While Canada was still under military rule, and before the Peace of Paris was signed, the British Government took steps to collect full information as to their newly-acquired possession, with a view to determining the lines on which it should be administered in future. At the end of 1761 Amherst was instructed to obtain the necessary reports, which were in the following year duly supplied by Murray, Burton, and Gage in respect of Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal respectively.[36] Canada at this time contained little more than 70,000 white inhabitants. The population, Murray thought, had tended to decrease for twenty years past, owing to war, to the strictness of the marriage laws, and to the prohibition of marriages between Protestants and Roman Catholics; but he looked for a large increase from natural causes in the next twenty years, the men being strong and the women extremely prolific. The Canadians, Murray wrote, were ‘mostly of a Norman race’ and, ‘in general, of a litigious disposition’. He classified them into the gentry, the clergy, the merchants, and the peasantry or habitants. The gentry or seigniors, descendants of military or civil officers, the creation largely of Louis XIV, Colbert, and Talon, he described as for the most part men of small means, unless they had held one or other of the distant posts, where they could make their fortunes. ‘They are extremely vain, and have an utter contempt for the trading part of the colony, though they made no scruple to engage in it, pretty deeply too, whenever a convenient opportunity served. They were great tyrants to their vassals, who seldom met with redress, let their grievances be ever so just. This class will not relish the British Government, from which they can neither expect the same employments or the same douceurs they enjoyed under the French.’ Of the clergy he wrote that the higher ranks were filled by Frenchmen, the rest being Canadian born, and in general Canadians of the lower class. Similarly the wholesale traders were mostly French, and the retail traders natives of Canada. The peasantry he described as ‘a strong, healthy race, plain in their dress, virtuous in their morals, and temperate in their living’, extremely ignorant, and extremely tenacious of their religion. At the time of writing, Murray and his colleagues evidently anticipated more loyalty from the peasantry than from the higher classes of Canadians. Protected in their religion, given impartial justice, freed from class oppression and official corruption, they seemed likely to develop into happy and contented subjects of the British Crown. The sequel was, however, to show that more support would accrue to the new rulers of Canada from the classes which had something to lose than from the credulous habitants.