General Murray was left in command of Quebec to pass one of the most trying winters ever undergone by a garrison which was without proper clothing or supplies. At no great distance was a very capable leader, Lévis, plotting to recover the city, which he very nearly succeeded in doing, by defeating Murray outside the walls at the battle of St Foy, on April 28, 1760. The French general, however, lost his opportunity by not striking at the city itself when the garrison was confused by the defeat. Murray was saved by the timely appearance of the British fleet on May 15, and Lévis retreated. All that was now left to be done to complete the conquest of Canada and the salvation of the Thirteen Colonies from French attack was a final advance upon Montreal. Murray was the first to make a move in July; while Haviland advanced down the Richelieu River with three thousand five hundred men, including Rogers and his New Englanders. Amherst's army had already collected at Schenectady, but its progress was retarded by the slow arrival of the colonial contingent of about five thousand men. The forces at last combined before Montreal; and on September 8, just a year after Wolfe's splendid victory, the last stronghold of New France capitulated to the combined forces of England and the Thirteen Colonies. According to Lord Chesterfield the acquisition of Canada cost the English nation four score millions. No one at the present day can think that the possession of the great Dominion, then regarded as "a few acres of snow," was not worth twenty times the sum. By the Treaty of Paris, 1763, Louis XV. ceded "in full right Canada with all its dependencies, as well as the island of Cape Breton and all other islands and coasts in the gulf and river of St Lawrence." The French had done their best, ever since the great voyage of Jacques Cartier in 1534, to build up a new French Empire in the West. They had failed, partly because of the fallacious principles of the French colonial system, but particularly for two reasons. The first was the absolute exclusion of the Huguenots, whereby the Canadians shut out the very people who would have made the Empire rich and strong; and the second reason was because their dreams were too diffuse, too magnificent, beyond the physical capacity of so small a nation. They proposed to shut within narrow limits a nation twenty times as large in population, far more energetic and industrious, and one which would by the laws of nature overflow into those very valleys and happy hunting-grounds that they had marked out for themselves.