The situation in Canada proper presented the British authorities with a problem new in their imperial experience.Hitherto, save for Acadia and New Netherland, where the settlers were few in numbers and, even in New Netherland, closely akin to the conquerors in race, religion, and speech, no colony containing men of European stocks had been acquired by conquest.Canada held some sixty or seventy thousand settlers, French and Catholic almost to a man.Despite the inefficiency of French colonial methods the plantation had taken firm root.The colony had developed a strength, a social structure, and an individuality all its own.Along the St.Lawrence and the Richelieu the settlements lay close and compact; the habitants' whitewashed cottages lined the river banks only a few arpents apart.The social cohesion of the colony was equally marked.Alike in government, in religion, and in industry, it was a land where authority was strong.Governor and intendant, feudal seigneur, bishop and Jesuit superior, ruled each in his own sphere and provided a rigid mold and framework for the growth of the colony.
There were, it is true, limits to the reach of the arm of authority.Beyond Montreal stretched a vast wilderness merging at some uncertain point into the other wilderness that was Louisiana.Along the waterways which threaded this great No Man's Land the coureurs-de-bois roamed with little heed to law or license, glad to escape from the paternal strictness that irked youth on the lower St.Lawrence.But the liberty of these rovers of the forest was not liberty after the English pattern; the coureur-de-bois was of an entirely different type from the pioneers of British stock who were even then pushing their way through the gaps in the Alleghanies and making homes in the backwoods.Priest and seigneur, habitant and coureur-de-bois were one and all difficult to fit into accepted English ways.Clearly Canada promised to strain the digestive capacity of the British lion.
The present western provinces of the Dominion were still the haunt of Indian and buffalo.French-Canadian explorers and fur traders, it is true, had penetrated to the Rockies a few years before the Conquest, and had built forts on Lake Winnipeg, on the Assiniboine and Red rivers, and at half a dozen portages on the Saskatchewan.But the "Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay" had not yet ventured inland, still content to carry on its trade with the Indians from its forts along the shores of that great sea.On the Pacific the Russians had coasted as far south as Mount Saint Elias, but no white man, so far as is known, had set foot on the shores of what is now British Columbia.
Two immediate problems were bequeathed to the British Government by the Treaty of Paris: what was to be done with the unsettled lands between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi; and how were the seventy thousand French subjects in the valley of the St.
Lawrence to be dealt with? The first difficulty was not solved.
It was merely postponed.The whole back country of the English colonies was proclaimed an Indian reserve where the King's white subjects might trade but might not acquire land.This policy was not devised in order to set bounds to the expansion of the older colonies; that was an afterthought.The policy had its root in an honest desire to protect the Indians from the frauds of unscrupulous traders and from the encroachments of settlers on their hunting grounds.The need of a conciliatory, if firm, policy in regard to the great interior was made evident by the Pontiac rising in 1763, the aftermath of the defeat of the French, who had done all they could to inspire the Indians with hatred for the advancing English.
How to deal with Canada was a more thorny problem.The colony had not been sought by its conquerors for itself.It was counted of little worth.The verdict of its late possessors, as recorded in Voltaire's light farewell to "a few arpents of snow," might be discounted as an instance of sour grapes; but the estimate of its new possessors was evidently little higher, since they debated long and dubiously whether in the peace settlement they should retain Canada or the little sugar island of Guadeloupe, a mere pin point on the map.Canada had been conquered not for the good it might bring but for the harm it was doing as a base for French attack upon the English colonies--"the wasps" nest must be smoked out." But once it had been taken, it had to be dealt with for itself.
