Volume I Part 3 (2/2)
Settler, never become a lumberer, if you can avoid it.
But, as we have in this favourite hobbyhorse style of ours, which causes description to start up as recollections occur, accompanied the lumberer on his voyage to that lumberer's Paradise, Quebec, whither he has conducted his charge to The Coves, for the culler to cull, the marker to mark, the skipper to s.h.i.+p, and the lumber-merchant to get the best market he can for it, so we shall return for a short time to Lower Canada, to talk a little about settlement there.
As I hinted before, Lower Canada is too much decried as a country to re-commence the world in; but the Anglo-Saxon and Milesian populace are nevertheless beginning to discover its value, and are very rapidly increasing both in numbers and importance. The French Canadian yeoman, or small farmer, has an alacrity at standing still; it is only _le notaire_ and _le medecin_ that advance; so that, if emigration goes on at the rate it has done since the rebellion, the old country folks will, before fifty more years pa.s.s over, outnumber and outvote, by ten times, Jean Baptiste, which is a pity, for a better soul than that merry mixture of bonhomie and phlegm, the French Canadian is, the wide world's surface does not produce. Visionary notions of _la gloire de la nation Canadienne_, instilled into him by restless men, who panted for distinction and cared not for distraction, misled the _bonnet rouge_ awhile: but he has superadded the thinking cap since; and, although he may not readily forget the sad lesson he received, yet he has no more idea of being annexed to the United States than I have of being Grand Lama. In fact, I really believe that the merciful policy which has been shown, and the wise measure of making Montreal the seat of government, and thus practically demonstrating the advantage of the inst.i.tutions of England by daily lessons in the heart of their dear country, has done more to recall the Canadians to a sense of the real value of the connexion with Great Britain than all the protocols of diplomatists, or all the powder that ever saltpetre generated, could have achieved.
Pursue a perfectly impartial course, as you ought and must do, towards the Canadians, and show them that they are as much British citizens as the people of Toronto are, and you may count upon their loyalty and devotion without fear. They know they never can be an independent nation; that folly has been dreamed out, and the fumes of the vision are evaporating.
They now know and feel that annexation to the great Republic in their neighbourhood will swamp their nationality more effectively than the red or the blue coats of England can ever do, will desecrate their altars, will portion out their lands, will nullify their present importance, and render them an isolated race, forgotten and unsought for, as the Iroquois of the last century, who, from being the children and owners of the land, the true _enfans du sol_, are now--where? The soil, had it voice, could alone reply, for on its surface they are not.
We must never in England form a false estimate of the French Canadian, because a few briefless lawyers or saddle-bag medical men urged them into rebellion. Their feelings and spirit are not of the same _genre_ as the feelings and spirit which animated the hideous soul of the _poissardes_ and _canaille_ of Paris in 1792. There is very little or no poverty in Lower Canada; every man who will work there, can work; and it is a nation rather of small farmers than of cla.s.ses, with the ideas of independence which property, however small, invariably generates in the human breast; but with that other idea also which urges it to preserve ancient landmarks.
It is chiefly in the large towns and in their neighbourhood that the desire for exclusive nationality still exists, fostered by a rabid appet.i.te for distinction in some ardent and reckless adventurers from the British ranks, who care little what is undermost so long as they are uppermost.
The hostility of the British settlers to the French is by no means so great as is so carefully and constantly described, and would altogether cease, if not kept continually alive by Upper Canadian demonstration, and that desire to rule exclusively which has so long been the bane of this fine colony.
It reminds one always of the morbid hatred of France, which existed thirty years ago in England, when Napoleon was believed, by the lower cla.s.ses--ay, and by some of the higher too--to be Apollyon in earnest.
I remember an old lord of the old school, whose family honours were not of a hundred years, and whose ancestors had been respectable traders, saying to me, a short time before he died, that Republican notions had spread so much from our peace with infidel France, that he should yet live to see those who possessed talent or energy enough among the middle cla.s.s, take those honours which he was so proud of, and with the t.i.tles also, the estates.
Look, said he, at the absurd decoration showered on the _savans_ of France, Baron Cuvier, for instance; and he fell into a pa.s.sion, and, being a French scholar, sang forth, in a paroxysm of gout, this _refrain_:--
”Travaillez, travaillez, bon tonnelier, Racommodez, racommodez, ton Cuvier.”
And yet he was by no means an ignorant man--was at heart a true John Bull, and had travelled and seen the world. He was blinded by an unquenchable hatred of France, a hatred which has now ceased in England in consequence of the facility of intercourse, but which is revived in France against England by those who think _la gloire_ preferable to peace and honour.
The miserable feudal system in Lower Canada has kept the French population in abeyance; that population is literally dormant, and the resources of the country unused; a Seigneur, now often anything but a Frenchman, holds an immense tract, parcelled out into little slips amongst a peasantry, whose ideas are as limited as their lands.
