Part 4 (1/2)

With lands unfenced and cattle wandering about, with most deeds and other legal doc.u.ments loosely drawn, with too much time on their hands during the winter, it is not surprising that the people were continually falling out and rus.h.i.+ng to the nearest royal court. The intendant Raudot suggested that this propensity should be curbed, otherwise there would soon be more lawsuits than settlers in the colony.

On the whole, however, the habitant was well behaved and gave the authorities very little trouble. To the Church of his fathers he gave ungrudging devotion, attending its services and paying its t.i.thes with exemplary care.

The Church was a great deal to the habitant; it was his school, his hospital, his newspaper, his philosopher telling of things present and things to come. From a religious point of view the whole colony was a unit.

'Thank G.o.d,' wrote one governor, 'there are no heretics here.' The Church, needing to spend no time or thought in crus.h.i.+ng its enemies, could give all its attention to its friends. As for offences against the laws of the land these were conspicuously few. The banks of the St Lawrence, when once the redskin danger was put out of the way, were quite safe for men to live upon. The hand of justice was swift and sure, but its intervention was not very often needed. New France was as law-abiding as New England; her people were quite as submissive to their leaders in both Church and State.

The people were fond of music, and seem to have obtained great enjoyment from their rasping, home-made violins.

Every parish had its fiddler. But the popular repertoire was not very extensive. The Norman airs and folk-songs of the day were easy to learn, simple and melodious. They have remained in the hearts and on the lips of all French Canada for over two centuries. The shantyman of Three Rivers still goes off to the woods chanting the Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre which his ancestors sang in the days of Blenheim and Oudenarde. Many other traits of the race have been borne to the present time with little change.

Then as now the habitant was a voluble talker, a teller of great stories about his own feats and experiences.

Hocquart was impressed with the scant popular regard for the truth in such things, and well he may have been. Even to-day this trait has not wholly disappeared.

Unlike his prototype, the censitaire of Old France, the habitant never became dispirited; even when things went wrong he retained his bonhomie. Taking too little thought for the morrow, he liked, as Charlevoix remarks, 'to get the fun out of his money, and scarcely anybody amused himself by h.o.a.rding it.' He was light-hearted even to frivolousness, and this gave the austere Church fathers many serious misgivings. He was courteous always, but boastful, and regarded his race as the salt of the earth.

A Norman in every bone of his body, he used, as his descendants still do, quaint Norman idioms and forms of speech. He was proud of his ancestry. Stories that went back to the days when 'twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings' were pa.s.sed along from father to son, gaining in terms of prodigious valour as they went. His versatility gained him the friends.h.i.+p and confidence of the Indian, an advantage which his English brother to the south was rarely able to secure.

Much of the success which marked French diplomacy with the tribes was due to this versatility. Beneath an ungainly exterior the habitant often concealed a surprising ability in certain lines of action. He was a master of blandishment when he had an end thereby to gain. Dealings which required duplicity, provided the outcome appeared to be desirable, did not rudely shock his conscience. He had no Puritan scruples in his dealings with men of another race and religion. But in many things he had a high sense of honour, and nothing roused his ire so readily as to question it. Unstable as water, however, he did not excel in tasks that took patience. He wanted to plough one day and hunt the next, so that in the long run he rarely did anything well. This spirit of independence was very p.r.o.nounced. The habitant felt himself to be a free man.

This is why he spurned the name 'censitaire.' As Charlevoix puts it, 'he breathed from his birth the air of liberty,'

and showed it in the way he carried his head. A singular type, when all is said, and worthy of more study than it has received.

CHAPTER VI

'AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM'

Church and State had a common aim in early Canada. Both sought success, not for themselves, but for 'the greater glory of G.o.d.' From beginning to end, therefore, the Catholic Church was a staunch ally of the civil authorities in all things which made for real and permanent colonial progress. There were many occasions, of course, when these two powers came almost to blows, for each had its own interpretation of what const.i.tuted the colony's best interests. But historians have given too much prominence to these rather brief intervals of antagonism, and have thereby created a misleading impression. The civil and religious authorities of New France were not normally at variance. They clashed fiercely now and then, it is quite true; but during the far greater portion of two centuries they supported each other firmly and worked hand in hand.

Now the root of all trouble, when these two interests came into ill-tempered controversy, was the conduct of the coureurs de bois. These roving traders taught the savages all the vices of French civilization in its most degenerate days. They debauched the Indian with brandy, swindled him out of his furs, and entered into illicit relations with the women of the tribes. They managed in general to convince the aborigines that all Frenchmen were dishonest and licentious. That the representatives of the Most Christian King should tolerate such conduct could not be regarded by the Church as anything other than plain malfeasance in office.

The Church in New France was militant, and in its vanguard of warriors was the Jesuit missionary. Members of the Society of Jesus first came to Quebec in 1625; others followed year by year and were sent off to establish their outposts of religion in the wilderness. They were men of great physical endurance and unconquerable will.

