=Canada under the Quebec Act 1774.= from T. Pownall’s map of the Middle British Colonies of N. America, London 1775. _to face page 81_ B. V. Barbishire, Oxford, 1908 ] It will be remembered[49] that these territories had not been included in the province of Quebec for three reasons: that their incorporation with the conquered province might have been held to be an admission that the British title to them only dated from the conquest of Canada, that their annexation to any particular province would have given to that province a preponderating advantage in regard to trade with the Indians, and that the extension to them of the laws and administration of the province of Quebec would have necessitated the establishment of a number of military garrisons throughout the territories. The first of these three objections was, in fact, taken in the debates on the Quebec Bill. ‘The first object of the Bill,’ said Mr. Dunning in the House of Commons on the 26th of May, 1774, ‘is to make out that to be[50] Canada, which it was the struggle of this country to say, was not Canada.’ The second objection was clearly potent in the minds of the partisans of the old British colonies, who opposed the Bill. It would seem that when the Proclamation of 1763 was issued, the British Government had contemplated passing an Act of Parliament, constituting a separate administration for the Western territories, but the plan, whatever it was, never came to the birth;[51] and, as the King had foreseen, ‘great inconvenience’ had arisen ‘from so large a tract of land being left, without being subject to the civil jurisdiction of some governor’.[52] This inconvenience the Quebec Act tried to rectify by bringing these western lands under the government of Canada. The line now laid down, on the motion of Burke in the House of Commons, was carried from the point where the 45th parallel of latitude intersected the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, up Lake Ontario and the Niagara river into Lake Erie, and along the southern or eastern shore of Lake Erie, until it met the alleged frontier of the state of Pennsylvania, or, if that frontier was found not to touch the lake, up to the point nearest to the north-western angle of Pennsylvania. From that angle it skirted the western boundary of Pennsylvania down to the Ohio, which river it followed to the Mississippi. [Sidenote: Claims of Pennsylvania.]