As the first civil Governor of Canada, the British authorities chose General Murray, one of Wolfe's ablest lieutenants, who since 1760 had served as military Governor of the Quebec district. He was to be aided in his task by a council composed of the Lieutenant Governors of Montreal and Three Rivers, the Chief Justice, the head of the customs, and eight citizens to be named by the Governor from "the most considerable of the persons of property" in the province. The new Governor was a blunt, soldierly man, upright and just according to his lights, but deeply influenced by his military and aristocratic leanings. Statesmen thousands of miles away might plan to encourage English settlers and English political ways and to put down all that was French. To the man on the spot English settlers meant "the four hundred and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders" who had come in the wake of the army from New England and New York, with no proper respect for their betters, and vulgarly and annoyingly insistent upon what they claimed to be their rights. The French might be alien in speech and creed, but at least the seigneurs and the higher clergy were gentlemen, with a due respect for authority, the King's and their own, and the habitants were docile, the best of soldier stuff. "Little, very little," Murray wrote in 1764 to the Lords of Trade, "will content the New Subjects, but nothing will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here, but the expulsion of the Canadians, who are perhaps the bravest and best race upon the Globe, a Race, who cou'd they be indulged with a few priviledges wch the Laws of England deny to Roman Catholicks at home, wou'd soon get the better of every National Antipathy to their Conquerors and become the most faithful and most useful set of Men in this American Empire."* * This quotation and those following in this chapter are from official documents most conveniently assembled in Shorn and Doughty, "Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759-1791", and Doughty and McArthur, "Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1791-1818". Certainly there was much in the immediate situation to justify Murray's attitude. It was preposterous to set up a legislature in which only the four hundred Protestants might sit and from which the seventy thousand Catholics would be barred. It would have been difficult in any case to change suddenly the system of laws governing the most intimate transactions of everyday life. But when, as happened, the Administration was entrusted in large part to newly created justices of the peace, men with "little French and less honour," "to whom it is only possible to speak with guineas in one's hand," the change became flatly impossible. Such an alteration, if still insisted upon, must come more slowly than the impatient traders in Montreal and Quebec desired.