Part 8 (2/2)
”What insolent person is this who has pa.s.sed before me?”
An old man went up to her, hat in hand, and said with tears in his voice:
”Madame, it is my son who unfortunately is tipsy, but be sure that I shall bring him to make his apologies and meanwhile I beg you to accept mine for his boorishness.”
I ought to add that the whole parish spoke with indignation of the conduct of the young man. The delinquent had committed a double offence. He had been rude to their benefactress, and besides, violating a French Canadian custom, he had pa.s.sed a carriage without asking permission.[33]
This must have been before 1813 for in that year this good Madame Tache died: even so early was youth restive under the old traditions of deference and subordination. Already some even of the seigneurs were saying that the system r.e.t.a.r.ded settlement. It would have suited the seigneurs to have their holdings converted into freehold, for then they could have held the unsettled land as their own property instead of being under obligation to grant it for a nominal rental to _censitaires_. But to make this conversion would have been too kind to the seigneurs; so the matter dragged on for a long time.
The grievances of the habitant against the seigneurs were numerous, some of them real, some fanciful. It seemed anomalous that, in a British colony in the nineteenth century, there should be men holding great tracts of land with rights over their tenants, as some authors have seriously claimed, extending from the power of trying them for petty offences to that of inflicting the death penalty. This last right was, in any case, only nominal and was never exercised by any seigneur in Canada; but even the claim that it existed shows how high were the authority and privilege of the seigneur. A right like the _corvee_ had a sinister meaning. One of the greatest hards.h.i.+ps of the old regime, in France it meant that, on demand, the peasant must drop his own work to join in making highways, in carrying from one place to another the effects of a regiment, and other unwelcome tasks, all without pay. In Canada it was milder. The seigneur levied a _corvee_ of so many days'
labour, which he employed on the useful task of improving the highway.
Some seigneurs required that at the times they chose, the habitants should work for them a certain number of days, usually six, in each year. They could even make the habitants work without pay at building a manor house; a few of the ma.s.sive stone mansions still fairly numerous in the Province of Quebec were constructed by such labour. Not unnaturally the habitant came to feel it odious and humiliating to be obliged thus to give his labour at another's order.
The seigneuries too were often broken up. In Canada there is no law of primogeniture and, at a seigneur's death, the land went to daughters as well as to sons. Few of the old seigniorial families remained on their original estates. In time those who held the property came to think that a rental of about a cent an acre was not enough. In the days of French rule they could not have increased it; but the old custom, they claimed, did not apply under British sovereignty. So these charges were often increased; in time instead of a penny the habitant had to pay three-pence, six-pence, and even eight-pence, an acre; the seigneurs, as a judge put it, showed an excellent knowledge of arithmetical progression. Thus the _cens et rentes_ began to bring in a real income.
So did the _lods et ventes_, the tax of one-twelfth of the price of whatever land the habitant sold. In early days land was rarely sold. But when towns and villages had grown up on seigniorial estates, a good deal of buying and selling took place and there stood always the seigneur demanding in every transaction his share of the selling price. If the land was sold two or three times in a year, as might well happen, each time the seigneur got his share of one-twelfth. If the occupier had built on the land a house at his own cost, none the less did the seigneur, who had done nothing, get his large percentage on the selling value of these improvements. This was a real grievance. To avoid paying the seigneur's claim a price, lower than that really paid, was sometimes named in the deed, and this led to perjury. To protect themselves the seigneur used his _droit de retrait_ the right for forty days of himself taking the property at the price named. This involved vexation and delay and increased discontent. Moreover the seigneur's right to _lods et ventes_ stood in the way of a ready transfer of property between members of the same family.
There were other causes of discontent. The seigneur had the _droit de ba.n.a.lite_, the ba.n.a.l rights, under which in France the habitant must use the seigneur's wine-press, his oven and his mill. In Canada no wine was made, so the seigneur's winepress did not exist. Some attempts were made to force the habitant to bake his bread in the seigneur's oven but what would do in a compact French village, where fuel was scarce, became absurd in Canada; the picture is ludicrous of a habitant carrying a dozen miles, over rough roads, to the seigneur's oven, unbaked dough which might be hard frozen _en route_. Moreover new inventions made ovens common and cheap so that the habitant could afford to have his own. The seigneur's oven thus caused no grievance. Not so however the seigneur's mill. In the early days when the seigneur had the sole right to build a mill this became for him, in truth, a duty sometimes burdensome; for, whether it would pay or not, the government forced him to build a mill or else abandon the right. But in time the mill proved profitable and to it the peasant must bring his wheat. There might be a good mill near his house, while the seigneur's mill might be a dozen miles away and even then might give poor service; yet to the seigneur's mill he must go. If it was a wind-mill, nature, by denying wind, might cause a long delay before the flour should be ready. As time went on, some seigneurs claimed or reserved a monopoly in regard to all mills; grist mills, saw mills, carding mills, factories of every kind. Canada in time exported flour, but the seigneur's rights stood in the way of the free grinding of the wheat for this trade. The habitant might have on his land an excellent mill site with water power convenient, but he could not use it without the seigneur's consent. More than this the seigneur often reserved the right to take such a site to the extent of six arpents for his own use without any compensation to the habitant.
