Note 74 — Chapter XXXIII

"Anxious (1775, October) to relieve St. John's, Carleton, after the capture of Allen, succeeded in assembling about nine hundred Canadians at Montreal; but a want of mutual confidence, and the certainty that the inhabitants generally favoured the Americans, dispirited them, and they disappeared by desertions thirty or forty of a night, till he was left almost as forlorn as before. The Indians, too, he found of little service; 'they were easily dejected, and chose to be of the strongest side, so that when they were most wanted they vanished'. But history must preserve the fact that though often urged to let them loose on the rebel provinces, in his detestation of cruelty he would not suffer a savage to pass the frontier." (Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. VIII., Chap. lii., p. 186.)