Old Quebec by Gilbert Parker — Read

Quebec entered upon the nineteenth century equipped with the machinery of constitutional government, which was, however, clogged in action by unhappy divisions within the city. The four years of Sir James Craig's rule were disturbed by a truceless war between the Legislative Assembly and the Governor, whose arbitrary temper ill qualified him to lead a people still groping for standing-ground within the area of their new constitution. He looked at popular institutions with the distrust natural to an old soldier, and the period of his administration became known in the annals of the province as "the reign of little King Craig. " Born at Gibraltar, he had entered the army at the tender age of fifteen, and having earned rapid promotion on many battlefields, he finally reached the rank of major-general at the close of the American revolutionary war.

Further experience in India and the Mediterranean increased his reputation, and in the autumn of 1807 he arrived in Quebec full of military honours, and imbued with the high political views then held by the most exclusive wing of the Tory party. The members of the Legislative Council and the administrative clique drew close about the person of this new champion, and in the same degree the French majority in the Legislative Assembly held aloof.