CANADA, the Commonwealth's northern American province upon the St Lawrence, acquired from France by the Peace of Paris (q.v.) in 1763. The name belongs here to that provincial country, not to a general dominion embracing every northern possession. Acadia (q.v.) and Newfoundland have their separate history of attachment in 1713; the Lakes (q.v.) designate another provincial division. The distinctions are of consequence wherever a map of the present is used to explain the negotiations of the past.
The military decision preceded the diplomatic one. The Capitulation of Quebec (q.v.) in 1760, during the Great Atlantic War, broke the French position upon the river. Paris registered a wider cession of French America, extending to the eastern bank of the Mississippi. That large description of a crown's relinquished claims should not be read as a statement that every part of the ceded interior was occupied, surveyed, or immediately governed with equal effect. The river settlements could change allegiance upon terms intelligible to their inhabitants; the interior required a longer acquaintance between the government and its new maps.
The French-language inheritance has proved more durable than the French crown's title. In Quebec and the river country French continues to be used in domestic life, trade, and print. The conqueror acquired customers, neighbours, and readers who did not become English-speaking through the correction of a heading in a despatch. The poems of Marguerite Tessier (q.v.) illustrate a later literary consequence; the general subject belongs under FRENCH LETTERS IN THE WEST (q.v.).
Religious incorporation was a more awkward business than official celebrations of the conquest usually acknowledge. The old exclusions of the Public Profession (q.v.) were not devised for the easy reception of a French Catholic population. Conquest and full participation in the institutions of the conqueror are separate questions; the Act of Relief of the Old Religion in 1832 belongs to the latter history. It would be an agreeable simplification to make the peace of 1763 perform in advance everything that later generations found necessary to alter.
The St Lawrence (q.v.) remains the principal line of the country's economic life. Settlements, landing-places, and agricultural districts depend upon their access to it; the season during which navigation is available gives storage and timely despatch an importance less apparent in the annual totals of trade. Quebec is a point of interchange between river and ocean carriage as well as a place celebrated in the military histories. The merchant's Canada has always contained more seasons than the diplomatist's.
The conquest also enlarged the question of representation. The Reapportionment Quarrels (q.v.) and the Census Act of 1772 belong to the Commonwealth's adjustment to the weight of its enlarged West. They did not make the several inherited societies identical. Canada is one of the clearest instances of an acquisition which extended the Commonwealth and altered the matter of which it was composed. A peace may transfer allegiance; it is less competent to prescribe memory. (H. LeF.)