"
Leadership under these conditions fell to the "unprincipled
Demagogues," half-educated lawyers, men "with nothing to lose."
But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and
shopkeepers, nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but as an
Englishman on guard against Frenchmen that Craig found himself at
odds with his Assembly. For nearly twenty years in this period
England was at death grips with France, end to hate and despise
all Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and congenial duty of
all true Britons. Craig and those who counseled him were firmly
convinced that the new subjects were French at heart. Of the
250,000 inhabitants of Lower Canada, he declared, "about 20,000
or 25,000 may be English or Americans, the rest are French. I use
the term designedly, my Lord, because I mean to say that they are
in Language, in religion, in manner and in attachment completely
French." That there was still some affection for old France,
stirred by war and French victories, there is no question, but
that the Canadians wished to return to French allegiance was
untrue, even though Craig reported that such was "the general
opinion of all ranks with whom it is possible to converse on the
subject." The French Revolution had created a great gulf between
Old France and New France. The clergy did their utmost to bar all
intercourse with the land where deism and revolution held sway,
and when the Roman Catholic Church and the British Government
combined for years on a single object, it was little wonder they
succeeded.
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