from an experience of more than nine years.”  The government of the province was entrusted to a governor and a legislative council appointed by the crown, “inasmuch as it was inexpedient to call an assembly.”  The council was to be composed of not more than twenty-three residents of the province.  At the same time the British parliament made special enactments for the imposition of certain customs duties “towards defraying the charges of the administration of justice and the support of the civil government of the province.”  All deficiencies in the revenues derived from these and other sources had to be supplied by the imperial treasury.  During the passage of the act through parliament, it evoked the bitter hostility of Lord Chatham, who was then the self-constituted champion of the old colonies, who found the act most objectionable, not only because it established the Roman Catholic religion, but placed under the government of Quebec the rich territory west of the Alleghanies.  Similar views were expressed by the Mayor and Council of London, but they had no effect.  The king, in giving his assent, declared that the measure “was founded on the clearest principles of justice and humanity, and would have the best effect in quieting the minds and promoting the happiness of our Canadian subjects.”  In French Canada the act was received without any popular demonstration by the French Canadians, but the men to whom the great body of that people always looked for advice and guidance—­the priests, cures, and seigniors—­naturally regarded these concessions to their nationality as giving most unquestionable evidence of the considerate and liberal spirit in which the British government was determined to rule the province.  They had had ever since the conquest satisfactory proof that their religion was secure from all interference, and now the British parliament itself came forward with legal guarantees, not only for the free exercise of that religion, with all its incidents and tithes, but also for the permanent establishment of the civil law to which they attached so much importance.  The fact that no provision was made for a popular assembly could not possibly offend a people to whom local self-government in any form was entirely unknown.  It was impossible to constitute an assembly from the few hundred Protestants who were living in Montreal and Quebec, and it was equally impossible, in view of the religious prejudices dominant in England and the English colonies, to give eighty thousand French Canadian Roman Catholics privileges which their co-religionists did not enjoy in Great Britain and to allow them to sit in an elected assembly.  Lord North seemed to voice the general opinion of the British parliament on this difficult subject, when he closed the debate with an expression of “the earnest hope that the Canadians will, in the course of time, enjoy as much of our laws and as much of our constitution as may be beneficial to that country and safe for this”,