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acquainted with the history of Canada during the American war of rebellion. With wise and far-seeing judgment the leaders of the Catholic French-Canadians took their stand firmly and uncompromisingly on the side of England. Acting on the minds of a people still largely subject to feudal influence and filled with a spirit of devotion and submission to their ancient faith, the French bishops and priests held their flocks loyal and did much to retain the wide province that is now the Dominion of Canada for the British Crown.

The reward for these services was full and ample. The very remarkable position of power and authority which the Catholic Church occupies in the Province of Quebec to-day is in a large measure the direct outcome of the attitude taken up by the bishops and priests during the American war.

In the war of 1812 between Great Britain and the new Republic the French-Canadians were as staunch and loyal as their fellowsubjects of Ontario and the Maritime Provinces, the heroic loyalists of the New England colonies who had given up home and all that made life dear rather than be false to allegiance or principles. Some of the most brilliant victories in the campaigns of 1812-3-4 were won with the aid of the French volunteers, and at Chateauguay on October 26, 1813, four hundred French-Canadian Militia, commanded by Colonel de Salaberry, defeated three thousand Americans under General Hampton. In later years, during the Fenian Raid of 1867, in the North-West Rebellion, and lastly during the Boer war, Canadians, French and British, fought side by side, and cemented anew their racial friendship and their unswerving loyalty to the Empire.

It happens, then, that nowhere within the wide bounds of the British Empire to-day is there any spot so ripe and fitting for a scene such as that which will take place outside the walls of Quebec in this July, when with stately ceremony, and honoured by the presence of the heir to the British throne, the Plains of Abraham will be dedicated to the memory of the gallant soldiers of England and France who won, and lost, and died on that historic upland.

The battle of the Plains of Abraham is unique in the world's history. It is unique in that Wolfe, the English commander, died in the moment of victory, and that his noble adversary, Montcalm, who commanded the French, breathed his last almost in the same hour, finding sad consolation for the sorrows of the hour in

the thought that he would not live to see the surrender of his beloved Quebec. Its issue decided the fate of a continent of unbounded richness and resources; though at the time men had scarce begun to dream that the few arpents of snow in Canada,’ as a French statesman described his country's lost dominions, held a tithe of the wealth that time has since revealed. The battle of the Plains of Abraham, therefore, possesses features of intense interest for every student of history, and above all for the members of the two slowly mingling races who now occupy as their heritage the lands for which their fathers fought and died.

The conflict was the inevitable result of conditions which dominated and dictated the policy that France and England in the seventeenth century were compelled to pursue. On the Continent of Europe, on the burning plains of India, and amid the swamps and fastnesses of North American forests the two nations had long been engaged in a struggle for mastery. We are not here concerned with the incidents of the age-long contest in other parts of the world. The warfare between the English colonists in New England and the French settlers of New France, as Canada was generally termed at the time, had gone on intermittently for generations; sometimes helped and encouraged by the Mother countries, often waged more or less independently. Local victories or defeats had little effect on the general progress of the struggle. American territory was given and taken by treaty-making statesmen at home who frequently had but the faintest notion of the boundaries with which they were dealing. Even in later days we have the famous instance of a British Minister who was thrown into a ferment of excitement by his unexpected discovery that Cape Breton was an island!

But apart from any question as to their final outcome the records of British and French achievements in North America are equally glorious for both. Fighting now with each other, now with the fierce and bloodthirsty savages of the forest, the long story is always one of progress and improvement in the face of appalling difficulties. Victory rested sometimes with one, sometimes with the other. In the end the incredible peculation and rascality of Bigot, the last Intendant of New France, with his misappropriation of funds and the falsification of accounts, had, perhaps, as much, or more, to do with the final defeat of France as the qualities of the soldiers on the battlefield. Montcalm himself, before his last battle under the walls of Quebec, had met the British on four hard-fought fields

and had won each, notably at Ticonderoga, where with greatly inferior numbers he had inflicted a heavy defeat on the rash and headstrong Abercrombie.

With the fall of Louisburg came the closing scene of the long struggle. For weary months in the summer of 1759 Wolfe, with the help of a fleet under Admiral Saunders-old Dreadnought '—had fruitlessly besieged Quebec, whose frowning battlements on the heights of Cape Diamond were deemed well nigh impregnable. His batteries on the heights of Levis across the St. Lawrence, under the command of General Monckton, had pounded the city until the lower town and the buildings along the steep slopes stretching from the waterside to the Citadel above had become a chaos of smoking ruins. Still Montcalm and the Governor, Vaudreil, refused to surrender. At Beauport Flats, where the Montmorency, after its prodigious leap of three hundred feet from the cliffs above, flows gently to mingle its foam-flecked waters with the St. Lawrence, Wolfe's veterans had been repulsed with the loss of over a thousand men, while the rocky cliffs for miles above the city seemed to mock at the idea of any successful enterprise in that direction. Winter was coming on apace when Admiral Saunders and his gallant fleet would be driven out of the river by the ice, and there would be nothing to do but to raise the siege. Without the ships the British commander would be helpless.

