eir loyalty.
In Canada he surrounded himself with such men as Herman W. Ryland, the
governor's secretary, and John Sewell, the attorney-general, men who
were actually in favour of repressing the French Canadians and of
crushing the power of their Church. 'I have long since laid it down as
a principle (which in my judgment no Governor of this Province ought to
lose sight of for a moment),' wrote Ryland in 1804, 'by every possible
means which prudence can suggest, gradually to undermine the authority
and influence of the Roman Catholic Priest.' 'The Province must be
converted into an English Colony,' declared Sewell, 'or it will
ultimately be lost to England.' The opinion these men held of the
French Canadians was most uncomplimentary. 'In the ministerial
dictionary,' complained _Le Canadien_, 'a bad fellow,
anti-ministerialist, democrat, _sans culotte_, and damned Canadian,
mean the same thing.'

[Illustration: Sir James Craig. From a portrait in the Dominion
Archives.]

Surrounded by such advisers, it is not {17} surprising that Sir James
Craig soon took umbrage at the language and policy of _Le Canadien_.
At first he made his displeasure felt in a somewhat roundabout way. In
the summer of 1808 he dismissed from the militia five officers who were
reputed to have a connection with that newspaper, on the ground that
they were helping a 'seditious and defamatory journal.' One of these
officers was Colonel Panet, who had fought in the defence of Quebec in
1775 and had been speaker of the House of Assembly since 1792; another
was Pierre Bedard. This action did not, however, curb the temper of
the paper; and a year or more later Craig went further. In May 1810 he
took the extreme step of suppressing _Le Canadien_, and arresting the
printer and three of the proprietors, Taschereau, Blanchet, and Bedard.
The ostensible pretext for this measure was the publication in the
paper of some notes of a somewhat academic character with regard to the
conflict which had arisen between the governor and the House of
Assembly in Jamaica; the real reason, of course, went deeper.

Craig afterwards asserted that the arrest of Bedard and his associates
was 'a measure of precaution, not of punishment.' There is no {18}
doubt that he actually feared a rising of the French Canadians. To his
mind a rebellion was imminent. The event showed that his suspicions
were ill-founded; but in justice to him it must be remembered that he
was go