"must direct the spirit of any code of laws." The Quebec Act multiplied the area of the colony sevenfold by the restoration of all Labrador on the east and the region west as far as the Ohio and the Mississippi and north to the Hudson's Bay Company's territory. It restored the old French civil law but continued the milder English criminal law already in operation. It gave to the Roman Catholic inhabitants the free exercise of their religion, subject to a modified oath of allegiance, and confirmed the clergy in their right "to hold, receive and enjoy their accustomed dues and rights, with respect to such persons only as shall confess the said religion." The promised elective Assembly was not granted, but a Council appointed by the Crown received a measure of legislative power. On his return to Canada in September, 1774, Carleton reported that the Canadians had "testified the strongest marks of Joy and Gratitude and Fidelity to their King and to His Government for the late Arrangements made at Home in their Favor." The "most respectable part of the English," he continued, urged peaceful acceptance of the new order. Evidently, however, the respectable members of society were few, as the great body of the English settlers joined in a petition for the repeal of the Act on the ground that it deprived them of the incalculable benefits of habeas corpus and trial by jury. The Montreal merchants, whether, as Carleton commented, they "were of a more turbulent Turn, or that they caught the Fire from some Colonists settled among them," were particularly outspoken in the town meetings they held. In the older colonies the opposition was still more emphatic. An Act which hemmed them in to the seacoast, established on the American continent a Church they feared and hated, and continued an autocratic political system, appeared to many to be the undoing of the work of Pitt and Wolfe and the revival on the banks of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi of a serious menace to their liberty and progress. Then came the clash at Lexington, and the War of American Independence had begun. The causes, the course, and the ending of that great civil war have been treated elsewhere in this series.* Here it is necessary only to note its bearings on the fate of Canada. * See "The Eve of the Revolution" and "Washington and His Comrades in Arms" (in "The Chronicles of America").