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.