On the other hand there was bitter and intelligible opposition to the annexation to Canada of ‘immense territories, now desert, but which are the best parts of that continent and which run on the back of all your ancient colonies’.[54] The decision which was now taken meant cutting off the existing English colonies from the West; and, in view of the other provisions of the Act, the incorporation of the new territories with Canada placed them under an administration in which there was at the time no element of self-government and which gave formal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church. It was, in short, or seemed to be, an admission that the old claim of Canada to the regions of the Ohio, against which, while Canada was still a French possession, the British Government and the British colonies had alike contended, was after all a valid claim; and it was, or seemed to be, a pronouncement that in years to come the future of the Western lands was to be shaped on Canadian principles and Canadian traditions, rather than on those which had moulded and inspired the ever-growing colonies of the British race. It has been argued that true statesmanship would, in accordance with the plan which had been at one time contemplated, have constituted the territories beyond the 45th parallel a separate province under the Crown, separate alike from Canada on the one hand, and from Pennsylvania and Virginia on the other. This might possibly have been a preferable course; but, as subsequent experience showed in the case of Upper Canada, an inland colony, whose only outlet is through other provinces, is always in a difficult position; and the multiplication of communities in North America had already borne a crop of difficulties. Moreover, the particular circumstances of the time accounted for the decision which was taken, as they accounted also for the strong antagonism which that decision called forth. In the same session in which the Quebec Act was passed, the British Parliament had already enacted three punitive laws against the recalcitrant colony of Massachusetts; one closing the harbour of Boston; another altering the legislature, and giving to the governor the power of appointing and removing the judges, magistrates, and sheriffs; and a third empowering the trial of persons accused of capital offences in the discharge of their public duties to be held outside the limits of the province. If it was thought necessary thus to limit the liberties of one of the English colonies by Imperial legislation, it would have been hopelessly illogical to enlarge the borders of others among the sister communities; and if the only possible alternative was to keep the Western territories directly under the Crown, it was simpler, and involved less friction and debate, to attach them by a single clause in a Bill to the existing province of Quebec, than to treat them as a separate unit and to provide them with an administration and a legislature by a separate law.