and determination of all civil and criminal cases, “according to law and equity, and as near as may be agreeable to the laws of England,” with liberty to appeal, in all civil cases, to the privy council of England.  General Murray, who had been in the province since the battle on the Plains of Abraham, was appointed to administer the government.  Any persons elected to serve in an assembly were required, by his commission and instructions, before they could sit and vote, to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and subscribe a declaration against transubstantiation, the adoration of the Virgin, and the Sacrifice of the Mass.

This proclamation—­in reality a mere temporary expedient to give time for considering the whole state of the colony—­was calculated to do infinite harm, since its principal importance lay in the fact that it attempted to establish English civil as well as criminal law, and at the same time required oaths which effectively prevented the French Canadians from serving in the very assembly which it professed a desire on the part of the king to establish.  The English-speaking or Protestant people in the colony did not number in 1764 more than three hundred persons, of little or no standing, and it was impossible to place all power in their hands and to ignore nearly seventy thousand French Canadian Roman Catholics.  Happily the governor, General Murray, was not only an able soldier, as his defence of Quebec against Levis had proved, but also a man of statesmanlike ideas, animated by a high sense of duty and a sincere desire to do justice to the foreign people committed to his care.  He refused to lend himself to the designs of the insignificant British minority, chiefly from the New England colonies, or to be guided by their advice in carrying on his government.  His difficulties were lessened by the fact that the French had no conception of representative institutions in the English sense, and were quite content with any system of government that left them their language, religion, and civil law without interference.  The stipulations of the capitulations of 1759-1760, and of the treaty of Paris, with respect to the free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion, were always observed in a spirit of great fairness:  and in 1766 Monseigneur Briand was chosen, with the governor’s approval, Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec.  He was consecrated at Paris after his election by the chapter of Quebec, and it does not appear that his recognition ever became the subject of parliamentary discussion.  This policy did much to reconcile the French Canadians to their new rulers, and to make them believe that eventually they would receive full consideration in other essential respects.