Generation after generation has tilled these patches, until they are exhausted; and thus the few proprietors who have been able to emanc.i.p.ate themselves from the Seignoral thraldom sell as fast as they can obtain purchasers; and the Seignories lapse, by failure of descent or by cutting off the entail, as it may be termed, under the dominion of foreigners, to the people.
It is surprising that British capitalists do not turn their attention more to Lower Canada, where land is thus to be bought very cheap, and which only requires manuring, a treatment that it rarely receives from a Canadian, to bring it into heart again, and where the vast extent of the British towns.h.i.+ps, held in free and common soccage, opens such a field for the agriculturist.
These towns.h.i.+ps are rapidly opening up and improving, and the sales of the British American Land Company may in round numbers be said to average 20,000 a year, or more than 40,000 acres, averaging ten s.h.i.+llings an acre.
The day's wages for a labourer on a farm in Lower Canada may be stated at two s.h.i.+llings currency, about one s.h.i.+lling and eightpence sterling, with food and lodging; but, excepting in the towns and in the eastern towns.h.i.+ps, the labourers are Canadians, elsewhere chiefly Irish. In the large towns also they are Irish, and two s.h.i.+llings and sixpence is the usual price of a day's work at Montreal.
There is a great demand for English or Scotch labourers in the towns.h.i.+ps where provisions are reasonable, and the materials for building, either lime, stone, brick, or wood, also very moderate in price from their abundance.
Cultivated, or rather cleared, farms may be purchased now near the settlements for about six pounds per acre, with very often dwelling and farms on them, and a clear t.i.tle may be readily obtained, after inquiry at the registry office of the county, to see whether any mortgage or other enc.u.mbrance exist--a course always to be adopted, both in Upper and Lower Canada. A settler must take the precaution of tracing the original grant, and that the land, if he buys from an individual, is neither Crown nor Clergy reserve, nor set apart for school or any other public purposes. Never buy, moreover, of a squatter, or land on which a squatter is located, for the law is very favourable to these gentry.
A squatter is a man who, axe in hand, with his gun, dog, and baggage, sets himself down in the deep forest, to clear and improve; and this he very frequently does, both upon public and private property; and the Government is lenient, so that, if he makes well of it, he generally has a right of pre-emption, or perhaps pays up only instalments, and then sells and goes deeper into the bush. Every way there is difficulty about squatted land, and very often the squatter will significantly enough hint that there is such a thing as a rifle in his log castle.
Squatters are usually Americans, of the very lowest grade, or the most ignorant of the Irish, who really believe they have a right to the soil they occupy.
I do not profess to give an account of the Eastern Towns.h.i.+ps; the prospectus of the British American Land Company will do that; and, as I have never been through them entirely, so I could only advance a.s.sertion; but I believe that they are admirably adapted for English and Scotch settlers, and that, bounded as they are by the French Canadians on one side, and by the United States on the other, with every facility for roads, ca.n.a.ls, and railways, they must become one of the richest, most and important portions of Canada before half a century has pa.s.sed over; but it will take that time, notwithstanding railways and locomotives, to make Jean Baptiste a useful agriculturist; and the fly must be eradicated from the wheat before Lower Canada can ever come within a great distance of compet.i.tion in the flour market with the upper province.
Take a steamboat voyage from Quebec to Montreal, and you pa.s.s through French Canada; for, although there are very extensive settlements of the race below Quebec till they are lost in the rugged mountains of Gaspesia, yet the main body of _habitants_ rest upon the low and tranquil sh.o.r.es of the St. Lawrence, for one hundred and eighty miles between the Castle of St. Lewis and the Cathedral of Montreal. The farm-houses, neat, and invariably whitewashed, line the river, particularly on the left bank, like a cantonment, and go back to the north for, at the utmost, ten or twelve miles into the then boundless wilderness.
The cultivated ground is in narrow slips, fenced by the customary snake fence, which is nothing more than slabs of trees split coa.r.s.ely into rails, and set up lengthways in a zig-zag form to give them stability, with struts, or riders, at the angles, to bind them. These farms are about nine hundred feet in width, and four or five miles in depth, being the concessions or allotments made originally by the _seigneurs_ to the _censitaires_, or tillers of the soil. Every here and there, a long road is left, with cross ones, to obtain access to the farms, much in the same way, but not near so conveniently, or well done, as the concession lines in Upper Canada, which embrace large s.p.a.ces of a hundred acre or two hundred acre lots, including many of these lots, and giving a sixty-six feet or a forty foot road, as the case may be, and thus dividing the country into a series of large parallelograms, and making every farm accessible.
Each Lower French Canadian farmer is an independent yeoman, excepting as bound to the soil, and to certain seignorial dues and privileges, which are, however, trifling, and far from burthensome. Taxes are unknown, and they cheerfully support their priesthood.
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