But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and shopkeepers, nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but as an Englishman on guard against Frenchmen that Craig found himself at odds with his Assembly. For nearly twenty years in this period England was at death grips with France, end to hate and despise all Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and congenial duty of all true Britons. Craig and those who counseled him were firmly convinced that the new subjects were French at heart. Of the 250,000 inhabitants of Lower Canada, he declared, "about 20,000 or 25,000 may be English or Americans, the rest are French. I use the term designedly, my Lord, because I mean to say that they are in Language, in religion, in manner and in attachment completely French." That there was still some affection for old France, stirred by war and French victories, there is no question, but that the Canadians wished to return to French allegiance was untrue, even though Craig reported that such was "the general opinion of all ranks with whom it is possible to converse on the subject." The French Revolution had created a great gulf between Old France and New France. The clergy did their utmost to bar all intercourse with the land where deism and revolution held sway, and when the Roman Catholic Church and the British Government combined for years on a single object, it was little wonder they succeeded. Nelson's victory at Trafalgar was celebrated by a Te Deum in the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Quebec. In fact, as Craig elsewhere noted, the habitants were becoming rather a new and distinct nationality, a nation canadienne. They ceased to be French; they declined to become English; and sheltered under their "Sacred Charter"* they became Canadians first and last.

* "It cannot be sufficiently inculcated ON THE PART OF GOVERNMENT that the Quebec Act is a Sacred Charter, granted by the King in Parliament to the Canadians as a Security for their Religion, Laws, and Property." Governor Sir Frederick Haldimand to Lord George Germaine, Oct. 25, 1780.

The governors were not alone in this hostility to the mass of the people. There had grown up in the colony a little clique of officeholders, of whom Jonathan Sewell, the Loyalist Attorney General, and later Chief Justice, was the chief, full of racial and class prejudice, and in some cases greedy for personal gain. Sewell declared it "indispensably necessary to overwhelm and sink the Canadian population by English Protestants," and was even ready to run the risk of bringing in Americans to effect this end. Of the non-official English, some were strongly opposed to the pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; but others, and especially the merchants, with their organ the Quebec "Mercury", were loud in their denunciations of the French who were unprogressive and who as landowners were incidentally trying to throw the burden of taxation chiefly on the traders.

The first open sign of the racial division which was to bedevil the life of the province came in 1806 when, in order to meet the attacks of the Anglicizing party, the newspaper "Le Canadien" was established at Quebec. Its motto was significant: "Notre langue, nos institutions, et nos lois." Craig and his counselors took up the challenge. In 1808 he dismissed five militia officers, because of their connection with the irritating journal, and in 1810 he went so far as to suppress it and to throw into prison four of those responsible for its management. The Assembly, which was proving hard to control, was twice dissolved in three years. Naturally the Governor's arbitrary course only stiffened resistance; and passions were rising fast and high when illness led to his recall and the shadow of a common danger from the south, the imminence of war with the United States, for a time drew all men together.

While the foundations of the eastern provinces of Canada were being laid, the wildernesses which one day were to become the western provinces were just rising above the horizon of discovery. In the plains and prairies between the Great Lakes and the Rockies, fur traders warred for the privilege of exchanging with the Indians bad whiskey for good furs. Scottish traders from Montreal, following in the footsteps of La Verendrye and Niverville, pushed far into the northern wilds.* In 1788 the leading traders joined forces in organizing the North-West Company. Their great canoes, manned by French-Canadian voyageurs, penetrated the network of waters from the Ottawa to the Saskatchewan, and poured wealth into the pockets of the lordly partners in Montreal. Their rivalry wakened the sleepy Hudson's Bay Company, which was now forced to leave the shores of the inland sea and build posts in the interior.

* It is interesting to note the dominant share taken in the trade and exploration of the North and West by men of Highland Scotch and French extraction. For an account of La Verendrye see "The Conquest of New France" and for the Scotch fur traders of Montreal see "Adventurers of Oregon" (in "The Chronicles of America").