All through the siege the fleet had had to encounter deadly peril from the French gunners on the summit of Cape Diamond and from the fire rafts which the garrison of Quebec sent floating down stream. It is recorded that upon one occasion, as the heroic sailors boldly grappled with the fire rafts and towed them away from the threatened ships, one gallant tar hailed a comrade with the strange query, 'Hast ever had hell-fire in tow before, lad?' 'No,' replied his comrade, and then thinking probably of the bloody repulse at Beaufort Flats, he added, but I've been in tow of Jimmy Wolfe's red head, and that's hell-fire enow for me.'

In truth the tall, ungainly Irishman with his angular figure and ugly features, surmounted by a mass of red hair, was a fiery leader, and those who followed him often had to encounter perils which almost justified the sailor's irreverent remark.

The failure of all his plans for the reduction of the fortress at last induced Wolfe to conceive and adopt a final desperate resort which might well try the courage of the bravest troops. Upon

it the success or failure of the great enterprise upon which the army had been engaged for months must depend.

Admiral Saunders' ships had successfully run the gauntlet of fire from the French batteries, and a division under Admiral Holmes was cruising in the river above Quebec. This success encouraged Wolfe to determine upon the desperate plan of transferring his troops westward of the city, ferrying them across the St. Lawrence with the aid of the fleet, and bringing Montcalm to battle on the open ground west of the fortifications. Quebec, despite the courage with which the defence was maintained, was in sore straits, and Wolfe reasonably calculated that a defeat in the open would speedily bring about a surrender. The terrible and unquenchable batteries on Levis had rained death and destruction on the city. Churches and hospitals were in ruins and the streets were impassable, so encumbered were they with the debris of shattered buildings. Even the rampart batteries were in some cases buried beneath the fallen walls of demolished houses. To such condition was the city reduced that the wretched inhabitants had been forced to seek what scanty shelter they could find near the Hôpital Général, which stood beyond the range of the British guns in a bend of the St. Charles river. Every available spot was crowded with refugees, and even the chapel of the Hospital was filled with wounded so that Mass had to be said in the choir.

The spectre of famine, too, had begun to stalk abroad. Wolfe's soldiers had laid the country waste in every direction, and Admiral Holmes' division, cruising in the St. Lawrence above Quebec, intercepted supplies approaching by way of the river from the west. No wonder that Montcalm and his hungry garrison prayed hard for the coming of winter to drive those terrible ships out of the river. They not only cut off all supplies, but they sorely taxed the energies of Bougainville and the fifteen hundred men whom Montcalm had detached to guard the left bank of the St. Lawrence above the city.

General Murray with a small force had been placed aboard the ships of Holmes' division and had attempted landings at Pointaux-Trembles and La Mulitière, but was repulsed. He did, however, achieve some success at Deschambault, forty-one miles up the river, where he captured and burned a large depôt of provisions, without the loss of a man, before Bougainville could march to the spot. In the face of famine Montcalm's militia were deserting in hundreds, and the fortitude of those who remained was

weakened by the sight of their villages in the surrounding country being given to the flames by Wolfe's troops.

Despite all this, the English made little impression on the grim fortress itself, whose defences still rose almost unimpaired upon the heights of Cape Diamond. September was at hand, and already chilly nights warned the besieging army of the approach of the Canadian winter, a more relentless foe than even Montcalm and his French regulars. It was in these circumstances that Wolfe decided as a last resort upon his desperate plan of crossing the river above Quebec, scaling the cliffs and attacking the defences of the city in rear, a task which Vaudreil declared impossible, unless the English grew wings. There was the additional reason for urgency in that the British general, although only thirty-two, was sorely stricken with disease and felt already the finger of death upon him.

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'I know perfectly well you cannot cure me,' he said to his surgeon, but pray make me up so that I may be without pain for a few days, and able to do my duty; that is all I want.' He wrote to Pitt about the same time-his last despatch-saying that he was ill and weak, but that he had resolved to throw four or five thousand men across the river and endeavour to draw the enemy to an action on the Plains of Abraham.

So the camp at Montmorency was abandoned and only a few men were left at the Isle of Orleans to deceive the enemy. The position at Levis was also deprived of all but the men necessary to work the guns. Admiral Holmes' division was strengthened, and on the night of September 4 vessels carrying large stores of ammunition and supplies for the troops ran the gauntlet of the French batteries unobserved and anchored off Cap Rouge. Next day seven battalions were marched overland from Levis to a point opposite Sillery Cove, and presently Wolfe had twenty-two ships with nearly four thousand soldiers on board in the river above Quebec. This rearrangement was carried out so secretly that Montcalm had no knowledge of it. The movements of the fleet, however, aroused his suspicions. The ships drifted up and down the river with the tide day after day, apparently seeking for a suitable place to make a landing. Admiral Saunders in the lower bay was threatening to renew the landing at Beauport Flats. Montcalm was still confident that the cliffs were inaccessible to Wolfe's troops, and he retained the bulk of his forces between the St. Charles and the Montmorency. He did, however, increase Bougain

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