It was the honest desire of the British Government to give liberty to Canada, to treat it, not as a conquered country, but as a British colony. Liberty, as the English understand it, has connoted three things, representative institutions, British law and justice, including especially trial by jury and the Habeas Corpus Act, and freedom of conscience. But in past times to Protestants freedom of conscience meant practical exclusion from the political sphere of those, like Roman Catholics, whose creed was in principle an exclusive creed; and therefore, in a Roman Catholic country under Protestant supremacy, like Ireland or Canada in the eighteenth century, representative institutions from the strong Protestant point of view meant institutions which did not represent the bulk of the population. In this matter, as in others, in the case of Canada, English statesmen and English governors, though not at once prepared to dispense with religious tests, were more liberally inclined towards the ‘new subjects’, the French Canadians, than were the English colonists in America; and the soldier Murray had far more breadth of mind than the local lawyers and politicians who prated of liberties which they had no intention of granting to others. [Sidenote: Murray’s letter to Lord Shelburne.] [Sidenote: His opinion of the Protestant minority in Canada.] Shortly after his return to England, in 1766, Murray expressed his views as to the small Protestant minority in Canada in plain outspoken terms. In a letter addressed to Lord Shelburne on the 20th of August in that year, he wrote, ‘most of them were followers of the army, of mean education, or soldiers disbanded at the reduction of the troops. All have their fortunes to make, and I fear few of them are solicitous about the means when the end can be obtained. I report them to be in general the most immoral collection of men I ever knew, of course little calculated to make the new subjects enamoured with our laws, religion, and customs, far less adapted to enforce these laws and to govern.’ As the Canadian peasantry, he continued, ‘have been taught to respect their superiors and not get intoxicated with the abuse of liberty, they are shocked at the insults which their noblesse and the King’s officers have received from the English traders and lawyers, since the civil government took place.... Magistrates were to be made and juries to be composed from four hundred and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders ... the Canadian noblesse were hated because their birth and behaviour entitled them to respect, and the peasants were abhorred because they were saved from the oppression they were threatened with.’ Equally severe was his judgement on ‘the improper choice and the number of the civil officers sent out from England’, ignorant of the law and language, rapacious, and lowering the dignity of government. In short his letter[42] was a wholesale condemnation of the representatives of the party