In some ways the Act did, in other ways it did not, fulfil the objects of its framers. It was undoubtedly a generous concession to the leading French Canadians. It did help to keep Canada both British and Canadian. And it did open the way for what ought to have been a crushing attack on the American revolutionary forces. But it was not, and neither it nor any other Act could possibly have been, at that late hour, completely successful. It conciliated the seigneurs and the parochial clergy. But it did not, and it could not, also conciliate the lesser townsfolk and the habitants. For the last fourteen years the habitants had been gradually drifting away from their former habits of obedience and former obligations towards their leaders in church and state. The leaders had lost their old followers. The followers had found no new leaders of their own. Naturally enough, there was great satisfaction among the seigneurs and the clergy, with a general feeling among government supporters, both in England and Canada, that the best solution of a very refractory problem had been found at last. On the other hand, the Opposition in England, nearly every one in the American colonies, and the great majority of English-speaking people in Newfoundland, the Maritime Provinces, and Canada itself were dead against the Act; while the habitants, resenting the privileges already reaffirmed in favour of the seigneurs and clergy, and suspicious of further changes in the same unwelcome direction, were neutral at the best and hostile at the worst. The American colonists would have been angered in any case. But when they saw Canada proper made as unlike a 'fourteenth colony' as could be, and when they also saw the gates of the coveted western lands closed against them by the same detested Act--the last of the 'five intolerable acts' to which they most objected--their fury knew no bounds. They cursed the king, the pope, and the French Canadians with as much violence as any temporal or spiritual rulers had ever cursed heretics and rebels. The 'infamous and tyrannical ministry' in England was accused of 'contemptible subservience' to the 'bloodthirsty, idolatrous, and hypocritical creed' of the French Canadians. To think that people whose religion had spread 'murder, persecution, and revolt throughout the world' were to be entrenched along the St Lawrence was bad enough. But to see Crown protection given to the Indian lands which the Americans considered their own western 'birthright' was infinitely worse. Was the king of England to steal the valley of the Mississippi in the same way as the king of France?