Leadership under these conditions fell to the "unprincipled Demagogues," half-educated lawyers, men "with nothing to lose." But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and shopkeepers, nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but as an Englishman on guard against Frenchmen that Craig found himself at odds with his Assembly. For nearly twenty years in this period England was at death grips with France, end to hate and despise all Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and congenial duty of all true Britons. Craig and those who counseled him were firmly convinced that the new subjects were French at heart. Of the 250,000 inhabitants of Lower Canada, he declared, "about 20,000 or 25,000 may be English or Americans, the rest are French. I use the term designedly, my Lord, because I mean to say that they are in Language, in religion, in manner and in attachment completely French." That there was still some affection for old France, stirred by war and French victories, there is no question, but that the Canadians wished to return to French allegiance was untrue, even though Craig reported that such was "the general opinion of all ranks with whom it is possible to converse on the subject." The French Revolution had created a great gulf between Old France and New France. The clergy did their utmost to bar all intercourse with the land where deism and revolution held sway, and when the Roman Catholic Church and the British Government combined for years on a single object, it was little wonder they succeeded. Nelson's victory at Trafalgar was celebrated by a Te Deum in the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Quebec. In fact, as Craig elsewhere noted, the habitants were becoming rather a new and distinct nationality, a nation canadienne. They ceased to be French; they declined to become English; and sheltered under their "Sacred Charter"* they became Canadians first and last. * "It cannot be sufficiently inculcated ON THE PART OF GOVERNMENT that the Quebec Act is a Sacred Charter, granted by the King in Parliament to the Canadians as a Security for their Religion, Laws, and Property." Governor Sir Frederick Haldimand to Lord George Germaine, Oct. 25, 1780.