t
Nairne with some natives, and only three Europeans, went up country,
through woods and bogs, to seize the offender. When there was fighting
his natives fled, and he was shot through the body. It was a pity, says
John Nairne's correspondent, Hepburn, to lose his life "in so silly a
manner." He would soon have been governor of Bencoolen and was in a way
to make "a great figure in life." Of his fortune of L6,000 John Nairne
received a part. Twenty-five years after his brother's death Nairne was
to get at Murray Bay similar news of the loss of his own son in distant
India. It has levied a heavy tribute of Britain's best blood.

In 1774 Nairne again revisited Scotland. Though no politician, he must
have heard much about the Quebec Act, then before the Imperial
Parliament. The Governor of Canada, Sir Guy Carleton, after careful
consideration of the whole question, had reached the conclusion, not
belied by subsequent history, as far as the Province of Quebec is
concerned, that Canada would always be French and that, with some slight
modifications, the French system found there by Britain should be given
final and legal status under British supremacy. So the Quebec Act was
passed in 1774. While the British criminal law was introduced, the
French civil law, including the land system under which Nairne held
Murray Bay, was left unchanged. The Bill gave the Church the same
privileged position that it had enjoyed under Catholic sovereigns. The
tithe could be collected by legal process; taxation for church purposes
voted by the parochial authority called the _fabrique_ was as compulsory
as civil taxes, unless the person taxed declared that he was not a Roman
Catholic; and the whole ecclesiastical system of New France was
supported and encouraged. The Bill caused much irritation in Protestant
New England, which saw some malicious design in the establishment of
Roman Catholicism on its borders. The Continental Congress of 1775
denounced the Quebec Act, and even the Declaration of Independence has
something to say about it.

It is obvious that Nairne disliked the Bill. His irrepressible friend,
Gilchrist, wrote giving a picture of its probable dire social results,
upsetting all domestic relations between the two races. The Bill, says
Gilchrist, "is the most pernicious [that] could have been devised. Judge
of the Fetes now that the fools have got the sanction of the British
Parliament to their beggaring principles. It is not clear th