In the second of these letters[62] from which quotations have been made, Carleton said that he would endeavour to represent the true situation of the province to the ministers at home, who were already engaged in considering ‘the improvement of the civil constitution of Quebec’, lest the King’s servants, with all their ability, should be at a disadvantage in forming their conclusions ‘for want of having truly represented to them objects at so great a distance, and in themselves so different from what is to be found in any other of his dominions’. But it was not merely a case of the man on the spot advising the men at a distance; the value of Carleton’s advice was largely due to the fact of his being a soldier. To this fact must be attributed, in great measure, the strong sympathy which the soldier-governors felt with the French Canadians, and on Carleton’s part more especially with the French Canadian gentry. As Murray had pointed out,[63] the Canadians were a people of soldiers; they were accustomed to personal rule and attachment rather than to the rule of the law. To high minded English officers, themselves brought up in the King’s service, trained to discipline, to well ordered grades of obedience, the old Canadian system with its feudal customs was congenial and attractive, and they resented attempts to substitute for it the beginnings of undisciplined democracy. Hence Carleton laid stress on taking Canadian gentlemen into the government service, and on enlisting companies of Canadian soldiers, in other words, on making the Canadians feel that they were, as they had been in past times, the King’s men. Hence, too, we find him in a letter to Shelburne of April, 1768,[64] recommending full recognition and continuance of the old feudal tenures of Canada, including ‘a formal requisition of all those immediately holding of the King, to pay faith and homage to him at his castle of St. Lewis’. If left to himself, he would have liked to repeal entirely the Ordinance of September, 1764, which introduced English laws into Canada, ‘and for the present leave the Canadian laws almost entire;’[65] and, though he assented to the compromise embodied in the Quebec Act, whereby the criminal law was to be that of England, while in civil matters Canadian law and custom were in the main to prevail, we find him in June, 1775,[66] after war had begun, writing to Dartmouth, ‘For my part, since my return to this province I have seen good cause to repent my ever having recommended the Habeas Corpus Act and English criminal laws.’