Canada had by this time cost France dear; and she silently left it to its miserable fate.  In vain did the governor, the general, the commissariat demand incessantly re-enforcements, money, provisions; no help came from France.  “We keep on fighting, nevertheless,” wrote Montcalm to the minister of war, “and we will bury ourselves, if necessary, under the ruins of the colony.”  Famine, the natural result of neglecting the land, went on increasing:  the Canadians, hunters and soldiers as they were, had only cleared and cultivated their fields in the strict ratio of their daily wants; there was a lack of hands; every man was under arms; destitution prevailed everywhere; the inhabitants of Quebec were reduced to siege-rations; the troops complained and threatened to mutiny; the enemy had renewed their efforts:  in the campaign of 1758, the journals of the Anglo-American colonies put their land forces at sixty thousand men.  “England has at the present moment more troops in motion on this continent than Canada contains inhabitants, including old men, women, and children,” said a letter to Paris from M. Doreil, war commissioner.  Mr. Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, who had lately, come to the head of the English government, resolved to strike the last blow at the French power in America.  Three armies simultaneously invaded Canada; on the 25th of June, 1759, a considerable fleet brought under the walls of Quebec General Wolfe, a young and hopeful officer who had attracted notice at the siege of Louisbourg.  “If General Montcalm succeeds again this year in frustrating our hopes,” said Wolfe, “he may be considered an able man; either the colony has resources that nobody knows of, or our generals are worse than usual.”

Quebec was not fortified; the loss of it involved that of all Canada; it was determined to protect the place by an outlying camp; appeal was made to the Indian tribes, lately zealous in the service of France, but now detached from it by ill fortune and diminution of the advantages offered them, and already for the most part won over by the English.  The Canadian colonists, exhausted by war and famine, rose in mass to defend their capital.  The different encampments which surrounded Quebec contained about thirteen thousand soldiers.  “So strong a force had not been reckoned upon,” says an eye-witness, “because nobody had expected to have so large a number of Canadians; but there prevailed so much emulation among this people that there were seen coming into the camp old men of eighty and children of from twelve to thirteen, who would not hear of profiting by the exemption accorded to their age.”  The poor cultivators, turned soldiers, brought to the camp their slender resources; the enemy was already devastating the surrounding country.  “It will take them half a century to repair the damage,” wrote an American officer in his journal of the expedition on the St. Lawrence.  The bombardment of Quebec was commencing at the same moment.