While Murray and his lieutenants had been collecting information for their reports the home government had been undergoing many changes for the worse.  The master-statesman Pitt had gone out of power and the back-stairs politician Bute had come in.  Pitt’s ’bloody and expensive war’—­the war that more than any other, laid the foundations of the present British Empire—­was to be ended on any terms the country could be persuaded to bear.  Thus the end of the Seven Years’ War, or, as the British part of it was more correctly called, the ‘Maritime War,’ was no more glorious in statesmanship than its beginning had been in arms.  But the spirit of its mighty heart still lived on in the Empire’s grateful memories of Pitt and quickened the English-speaking world enough to prevent any really disgraceful surrender of the hard-won fruits of victory.

The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 10th of February 1763, and the king’s proclamation, published in October, were duly followed by the inauguration of civil government in Canada.  The incompetent Bute, anxious to get Pitt out of the way, tried to induce him to become the first British governor of the new colony.  Even Bute probably never dared to hope that Pitt would actually go out to Canada.  But he did hope to lower his prestige by making him the holder of a sinecure at home.  However this may be, Pitt, mightiest of all parliamentary ministers of war, refused to be made either a jobber or an exile; whereupon Murray’s position was changed from a military command into that of ‘Governor and Captain-General.’

The changes which ensued in the laws of Canada were heartily welcomed so far as the adoption of the humaner criminal code of England was concerned.  The new laws relating to debtor and creditor also gave general satisfaction, except, as we shall presently see, when they involved imprisonment for debt.  But the tentative efforts to introduce English civil law side by side with the old French code resulted in great confusion and much discontent.  The land laws had become so unworkable under this dual system that they had to be left as they were.  A Court of Common Pleas was set up specially for the benefit of the French Canadians.  If either party demanded a jury one had to be sworn in; and French Canadians were to be jurors on equal terms with ‘the King’s Old Subjects.’  The Roman Catholic Church was to be completely tolerated but not in any way established.  Lord Egremont, in giving the king’s instructions to Murray, reminded him that the proviso in the Treaty of Paris—­as far as the Laws of Great Britain permit—­should govern his action whenever disputes arose.  It must be remembered that the last Jacobite rising was then a comparatively recent affair, and that France was equally ready to upset either the Protestant succession in England or the British regime in Canada.