'As soon a living man chained to a dead man, as I would hamper myself with that old-world feudality!' exclaimed the Western pioneer. 'Why, sir, can you have seen the wretched worn-out land they scratch with a wretched plough, fall after fall, without dreaming of rotation of crops, or drainage, or any other improvement? Do you remember the endless strips of long narrow fields edging the road, opening out of one another, in miserable divisions of one or two acres, perhaps, just affording starvation to the holders? What is the reason that where vast quantities of wheat were formerly exported, the soil now grows hardly enough for the people to eat? Sir, the country is cut up and subdivided to the last limits that will support even the sleepy life of a habitan; all improvement of every kind is barred; the French population stand still in the midst of our go-ahead age: and you would prolong the system that causes this!'
It was one of the few subjects upon which Mr. Holt got excited; but he had seen the evils of feudalism in the strong light of Western progress. Captain Armytage, for peace' sake, qualified his lately expressed admiration, but was met again by a torrent of words—to the unalloyed delight of Andy, who was utterly unable to comprehend the argument, but only hoped 'the schamer was gettin' more than he bargained for.'
'Pauperism will be the result, sir; the race is incorrigible in its stupid determination to do as its forefathers did, and nothing else. Lower Canada wants a clearing out, like what you are getting in Ireland, before a healthy regeneration can set in. The religion is faulty; the habits and traditions of the race are faulty; Jean Baptiste is the drone in our colonial hive. He won't gather honey: he will just live, indolently drawling through an existence diversified by feast and fast days; and all his social vices flourish in shelter of this seignorial system—this—this upas-tree which England is pledged to perpetuate:' and Mr. Holt struck his hand violently on the gunwale of the boat, awakening a responsive grin of triumph from Andy.
The captain was spared a reply by the boat just then touching the wharf; and while they were landing, and lodging the luggage in Pat M'Donagh's house till the starting of the Montreal boat next afternoon, we may say a few words concerning the feudal system extant in Lower Canada at the period when this story begins.
Henri Quatre was the monarch under whose sway the colony was originated. Champlain and De Levi knew no better than to reproduce the landed organization of France, with its most objectionable feature of the forced partition of estates, in the transatlantic province, for defensive purposes, against the numerous and powerful Indian tribes. Military tenure was superadded. Every farmer was perforce also a soldier, liable at any time to be called away from his husbandry to fight against the savage Iroquois or the aggressive British. Long after these combative days had passed away the military tenure remained, with its laws of serfdom, a canker at the roots of property; and thinking men dreaded to touch a matter so inwound with the very foundations of the social fabric in Lower Canada. But in 1854 and 1859 legislative acts were passed which have finally abolished the obnoxious tenure; each landholder, receiving his estate in freehold, has paid a certain sum, and the Province in general contributed £650,000 as indemnity to those whose old-established rights were surrendered for the public weal. Eight millions of inhabited acres were freed from the incubus, and Lower Canada has removed one great obstacle in the way of her prosperity.
At the period when Hiram Holt expressed himself so strongly on the subject, a grinding vassalage repressed the industry of the habitans. Though their annual rent, as censitaires or tenants, was not large, a variety of burdensome obligations was attached. When a man sold his tenure, the seigneur could demand a fine, sometimes one-twelfth of the purchase money; heavy duties were charged on successions. The ties of the Roman Catholic Church were oppressive. Various monopolies were possessed by the seigneurs. The whole system of social government was a reproduction, in the nineteenth century, of the France of the fifteenth.
Mr. Holt was somewhat cooled when his party had reached the citadel, through streets so steep that the drive to their summit seemed a feat of horsemanship. Here was the great rock whence Jacques Cartier, first of European eyes, viewed the mighty river in the time of our Henry VIII., now bristling with fortifications which branch away in angles round the Upper Town, crowned with a battery of thirty-two pounders, whose black muzzles command the peaceful shipping below. Robert Wynn could not help remarking on that peculiarly Canadian charm, the exquisite clearness of the air, which brought distant objects so near in vision that he could hardly believe Point Levi to be a mile across the water, and the woods of the isle of Orleans more than a league to the eastward.
Captain Armytage had many reminiscences of the fortress, but enjoyed little satisfaction in the relating of any; for nothing could get the seignorial tenure out of Mr. Holt's head, and he drove in sentences concerning it continually.
Outside the Castle gates the captain remembered important business, which must preclude him from the pleasure of accompanying his friends to Wolfe's Landing.
'Well, sir, I hope you now acknowledge that the seignorial system is a blot on our civilisation.'