Haldimand was a man of the Carleton type; and, before he left London to take up his appointment, he wrote to Germain to the effect that he should be given full discretion in military matters, and, as civil governor, have the nomination to all appointments. Like Carleton, he was attacked by the partisans of Congress in Canada as a military despot, the enemy of civil liberties, the best known case against him being that of Du Calvet,[152] a French Protestant, who was in 1780 arrested and imprisoned for encouraging and abetting treason, and who subsequently published his case against the governor in London. That Du Calvet was a traitor there seems to have been no doubt, but his charges against the governor coloured the view which was commonly taken in after years of Haldimand’s administration. None the less, whatever may have been the technical merits of this and other individual cases, it is beyond question that, at a time when England was badly served both at home and abroad, in the most critical years, and in Canada where the position was most difficult, she was conspicuously well served by Carleton and Haldimand. Haldimand governed a community, in which the minority, as in Carleton’s time, was largely disaffected, and the loyalty of the majority was undermined by French appeals. From day to day the danger of attack at this point or at that was imminent, while there was constant risk that the supplies which came over the sea would be intercepted by French ships or American privateers. In England Haldimand’s master was still the same self-willed, half-informed minister Germain. In Canada there were few that he could trust. Yet solitary in public as in private life--for he had no wife or child--he held the reins of government with a firm and an honest hand, a good servant of England though of foreign birth. If Canada at the present day be compared with the province of Quebec which the Peace of 1763 gave into British keeping, the three main elements in the evolution of the great Dominion will be found to have been British immigration, canals, and railways. Railways, opening the North-West and linking the two oceans, date from long after Haldimand’s time; but he was governor when the first steps were taken to improve the waterways of Canada, and he watched over the incoming of the United Empire Loyalists. [Sidenote: The Vermont negotiations.]