Such were the principal provisions of the Quebec Act. It embodied a fair and reasonable compromise. In part the Government retraced their steps; they restored Canadian civil law, they postponed indefinitely a representative legislature, but they gave what could under the circumstances be suitably and prudently given, religious toleration, trial by jury in criminal matters, and a council to which the Crown could call representatives of all creeds and interests. The Bill was attacked in the House of Lords, and in the House of Commons; and, even after it had become law, in 1775, Lord Camden in the House of Lords, and Sir George Savile in the House of Commons, presented petitions from the British inhabitants of the province of Quebec against the Act and moved for its repeal. The corporation of London petitioned against it. The American colonists made it the text of the manifesto to the people of Canada, which has already been noticed.[56] In the debates in Parliament various points were taken. Fox argued that, as the Bill gave tithes to the Roman Catholic clergy, it was a money Bill, and should not have originated, as it did originate in the House of Lords. Others criticized the absence of any provision for the rights of Habeas Corpus,[57] and the abolition of trial by jury in civil cases; but the main attack was on the lines that the law gave formal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church, that it withheld popular representation, and that it extended these two unsound principles to new territories whose lot should rather have been cast with the English colonies. Reference was made to the case of the colony of Grenada, in which limited representation in the popular Assembly had been given to Roman Catholics; but the opponents of the Quebec Act had not the courage to declare for a popular Assembly for Canada, without any religious test, for it would have meant an almost exclusively Roman Catholic legislature. They were at one and the same time fighting for the Protestant minority and contending for popular representation, but Protestant claims and popular representation in Canada were hopelessly at variance. This made the case of the opposition weak, and this was the justification of the Act. Lord Chatham denounced it as a most cruel, oppressive, and odious measure. Burke tried to appeal to popular prejudice against the Canadian seigniors. He attacked them, and he pressed the claims of the Protestant minority on the ground of their commercial importance, descending to such clap-trap as that in his opinion, in the case in point, one Englishman was worth fifty Frenchmen. The tone of the opposition was unworthy of the men, but minds had been so embittered and judgements so clouded by years of wrangle and debate on the American question, that the Act for the better government of Canada was viewed by the opponents of the ministry and the partisans of the colonies mainly as a case of French against English, and Papists against Protestants. None the