Quebec and Montreal had grown up into considerable towns, each with a population of nearly forty thousand, the vast majority of whom were French. In the bay where Wolfe’s boats stole unobserved and in silence to the shore, there lay now a fleet of merchant-vessels ministering to a large and growing commerce. The lower town which the English guns had destroyed was a bustling, thriving sea-port. Far above, where Montcalm and Wolfe fought, was now a well-built city, bright with towers and spires; with its impregnable Citadel; with its Parliament House, said to be more imposing than that in which the Commons of Great Britain then assembled; with its Palace for the Governor-General, and its aspect and tone of metropolitan dignity; with college and schools; with newspapers and banks, and libraries and charitable societies; with ship-building, manufacturing, and all the busy marketing which beseems one of the great haunts of commerce. Those seventy years of English rule had raised Quebec from the rank of little more than a village to that of an important city; and had seen the valley of the St. Lawrence pass out of the condition of wilderness and become the home of a numerous and prospering population. CHAPTER XII. THE CANADIAN REVOLUTION. The progress of years did not allay, but, on the contrary, steadily enhanced the fever of political discontent which now pervaded the colonies. The measure of representation which they enjoyed had seemed, when the Act of Pitt conferred it upon them, fairly satisfactory; but after the close of the great European war political opinion ripened fast, and the freedom which had seemed ample in 1791 was intolerably insufficient forty years later. The colonists perceived that they were living under a despotism. Their Executive and one of their legislative chambers were appointed by the Crown, without regard to the popular wish. Only the Lower Chamber was chosen by the people, and its action was constantly frustrated by the Governor, the aristocratic advisers by whom his policy was guided, and his ally the Council. On their southern border lay the territories of a great nation, whose people enjoyed complete political freedom and appointed all their rulers. The United States had so prospered that their population was now tenfold that of Canada; and their more rapid growth was traced, in the general belief, to the larger freedom of their institutions. In England the engrossing occupation of the people had been, for many years, the extending of their liberties, the rescue of political power from the hands by which it had been irregularly appropriated. The Englishmen of Canada could not remain unmoved by the things which had come to pass among the Englishmen of America and of England.