The first reason was that they were not oppressed. On the contrary they had already enjoyed more liberty under the British Government than under the old French régime. There were complaints, no doubt, as will be seen, but the Canadians were free to make them; there was no stifling of discontent, no stamping out of inconvenient pleas for liberty. With British rule came in the printing press. The _Quebec Gazette_ was first issued in June, 1764, and in it the ordinances were published in French as well as in English. Even under military administration a formerly submissive people learnt their privileges and their rights, and General Murray, whose recall was due to allegations that he had unduly favoured the French population at the expense of the Protestant Loyalists, wrote of the Canadians as a ‘frugal, industrious, moral race of men who, from the just and mild treatment they met with from His Majesty’s military officers, who ruled the country four years, until the establishment of civil government, had greatly got the better of the natural antipathy they had to their conquerors’.[35] Canada was not anxious to overturn a system under which Canadians were being trained to be free. If England oppressed, she oppressed Englishmen rather than Frenchmen or natives, and one element in the alleged oppression of her own people consisted in safeguarding the rights of other races. [Sidenote: They preferred the English in and from England to the English colonists in America.] The second and the main reason why Canada did not combine with the United States was that, though Canadians did not love the English from England, they loved less their English neighbours in America. Charles the Second told his brother that the English would not kill himself to make James king. Similarly the Canadians, on reflection, were not prepared to turn out the British Government in order to substitute the domination of the English colonies. Generalities as to natural rights and equal liberties, borrowed from the writings of European philosophers, could not cover up the plain facts of the case. Canada, united to the English colonies, would have been submerged, and French Roman Catholics would have been permanently subject to English Protestants, far less tolerant than Englishmen at home. The colonists who had issued the high-sounding manifesto had done so with strong resentment at the extension of the limits of the province of Quebec, at the widening of the field in which the Canadian system and the religion of Canada should hold its own. They were speaking with two voices at one and the same time; calling on the Canadians not to submit to British tyranny, and denouncing as tyranny a measure which favoured Canada. Many years back the Canadians and their friends had differentiated between the English from England, who came out to fight, and the English colonists in America. The eye-witness of the siege and capture of