Once more, too, it must be noticed that the actual merits of British statesmanship and policy militated against its success. It was so keenly desired to give the new subjects all the privileges enjoyed by the old, that too little account was taken of the training, the wishes, and the present needs of the new subjects. The Canadians were politically children. They had never known even the semblance of representative institutions. They had from all time been born and bred under authority--under the King, under the Church, under the seigniors. They had learnt unquestioning obedience, and could not at once be re-cast in a democratic mould. The printing press, the Assembly for law-making and debate, the standing quarrels with governors, the withholding of supplies, the aggressive freedom in every form which characterized the English communities in North America, all were alien to the French Canadian. The wine might be good, but it was new, and pouring it into old bottles could only have one result, the loss of the wine and the bursting of the bottles. So also with British law and justice: that too was new and largely unintelligible; the language puzzled and confused, and the lawyers who came in found the confusion profitable. Premature attempts or proposals to assimilate only served to emphasize differences, and for the moment good intentions paved the way to something like anarchy. [Sidenote: Presentment of the Grand Jury in October, 1764.] In September, 1764, the ordinance constituting courts of justice was promulgated, and in the following month the Grand Jury at Quebec made a presentment, enumerating a number of alleged grievances, concerned not merely with the administration of justice, but also with various matters which lay wholly outside their sphere. ‘We represent,’ so the framers of the presentment wrote, ‘that as the Grand Jury must be considered at present as the only body representative of the colony, they, as British subjects, have a right to be consulted, before any ordinance that may affect the body that they represent be passed into a law.’ It was an impertinent document, a kind of manifesto against the Government; and, taken by itself alone, gave ample evidence of the class and the temper of the men who were determined to make trouble in Canada. It was signed by some French jurors as well as English, but a supplement to it, signed by the English, or, at any rate, by the Protestant members alone, protested against Roman Catholics being admitted as jurors, and it soon appeared that the French jurors had signed the main document in ignorance of its contents.[43] ‘Little, very little,’ wrote Murray, ‘will content the new subjects, but nothing will satisfy the licentious fanatics trading here, but the expulsion of the Canadians who are perhaps the bravest and the best race upon the globe, a race who, could they be indulged with a few privileges which the laws of England deny to Roman Catholics