The Jesuit went where no others dared to go; he often went alone, and always without armed protection.

Behold him on his way; his breviary Which from his girdle hangs, his only s.h.i.+eld.

That well-known habit is his panoply, That Cross the only weapon he will wield; By day he bears it for his staff afield, By night it is the pillow of his bed.

No other lodging these wild woods can yield Than Earth's hard lap, and rustling overhead A canopy of deep and tangled boughs far spread.

It is not strange that the Jesuit father should have disliked the traders. A single visit from these rough and lawless men would undo the spiritual labour of years.

How could the missionary enforce his lessons of righteousness when men of his own race so readily gave the lie to all his teachings? The missionaries accordingly complained to their superiors in poignant terms, and these in turn hurled their thunderbolts of excommunication against all who offended. But the trade was profitable, and Mammon continued, as in all ages, to retain his corps of ardent disciples. Religion and trade never became friendly in New France, nor could they ever become friendly so long as the Church stood firmly by its ancient tradition as a friend of law and order.

With agriculture, however, religion was on better terms.

Men who stayed on their farms and tilled the soil might be grouped into parishes, their lands could be made to yield the t.i.the, their spiritual needs might readily be ministered unto. Hence it became the policy of the Church to support the civil authorities in getting lands cleared for settlement, in improving the methods of cultivation, and in strengthening the seigneurial system at every point. This support the hierarchy gave in various ways, by providing cures for outlying seigneuries, by helping to bring peasant farmers from France, by using its influence to promote early marriages, and above all by setting an example before the people in having progressive agriculture on Church lands.

Both directly and through its dependent organizations the Catholic Church became the largest single landholder of New France. As early as 1626 the Jesuits received their first grant of land, the concession of Notre-Dame des Anges, near Quebec; and from that date forward the order received at intervals large tracts in various parts of the colony. Before the close of French dominion in Canada it had acquired a dozen estates, comprising almost a million arpents of land. This was about one-eighth of the entire area given out in seigneuries. Its two largest seigneurial estates were Batiscan and Cap de la Magdelaine; but Notre-Dame des Anges and Sillery, though smaller in area, were from their closeness to Quebec of much greater value. The king appreciated the work of the Jesuits in Canada, and would gladly have contributed from the royal funds to its furtherance. But as the civil projects of the colony took a great deal of money, he was constrained, for the most part, to show his appreciation of religious enterprise by grants of land. As land was plentiful his bounty was lavish--sometimes a hundred thousand arpents at a time.

Next to the Jesuits as sharers of the royal generosity came the bishop and the Quebec seminary, with a patrimony of nearly seven hundred thousand arpents, an acc.u.mulation which was largely the work of Francois de Laval, first bishop of Quebec and founder of the seminary. The Sulpicians had, at the time the colony pa.s.sed into English hands, an estate of about a quarter of a million arpents, including the most valuable seigneury of New France, on the island of Montreal. The Ursulines of Quebec and of Three Rivers possessed about seventy-five thousand arpents, while other orders and inst.i.tutions, a half-dozen in all, had estates of varying acreage. Directly under its control the Church had thus acquired in mortmain over two million arpents, while the lay landowners of the colony had secured only about three times as much. It held about one-quarter of all the granted lands, so that its position in Canada was relatively much stronger than in France.

These lands came from the king or his colonial representatives by royal patent. They were given sometimes in frankalmoigne or sometimes as ordinary seigneuries.

The distinction was of little account however, for when land once went into the 'dead hand' it was likely to stay there for all time. The Church and its inst.i.tutions, as seigneurs of the land, granted farms to habitants on the usual terms, gave them their deeds duly executed by a notary, received their annual dues, and a.s.sumed all the responsibilities of a lay seigneur. And as a rule the Church made a good seigneur. Settlers were brought out from France, and a great deal of care was taken in selecting them. They were aided, encouraged, and supported through the trying years of pioneering. As early as 1667 Laval was able to point with pride to the fact that his seigneuries of Beaupre and Isle d'Orleans contained over eleven hundred persons--more than one-quarter of the colony's entire population. These ecclesiastical seigneuries, moreover, were among the best in point of intelligent cultivation. With funds and knowledge at its disposal, the Church was better able than the ordinary lay seigneur to provide ba.n.a.l mills and means of communication. These seigneuries were therefore kept in the front rank of agricultural progress, and the example which they set before the eyes of the people must have been of great value.

The seigneurial system was also strengthened by the fact that the boundaries of seigneuries and parishes were usually the same. The chief reason for this is that the parish system was not created until most of the seigneuries had been settled. There were parishes, so-termed, in the colony from the very first; but not until 1722 was the entire colony set off into parish divisions. Forty-one parishes were created in the Quebec district; thirteen in the district of Three Rivers; and twenty-eight in the region round Montreal. These eighty-two parishes were roughly coterminous with the existing seigneuries, but not always so. Some few seigneuries had six or eight parishes within their bounds. In other cases, two or three seigneuries were merged into a single great parish.