There were five thousand souls left in Quebec, which was well provisioned for the winter.  The women, children, and men unfit to bear arms numbered three thousand.  The ‘exempts’ amounted to a hundred and eighty.  As there was a growing suspicion about many of these last, Carleton paraded them for medical examination at the beginning of March, when, a good deal more than half were found quite fit for duty.  These men had been malingering all winter in order to skulk out of danger; so he treated them with extreme leniency in only putting them on duty as a ’company of Invalids.’  But the slur stuck fast.  The only other exceptions to the general efficiency were a very few instances of cowardice and many more of slackness.  The militia order-books have repeated entries about men who turned up late for even important duties as well as about others whose authorized substitutes were no better than themselves.  But it should be remembered that, as a whole, the garrison did exceedingly good service and that all the malingerers and serious delinquents together did not amount to more than a tenth of its total, which is a small proportion for such a mixed body.

The effective strength at the beginning of the siege was eighteen hundred of all ranks.  Only one hundred of these belonged to the regular British garrison in Canada—­a few staff-officers, twenty-two men of the Royal Artillery, and seventy men of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, a regiment which was to be commanded in Quebec sixteen years later by Queen Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent.  The Fusiliers and two hundred and thirty ‘Royal Emigrants’ were formed into a little battalion under Colonel Maclean, a first-rate officer and Carleton’s right-hand man in action.  ’His Majesty’s Royal Highland Regiment of Emigrants,’ which subsequently became the 84th Foot, now known as the 2nd York and Lancaster, was hastily raised in 1775 from the Highland veterans who had settled in the American colonies after the Peace of 1763.  Maclean’s two hundred and thirty were the first men he could get together in time to reach Quebec.  The only other professional fighters were four hundred blue-jackets and thirty-five marines of H.M.SS. Lizard and Hunter, who were formed into a naval battalion under their own officers, Captains Hamilton and McKenzie, Hamilton being made a lieutenant-colonel and McKenzie a major while doing duty ashore.  Fifty masters and mates of trading vessels were enrolled in the same battalion.  The whole of the shipping was laid up for the winter in the Cul de Sac, which alone made the Lower Town a prize worth taking.  The ‘British Militia’ mustered three hundred and thirty, the ‘Canadian Militia’ five hundred and forty-three.  These two corps included practically all the official and business classes in Quebec and formed nearly half the total combatants.  Some of them took no pay and were not bound to service beyond the neighbourhood of Quebec, thus being very much like the Home Guards