d made
no progress in manufactures. It was six years later before their first
collegiate institution, at Hanover, New Hampshire, was founded. But,
while Canada, perhaps, only loaded a couple of vessels with the skins
of the bear, the beaver, the buffalo, the fox, the lynx, the martin,
the minx, and the wolf, to prevent the total evaporation of heat from
the shoulders of the gentler sex in Paris or London, or to fringe the
velvet robes of the courtiers of St. James and the Tuileries, the New
Englanders employed, annually, about one thousand and seventy-eight
British vessels, manned by twenty-eight thousand nine hundred seamen,
while their whale and other fisheries had become of great
importance.[4] To change the military character of the sixty-nine
thousand inhabitants of Canada ceded by France to England, could not be
done immediately. That was as impossible as to make them abjure by
proclamation, their religion. All changes, to be lasting, must be
gradual, and the government of Great Britain only contemplated a
lasting change, by the introduction into Canada of her own people,
imbued with somewhat different ideas, religiously, legally, and
commercially, from those which actuated the conquered population.

[4] In 1771, however, 471,000 bushels of wheat were exported from
Canada, of which two-thirds, it was computed, were made in the
Sorel District. _See the Journal of Charles Carroll, of
Carollton, page 77._

CHAPTER II.

For some years after the conquest, the form of government was purely
military. It was, indeed, only in 1774, that two Acts were passed by
the British government, one with the view of providing a revenue for
the civil government of the Province of Quebec, as the whole of Canada
was then termed, the other, called "The Quebec Act," defining the
boundaries of the Province, setting aside all the provisions of the
Royal proclamation, of 1763, and appointing a governing Council of not
more than twenty-three, nor less than seventeen persons. And whatever
may have been the motive for this almost unlooked for liberality on the
part of the mother country, it is not a little singular that only a
year later, England's great difficulty with her old colonies occurred.
The Parliament of Great Britain had imposed, without even consulting
the colonists, a tax for the defence and protection of the colonies, on
clayed sugar, indigo, coffee, &c., and the colonists resisted. The
American