In each year, if he chooses, the habitant has a good many chances to cast his vote. The Church, the greatest institution of the village has its annual election—that for a churchwarden; of the three churchwardens one retires every year. An annual election there is also for the municipal council, two or three of whose members retire each year. This body looks after the highways, the granting of licenses to sell spirituous liquors and so on. Annually also are elected school commissioners, who have charge of education. The municipal council and the school commission are comparatively new institutions in the Province of Quebec. They have been borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon world, but the habitant takes kindly to the elector's privileges and struggles are sometimes keen. The innovation of the ballot not having been adopted, as yet, in municipal elections, the voting is open. Every voter must thus show his preferences and when a moral question, such as the licensing of drinking places, is before the electors this open voting aids the Church's influence. Usually the curé is an ardent temperance man and to vote for a license against his wishes, made known perhaps from the pulpit, needs great strength of conviction. It thus happens that a very large number of parishes in the Province of Quebec have no licensed drinking places.
Of offices in the gift of the village voter those in the Church are the most highly esteemed. To be a municipal councillor or a school commissioner is indeed all very well. But the village council is not really very important. It spends only a few hundred dollars a year and to keep up the roads is not an exciting task. The village council rarely has even the "town hall" usual in other communities; it meets in the "salle publique," or the vestry, of the Church, or in the school house. The school commissioners too have no very dazzling work to do. The curé is sometimes their chairman and thus in some degree they come under the control of the Church. The commissioners appoint the teachers in the schools and keep up the school buildings, but their outlay is also very small, for the salaries of teachers, usually women, are appallingly low. The really important elective office in the parish is that of churchwarden (marguiller). In the church the churchwardens have a special seat of honour assigned to them. They control the temporalities and may beard even the curé himself. Large sums of money pass through their hands. They receive the pew rents,—and every habitant has a pew; they receive the voluntary offerings. It often happens that the Church accumulates large sums of money and that, if the building of a presbytère or parish church is decided upon, there is enough on hand to pay for it outright. The municipal council and the schoolboard, on the other hand, are always poor. The habitant watches their taxation with a parsimonious scrutiny and it is a thankless task to carry on their work.
Municipal interests represent of course only a part of the village's political thought. In provincial politics, federal politics, there is often in Quebec an interest keener even than in other parts of Canada. It would be too much to say that the habitant has a wide outlook on public questions; but the village notary and the village doctor are likely to have political ambitions and rivalry becomes acute; often indeed the curse of the village is the professional politician. At times in Quebec politics have been closely associated with religion and always the bishops are persons to be reckoned with. Their attitude has ever been that, if the policy of one or the other party seems to be inimical to the Church, they have the right to direct Catholic electors to vote against such a party. From the point of view of British supremacy in French Canada it would be a mistake to say that the bishops in a political rôle have always been mischievous. After the conquest they soon became the most staunch supporters of the authority of George III and through the Church the British conqueror was able to reach the people. When the American Revolution began, the bishops were strenuous for British connection and from the pulpits came solemn warnings against the Americans. Again in Britain's war on Revolutionary France the Canadian bishops were with her, heart and soul. They ordered Te Deums when Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile, and over Trafalgar there were great rejoicings. After Waterloo we find in French Canada perhaps the most curious of all the thanksgivings; at Malbaie, as elsewhere, a Te Deum was sung and the people were told in glowing terms of the victory of the "immortal Wellington" which had covered "our army" with glory and ended a cruel war. Later, in the days of Papineau, the Church opposed rebellion; she has since opposed annexation to the United States. She has also helped to preserve order. If a crime was to be detected, the curé read from the pulpit a demand that any one, who could give information to further this end, should do so. Solemn excommunication was pronounced against offenders; to make the warning impressive the priest would drop to the ground a lighted candle and put it out with his foot; so would God extinguish the offenders thus denounced, and those who abetted their crimes.
Since the Church has aided the state, not unnaturally she expected some special favours in return. She got them in the days of the early British governors of Canada. Sir Guy Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, secured for the Church the legal power to levy the tithe on Catholics and practically all the other privileges she had enjoyed under the old régime. The bishops tended to become more and more active in politics and this reached a climax in 1896. With great heat the bishops threw themselves into the attack on the Liberal party, because it would not support the Church's demands for her own separate schools in Manitoba, supported by taxes levied on Roman Catholics by the state. Some of the bishops went too far in denunciation; an appeal against their action was carried by Catholics to the Pope and the offenders were rebuked. The incident showed that in politics the habitant knows his own mind, for he gave an overwhelming support to the party on which the bishops were warring. Since then many a habitant draws a sharp distinction between the spiritual and the political claims of the bishops. Their full spiritual authority he does not doubt; in politics he thinks his own opinion as good as theirs.
