rom oaths of office and
enabled to serve on the jury. Also, the Catholic clergy is entitled to
collect its usual tithe of one twenty-sixth from the Catholics. An
elective assembly is refused for reasons that are plain, but a
legislative council is granted, to be appointed by the crown. For the
expense of government a slight tax is levied on liquor; but as the St.
Pierre smuggling is now flourishing, the tax docs not begin to meet the
cost of government, and the difference is paid from the imperial
treasury. However badly the imperial government blundered with the New
England colonies, her treatment of Quebec was an object lesson in
colonizing to the world. Had she treated her New England colonies half
as justly as she treated Quebec, British America might to-day extend to
Mexico. Had she treated Quebec half as unjustly as she treated her own
offspring of New England, the United States might to-day extend to the
Arctic Circle. The man who saved Canada to England, in the first place
by wisdom, in the second place by war, was Sir Guy Carleton.

While the English and French, Protestant and Catholic, wrangle for
power in Quebec there rages on the frontier one of the most devastating
Indian wars known to American history. Not for nothing had Pontiac
drawn himself to his full height and defied Major Rogers down on Lake
Erie. From tribe to tribe the lithe coureurs ran, naked but for the
breechcloth, painted as for war, carrying in one hand the tomahawk
dipped in blood, in the other the wampum belt of purple, typifying war.
The French had deeded away the Indian lands to the English! The news
ran like wildfire, ran by moccasin telegram from Montreal up Ottawa
River to Michilimackinac, from Niagara westward to Detroit, and
southward to Presqu' Isle and all that chain of forts leading
southwestward to the Mississippi. Was it a "Conspiracy of Pontiac," as
it has been called? Hardly. It was more one of those general
movements of unrest, of discontent, of misunderstanding, that but
awaits the appearance of {282} a brave leader to become a torrent of
destruction. Pontiac, the Ottawa chief, was such a leader, and to his
standard rallied Indians from Virginia, from the Mississippi, from Lake
Superior. Of the universal unrest among the Indians the English were
not ignorant, but they failed to realize its significance; failed, too,
to realize that the French fur traders, cast out of the western forts
and now roaming the wi