In many cases the seigneur might freely cut timber on the habitant's land to erect buildings for public use,--church, presbytery, mill, and even a manor house. The rights to base metals on the property he also retained. The eleventh fish caught in the rivers was his. He might change the course of streams or rivers for manufacturing purposes; he alone could establish a ferry; his will determined where roads should be opened. Some seigneurs were even able to force villages and towns to pay a bonus for the right to carry on the ordinary business of buying and selling. So it turned out that if the habitant's crop failed he had little chance to do anything else without the seigneur's consent; he is, says the report of a Commission of Enquiry in 1843, ”kept in a perpetual state of feebleness and dependence. He can never escape from the tie that forever binds to the soil him and his progeny; a cultivator he is born, a mere cultivator he is doomed to die.” No doubt this plaint is pitched in a rather high key. But in time the burden of grievances was generally felt and then the seigniorial system was doomed.
In the days of the last John Nairne political agitation became an old story at Malbaie. We get echoes of meetings held in the village to support the cause of the idol of habitant radicalism, Louis Joseph Papineau; in 1836 ninety-two resolutions drawn up by him and attacking the whole system of government in Canada appear to have met with clamorous approval from the a.s.sembled villagers. Papineau was himself a seigneur and did not a.s.sail the system. But after his unsuccessful rebellion in 1837-38 the attack on the seigneurs intensified. We know little of what happened at Malbaie but the end came suddenly. In 1854, after an election fought largely on this issue, the Parliament of Canada swept away the seigniorial system. The habitants then became tenants paying as rent the old _cens et rentes_. They could not be disturbed as long as this trifling rent was paid. Moreover at any time they might become simple freeholders by paying to the seigneur a sum of money representing their annual rent capitalized on a six per cent, basis. The term seigneur is still used but is now a mere honorary t.i.tle. No longer does his position give him the authority of a magistrate; no longer must the habitants grind their corn at his mill; no longer can he claim _lods et ventes_ when land is sold. For the loss of these rights he was paid compensation out of the public treasury.[34]
With the abolition of the seigniorial system ends too the story of the Nairne family. In 1861, exactly one hundred years after Colonel Nairne first visited Malbaie, died his grandson and the last of his descendants, John McNicol Nairne, son of Colonel Nairne's eldest daughter Magdalen. This last Nairne left the property absolutely to his widow, tied only by the condition that it was to go to her male issue if she had such, even by a second marriage. In 1884, she too died childless, and bequeathed the property to an old friend, both of herself and of her husband, Mr. W.E. Duggan. Had Mr. Duggan not survived Mrs.
Nairne the property was to go to St. Matthew's Church, Quebec. Mr.
Duggan occupied it, until his death in 1898, when it pa.s.sed by will to his half-brother, Mr. E.J. Duggan, the present seigneur.[35]
It is a sad story this of the extinction of a family. Both Thomas Nairne and his father were buried at first in the Protestant cemetery at Quebec. But not there permanently were they to lie, and many years ago they found a resting-place in a new tomb in Mount Hermon Cemetery. On a lovely autumn day in 1907 I made my way in Quebec to the spot where the Nairnes are interred. In the fresh cool air it was a pleasure to walk briskly the three miles of the St. Louis road to the cemetery. One crossed the battle field of the Plains of Abraham where, within a few months, a century and a half ago, Britain and France grappled in deadly strife. The elder Nairne saw that field with its harvest of dead on September 13th, 1759, and, in the following April, he saw its snow stained with the blood of brave men who fell in Murray's battle with Levis. In May, 1776, he marched across it in victorious pursuit of the fleeing American army. At Mount Hermon I readily found the Nairne tomb.
It lies on the slope of the hill towards the river. Through the n.o.ble trees gleamed the mighty tide of the St. Lawrence. A great pine tree stands near the block of granite that marks the Nairne graves and a gentle breeze through its countless needles caused that mysterious sighing which is perhaps nature's softest and saddest note. One's thoughts went back to the brave old Colonel who wrought so well and had such high hopes for his posterity to the soldier son, remembered here, who died in far distant India; and to the other soldier son who fell in Canada upon the field of battle. He was the last male heir of his line.
The name and the family are now well-nigh forgotten. The inscriptions on the tomb, reared by a friend, connected with the Nairnes by ties of friends.h.i.+p only, not of blood, are themselves the memorial of the rise and extinction of a Canadian family.[36]
[Footnote 25: He must have been a Roman Catholic for he was buried in the churchyard at Murray Bay.]
[Footnote 26: We have seen (_ante_ p. 49) how at Malbaie Colonel Nairne expected that a Protestant missionary would soon make the community Protestant.]
[Footnote 27: Professor Barrett Wendell, France of To-day, New York, 1907.]
[Footnote 28: Roy, Histoire de la Seigneurie de Lauzon, IV: 169, 170.]
[Footnote 29: The Abbe H.R. Casgrain: _Une Paroisse Canadienne au XVII.
Siecle_. _Oeuvres_, Vol. I, pp. 483 _sqq._]
[Footnote 30: Roy, La Seigneurie de Lauzon, IV: 247.]
[Footnote 31: M. Leon Gerin in ”L'Habitant de Saint-Justin”, p. 202.]
[Footnote 32: Roy, La Seigneurie de Lauzon IV: 245.]
[Footnote 33: De Gaspe, _Memoires_, p. 533, 4.]
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