sh commandants forgot to appease the wound to the Indians'
pride by the customary gifts over solemn powwow. At Detroit and
Michilimackinac the French quietly withdraw from the palisades and
build their white-washed cottages outside the limits of the fort--2500
French habitants there are at Detroit.

If the four or five hundred English adventurers who swarmed to Canada
on the heels of the English army thought to batten on the sixty
thousand defeated French inhabitants, far otherwise thought and decreed
the English generals, Sir Jeffrey {277} Amherst, and Murray, who
succeeded him. "You will observe that the French are British subjects
as much as we are, and treat them accordingly," ruled Amherst; and
General Murray, who practically became the first governor of Canada on
Amherst's withdrawal, at once set himself to establish justice.

[Illustration: MAJOR ROBERT ROGERS]

No more forced labor! No more carrion birds of the official classes,
like Bigot, fattening on the poor habitants! British government in
Canada for the next few years is known as the period of military rule.
At Quebec, at Three Rivers, at Montreal, the commanding officers
established martial law with biweekly courts; and in the parishes the
local French officers, or seigneurs, are authorized to hear civil
cases. By the terms of surrender the people have been guaranteed their
religious liberty; and the Treaty of Paris, which cedes all Canada to
England in 1763, repeats this guarantee, though it leaves a thorn of
trouble in the flesh of England by reserving to France for the benefit
of the Grand Banks fishermen the Islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, as
well as shore rights of fishing on the west coast of Newfoundland.
Also, the proprietary rights of Jesuits, Sulpicians, Franciscans, are
to remain in abeyance for the pleasure of the English crown. The
rights of the sisterhoods are at once confirmed.

{278} One of General Murray's first acts as governor is to convey
gentle hint to the Abbe Le Loutre, now released from prison and come
back to Canada, that his absence will be appreciated by the government.
Within a few years there are five hundred English residents in Montreal
and Quebec; and now trouble begins for the government,--that wrangle
between English and French, between Protestant and Catholic, which is
to go on for a hundred years and retard Canada's progress by a century.

[Illustration: NORTH AMERICA AT THE CLOSE OF THE FRENCH WARS, 1763]