Perhaps, when a slave wished to remain British, and his case was nicely balanced between the claimants and the counter-claimants, Carleton was a little inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But with other forms of disputed property he was too severe to please all Loyalists. A typical case of restitution in Canada will show how differently the two governments viewed the rights of private property. Mercier and Halsted, two Quebec rebels, owned a wharf and the frame of a warehouse in 1775. It was Arnold's intercepted letter to Mercier that gave Carleton's lieutenant, Cramahe, the first warning of danger from the south. Halsted was Major Caldwell's miller at the time and took advantage of his position to give his employer's flour to Arnold's army, in which he served as commissary throughout the siege. Just after the peace of 1783 Mercier and Halsted laid claim to their former property, which they had abandoned for eight years and on which the government had meanwhile built a provision store, making use of the original frame. The case was complicated by many details too long for notice here. But the British government finally gave the two rebels the original property, plus thirteen years' rent, less the cost of government works erected in the meantime. All the documents are still in Quebec. Property was troublesome enough. But people were worse. And Carleton's difficulties increased as the autumn wore on. The first great harrying of the Loyalists drove more than thirty thousand from their homes; and about twenty-five thousand of these embarked at New York. Then there were the remnants of twenty Loyalist corps to pension, settle, or employ. There were also the British prisoners to receive, besides ten thousand German mercenaries. Add to all this the regular garrison and the general oversight of every British interest in North America, from the Floridas to Labrador, remember the implacable enemy in front, and we may faintly imagine what Carleton had to do before he could report that 'His Majesty's troops and such remaining Loyalists as chose to emigrate were successfully withdrawn on the 25th [of November] without the smallest circumstance of irregularity.' Thus ended one of the greatest acts in the drama of the British Empire, the English-speaking peoples, or the world; and thus, for the second time, Carleton, now in his sixtieth year, apparently ended his own long service in America. He had left Canada, after saving her from obliteration, because, so long as he remained her governor, the war minister at home remained her enemy. He had then returned to serve in New York, and had stayed there to the bitter end, because there was no other man whom the new government would trust to command the rearguard of the Empire in retreat. CHAPTER IX FOUNDING MODERN CANADA 1786-1796