His successor was Guy Carleton, who arrived in Canada in September, 1766, and carried on the administration as Lieutenant-Governor till 1768, when he became Governor-in-chief. Like Murray, he was a soldier of distinction, and had been a warm personal friend of Wolfe, who made him one of the executors of his will. He was born in 1724, at Strabane in the north of Ireland, the third son of General Sir Guy Carleton. He went into the Guards, was transferred to the 72nd Regiment, and served in Germany, at Louisbourg, and, as Quartermaster-General, with Wolfe at Quebec. He remained at Quebec with Murray during the eventful winter of 1759-60; and, after further active service at Belle Isle and Havana, he came back to Quebec in 1766, to do more than any one man in war and peace for the safety and well-being of Canada as a British possession. [Sidenote: Conditions which led to the passing of the Quebec Act.] The difficulties which Murray had been called upon to meet confronted him also, and, like Murray, he saw the necessity as well as the justice of resisting the extravagant claims of the minority, and conciliating to British rule the large body of the Canadian population. For nearly four years he remained at his post, forming his views as to the lines on which Canada should be remodelled. In August, 1770, he left for England on leave of absence, and in England he remained until the Quebec Act had been passed. The Act was passed in June, 1774, taking effect from the 1st of May in the following year; and in the middle of September, 1774, Carleton arrived again at Quebec. It is now proposed to review the conditions which led to the passing of the Act, and the policy which was embodied in it, omitting as far as possible minor incidents and dealing only with the main features, which illustrate the general course of British colonial history. [Sidenote: The Conquest of Canada presented a new problem in British colonial history.] The acquisition of Canada presented to British statesmen a wholly new problem. The British Empire had hitherto widened mainly by means of settlement, for the seventeenth century, as far as Great Britain was concerned, was a time of settlement, not of conquest. Jamaica, it is true, had been taken from the Spaniards, and New York from the Dutch; but, great as was the importance of securing those two dependencies in the light of subsequent history, the conquest or cession of both the one and the other was rather an incident than the result of an era of war and conquest. Such an era came with the eighteenth century; and, when the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 secured Great Britain in undivided possession of Newfoundland, and confirmed to her the possession of the Acadian peninsula, and of the Rock of Gibraltar, a notable outpost of the future Empire, there was a beginning, though a small beginning, of territorial expansion as the result of war.