If in spiritual matters the Church led it was intended that in temporal affairs too the habitants should always have guidance. An old world flavour seems to pervade the relations between seigneur and vassal in a French Canadian parish. The seigneur was himself the vassal of the crown, bound to do humble homage at the capital when he received his grant. We have a detailed account of the ceremony as performed, perhaps for the first time under British rule. On December 23rd, 1760, in the morning one Jacques Noël, a seigneur, accompanied by royal notaries, proceeded to the government house in Quebec. He knocked at the principal entrance and, when a servant appeared, Noël asked if His Excellency James Murray, the Governor, was at home. The servant replied that His Excellency was within and that he would give him notice. On being admitted to the presence of the Governor, Noël with head uncovered, and, to symbolize his humble obedience, wearing neither sword nor spur, fell on his knees before him and declared that he performed faith and homage for the seigniory to which, on his father's death, he had become the heir. He then took an oath on the gospels to be faithful to the king and to be no party to anything against his interests; to hold his own vassals to the same obedience; and to perform all other duties required by the terms of his holding.
The Crown required very little of the seigneur and so, in truth, did the seigneur of his tenants. Their annual payment of cens et rentes rarely amounted to more than a very few dollars. When it fell due in the autumn they were given abundant notice. Still in the Canadian parishes, when the Sunday morning mass is over, the crier stands on a raised platform near the church door, the people gather round, and the announcement is made of tithes and taxes due, of articles lost or found, of anything indeed of general interest to the community. It was in this way that as St. Martin's day, November 11th, approached the people were reminded of the falling due of the cens et rentes. The meaning of the two terms is somewhat obscure. The cens was a trifling payment by the censitaire in recognition of the seigneur's position and rights as landowner; while the rentes represented a real rental based in some degree on the supposed value of the land. But the rate was usually conventional and very small. In early Canada the river was the highway and upon it therefore every settler desired to have a frontage. There was, also, greater safety from Indian attacks in having the houses close together at the front of the farms. So these became long narrow strips, with the houses built so close together that the country side often seems like a continuous village. The habitant paid usually in cens et rentes twenty sols (about twenty cents) for each arpent (192 feet) of frontage; instead of cash usually he might pay in kind—a live capon or a small measure (demi-minot) of grain for each arpent. He paid also about one cent of rent for each superficial acre. Thus for a farm of 100 acres, with two arpents of frontage, a habitant might pay $1.00 in cash and two capons. If each of 400 such tenants paid for their frontage in capons, 800 of these fowls would he brought to the seigneur's barn-yard each autumn!
Though payment was due on November 11th, the habitants usually waited for the first winter days when the sleighing had become good. In many of the sleighs, hastening with the merry sound of bells over the wintry roads to the manor house, there would be one or two captive capons or a bag or two of grain. M. de Gaspé has described how on such an occasion the seigneur, or some member of his family for him, would be found by the tenant "seated majestically in a large arm chair, near a table covered with green baize cloth." Here he received the payments, or in many cases only excuses for non-payment. The scene outside was often animated, for the fowls brought in payment of the rent, with legs tied but throats free, would not bear their captivity in silence. Rent day was a festal occasion, but the great day in the year at the manor house was New Year's Day. Then the people came to offer their respects to the seigneur and Nairne speaks of the prodigious consumption of whiskey and cakes at such a time. The seigneur was usually god-father to the first-born of the children of his tenants. It is a pretty custom among French Canadians for the children to go on New Year's Day, which is a great festival, to the chamber of their parents in the early morning and kneel before the bed for their benediction. To the seigneur as to a parent came on this day his god-children and we have it from M. de Gaspé, an eye witness, that on one occasion he saw no less than one hundred of these come to call upon the seigneur at the manor house! In the old days the people came also on the first day of May to plant the May-pole before his door and to dance round it.
Some of the seigneurs were as poor as their own censitaires and, like them, toiled with their hands. But usually there was a social gulf between the cottage and the manor house. Even the Church marked this. The seigneur had the right to a special pew; he was censed first; he received the wafer first at the communion; he took precedence in processions, and was specially recommended from the pulpit to the prayers of the congregation. Caldwell, who was seigneur of Lauzon opposite Quebec, used to drive through his great seigniory in state, half reclining on the cushions of his carriage and with a numerous following. If on a long drive he stopped at a farm house, even for the light refreshment of a drink of milk, he never paid the habitant with anything less than a gold coin. I once asked a habitant, who remembered the old days, whether the seigneur really was such a very great man in the village. He replied, with something like awe in his voice, "Monsieur, il était le roi, l'empereur, du village."