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Montcalm, who was not only a general, but a statesman, is said to have expressed himself to the effect, that the conquest of Canada by England would endanger her retention of the New England colonies, and ultimately prove injurious to her interests on this continent. Canada, not subject to France, would be no source of uneasiness or annoyance to the English colonists, who already were becoming politically important, and somewhat impatient of restraint. How far such an opinion was justifiable, is to be gathered from the condition of Canada and the colonies of Great Britain in America, at this hour.

Canada was, in 1763, ceded by His Most Christian Majesty, the King of France, to His Britannic Majesty King George the Second. Emigration from the United Kingdom to Canada was encouraged—not to Canada only, but to Nova Scotia, which then included the present Province of New Brunswick. By the treaty of 1763, signed at Paris, Nova Scotia, Canada, the Isle of Cape Breton, and all the other Islands in the Gulf and River St. Lawrence, were ceded to the British Crown. Britain, not only powerful in arms, but, even at this period, great in commerce, was about to change, though almost imperceptibly, the feelings of her new subjects. The old or New England colonies, which had so largely contributed to the subjugation of Canada, were already largely engaged in trade. They had not made much progress in agriculture. They had made no progress in manufactures. It was six years later before their first collegiate institution, at Hanover, New Hampshire, was founded. But, while Canada, perhaps, only loaded a couple of vessels with the skins of the bear, the beaver, the buffalo, the fox, the lynx, the martin, the minx, and the wolf, to prevent the total evaporation of heat from the shoulders of the gentler sex in Paris or London, or to fringe the velvet robes of the courtiers of St. James and the Tuileries, the New Englanders employed, annually, about one thousand and seventy-eight British vessels, manned by twenty-eight thousand nine hundred seamen, while their whale and other fisheries had become of great importance.[4] To change the military character of the sixty-nine thousand inhabitants of Canada ceded by France to England, could not be done immediately. That was as impossible as to make them abjure by proclamation, their religion. All changes, to be lasting, must be gradual, and the government of Great Britain only contemplated a lasting change, by the introduction into Canada of her own people, imbued with somewhat different ideas, religiously, legally, and commercially, from those which actuated the conquered population.