The danger from Canada had always been a source of anxiety to the English colonies. The French had made Canada a base for attempts to drive the English from North America. During many decades war had raged along the Canadian frontier. With the cession of Canada to Britain in 1763 this danger had vanished. The old habit endured, however, of fear of Canada. When, in 1774, the British Parliament passed the bill for the government of Canada known as the Quebec Act, there was violent clamor. The measure was assumed to be a calculated threat against colonial liberty. The Quebec Act continued in Canada the French civil law and the ancient privileges of the Roman Catholic Church. It guaranteed order in the wild western region north of the Ohio, taken recently from France, by placing it under the authority long exercised there of the Governor of Quebec. Only a vivid imagination would conceive that to allow to the French in Canada their old loved customs and laws involved designs against the freedom under English law in the other colonies, or that to let the Canadians retain in respect to religion what they had always possessed meant a sinister plot against the Protestantism of the English colonies. Yet Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the greatest mind in the American Revolution, had frantic suspicions. French laws in Canada involved, he said, the extension of French despotism in the English colonies. The privileges continued to the Roman Catholic Church in Canada would be followed in due course by the Inquisition, the burning of heretics at the stake in Boston and New York, and the bringing from Europe of Roman Catholic settlers who would prove tools for the destruction of religious liberty. Military rule at Quebec meant, sooner or later, despotism everywhere in America. We may smile now at the youthful Hamilton's picture of "dark designs" and "deceitful wiles" on the part of that fierce Protestant George III to establish Roman Catholic despotism, but the colonies regarded the danger as serious. The quick remedy would be simply to take Canada, as Washington now planned.