness, (through its inherent probability), of this idea from the colonial standpoint is easily understood. Its general vitality, moreover, is illustrated in the latest and best history of Canada from the native and Imperial standpoint (Kingsford's). The author, while vigorously defending the Quebec Act in the main, and asserting that he can "discover no admissible ground for the acceptance" of the belief that its main measures were due to the condition of things in the other colonies, yet says of the extension to the west (for which otherwise he can find no explanation): "It is possible that the spirit of revolt dominant in the colonies may have led to the desire of preventing the exercise of any pretension over the territory of the Western provinces of Virginia and Pennsylvania [!]; and of opposing by legislation all extension beyond their admitted frontier." (V. 244.) The failure of this writer to find other reasons may probably be explained from his accompanying assertion that west of Montreal "at the period of conquest there was scarcely a white man established," and from his disregard in this connection of the fur trade.

this light it was the first step in a new policy of tyrannical restriction of which the culmination was the Act of Parliament which in 1774 finally annexed the West to the unfree Province of Quebec.'

This contention is of course incompatible with the more ordinary view that the Quebec Act, in this as in its other provisions, was called out by the critical state of things in the older provinces in or about the years 1773-4; and before I go on to deal with the latter opinion it will be necessary to consider the variation.

It is manifest that if British colonial policy underwent such a decided change in the period 1760-3, we are justified in expecting to find evidence of that change in the confidential communications between the Imperial and the colonial authorities, or in the semi-official utterances of that

1 The chief expression of this view will be found in Hinsdale, Old Northwest, c. 8. The writer considers that with the treaty of Paris, England, abandoning the old sea-tosea colonial claims, made a decided change in her land policy; that while the Ohio grant of 1748 showed that "she had then no thought of preventing over-mountain settlements, or of limiting the expansion of the colonies in that direction," (p. 120), now, alarmed at their rapid growth, she took measures to permanently sever them from the western lands. This it is intimated was one of the main motives of the Proclamation of 1763. The writer, however, does not seem very decided upon the point, and concludes with the admission that on the whole, " in the years following the French war the Western policy of the British was not steady or consistent, but fitful and capricious; prompted by a solicitude for the Indian that was partly feigned and partly by a growing jealousy of the shore colonies." (p. 141.) Yet immediately after the half-abandoned position is resumed in the statement that "this policy of restriction culminated in 1774 in the Quebec Act," one of the main objects of which was “ permanently to sever the West from the shore colonies and put it in train for being cut up, when the time should come, into independent governments that should have affiliations with the St. Lawrence basin rather than with the Atlantic slope." The irritated colonies, we are told, looked upon the new boundaries given to Quebec by the Act "as a final effort to wrest the West from them forever." Roosevelt (Winning of the West, I, c. 2), expresses the same ideas in a somewhat different form. Far-reaching as are the above views they do not attain that breadth of assertion which we find in an even more recent opinion, that from its conquest in 1760 Canada was regarded by the British government as a point d'appui "for the support of the ministerial policy in asserting British parliamentary supremacy over the colonies." (Review of Life of John Patterson, N. Y. Nation, July 19, 1894.) These opinions are illustrative of the latest phase of revolutionary study, that which centers round the comparatively fresh field of Western interests and advance. They are the result of hasty generalization from one-sided investigation, stimulated by the suspicions that contemporary events and the heated assertions of the revolutionary age itself tend naturally to engender. It is all the more necessary that they should be promptly confronted with the facts; which must be my justification for the detail with which I have considered the subject.