In spite of Burke’s noble appeal in the House of Commons, toleration in the abstract had nothing to do with the treatment of the French Catholics.  British Catholics in the neighbouring Prince Edward Island were denied all civil rights in 1770, and only gained them in 1830.  In England, the Quebec Act with difficulty survived a storm of indignation, in which even Chatham joined.  The small minority of British settled in Quebec and Montreal made vehement protests, while the American Congress itself in 1774 committed the irreparable blunder of making the establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in Canada one of its formally published grievances against Great Britain.  When war broke out, and the magnitude of the mistake was seen, efforts were made to seduce the Canadians by hints of a coming British tyranny, but the Canadians very naturally abode by their first impressions.

The peace of 1783 and the final recognition of American Independence led to results of far-reaching importance for the further development of the British Empire.  Out of the loss of the American Colonies came the foundation of Australia and of British Canada.  Before the war it had been the custom to send convicts from the United Kingdom to penal settlements in the American Colonies.  The United States stopped this traffic.  Pitt’s Government decided, after several years of doubt and delay, to divert the stream of convicts to the newly acquired and still unpopulated territory of New South Wales, made known by the voyages of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks.  At the same period a very different class of men, seeking a new home, were thrown upon the charity of the British Government.  These were the “United Empire Loyalists,” as they styled themselves, some 40,000 Americans, with a sprinkling of Irishmen among them, such as Luke Carscallion, Peter Daly, Willet Casey, and John Canniff,[20] who had fought on the Royalist side throughout the war, and at the end of it found their fortunes ruined and themselves the objects of keen resentment.  Pitt, with a “total lack of Imperial imagination,” as Mr. Holland Rose puts it,[21] does not seem to have considered the plan of colonizing Australia with a part of these men, 433 of whom were reported to be living in destitution in London three years after the war.  No more alacrity was shown in relieving the distress of those still in America.  In 1788, however, a million and a quarter pounds were voted by Parliament for relief, and large grants of land were made in Canada, whither most of the Loyalists had already begun to emigrate.  Some went to the Maritime Provinces, notably to the region now known as New Brunswick; a few went to the towns of the Quebec Province, for the country lands on the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence were already monopolized by the French “habitants”; the rest, estimated at 10,000, to the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence and along the shores of the Lakes Ontario and Erie, in short, to what we now know as the Province of Ontario, and to what then became known as Upper Canada.