surrender of 500 regular British troops, at St. John's,
Canada East; the surrender of one hundred Canadians, of thirty-nine
pieces of cannon, of seven mortars, and of five hundred stand of arms?
Is it wonderful that Montreal, then so thinly inhabited and
indifferently garrisoned, should have capitulated, or that Quebec
should have been invested by Arnold, who sailed down the Chaudiere on
rafts, and by Montgomery, to whom Montreal had capitulated? It is only
wonderful that Quebec was successfully defended, and that General
Montgomery perished under her walls. Canada, notwithstanding the
temporary annexation of Montreal, was true to Great Britain, feeling
that whatever might have been the injustice of Britain to the old
Colonies, Canada had nothing then of which to complain. Indeed, the
attack upon the newly ceded province of Canada, was amongst the
earliest demonstrations of a disposition on the part of the old
Colonies to resort to violence. "The Quebec Act" was in itself a cause
of offence to them. On the 21st of October, 1774, the following
language was made use of by the Congress, in reference to that Act, in
an Address to the people of Great Britain:--"Nor can we suppress our
astonishment, that a British Parliament should ever consent to
establish in that country, a religion that has deluged your Island in
blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and
rebellion through every part of the world." And "That we think the
Legislature of Great Britain is not authorized by the Constitution to
establish a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets." The
attack was of a two-fold nature. Both the sword and the pen were
brought into requisition. It was supposed by the discontented old
colonists, that the boundary of the lakes and rivers which emptied
themselves into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and had formed the natural
barrier between two nations, until the peace of Paris, in 1763, when
Canada passed from the dominion of France to that of the British Crown,
formed no boundary to British rule, as the sway of the Anglo-Saxon race
was now fully established over the whole of the northern part of the
continent; and it was further supposed, that it was, therefore, proper
to detract, if possible, from the power of Great Britain, to harm the
revolutionary colonists on the great watery highway of the lakes and
rivers, or to prevent such a united force of Colonial and Provincial
inhabitants as might counterbala