At one time there was for some years a directed migration of young women from France, sent out to become the wives of the colonists and early in the history of the country a policy of bonuses for marriage, and for large families, which has been repeated at intervals ever since, was introduced. None the less, the colony grew but slowly and to the failure to establish it on a sound biological foundation is due the collapse of French rule.
In 1665 the first census showed a population of 3215. In the next hundred years this had increased to somewhat more than 70,000, with an additional 20,000 in what are now the Maritime Provinces. That the French could maintain the contest for so long against British neighbors who outnumbered them twenty to one is to their credit, but their lack of recognition that their settlement could not be permanent unless based on a real migration of families ultimately cost them the country.
One of the chief causes of the failure of French Canada to expand beyond the narrow limits of the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, during its first century of existence, was an obscure skirmish which occurred on the west side of Lake Champlain in 1609. Champlain was advancing toward the South in company with Canadian Algonquins, when he encountered a war party of the Mohawks. In the fighting that followed, some Mohawks were killed and captured. At that time and in that place began the bitter enmity of the Iroquois Five Nations and the Canadian French. It was a feud that was never allowed to rest and yearly war parties of Mohawks went north along Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River and devastated the lower portion of Quebec Province. At the same time war parties of the Senecas descended the Saint Lawrence and attacked the French from the West. As long as the power of the Iroquois lasted, which was all through the seventeenth century, they devastated a large part of New France.
DOMINION OF CANADA & NEWFOUNDLAND
In the meantime, the Dutch and English were growing up in security to the South and East. Thus Champlain's skirmish with the Iroquois was the factor that delayed the expansion of France into the region of the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi Valley until relatively late in the eighteenth century.
The French population still centers in Quebec Province, long known as Lower Canada, but it has spread to other parts of the continent both south and west of the Quebec boundary. Their expansion in Canada has been into the neighboring provinces. Emigration to New England began in the eighteenth century but was not considerable until the nineteenth century.
While this French-Canadian population has remained so fecund as to furnish a stock example for every writer, it, too, has felt the trend of the times. For a long time the government of Quebec offered a grant of one hundred acres of land to every man who was the father of twelve living children by one wife. In less than a single year over 3000 heads of families availed themselves of this privilege and in 1907 there was published a list of 7000 families having at least twelve living children.
In spite of this fecundity, the birthrate has been declining for almost the whole of the historical period. Two hundred and fifty years ago the average for all women of child-bearing age in Quebec Province was one child every two and one-half years. By 1850 this ratio had decreased to one in five years. At present it is one in seven and one-half years. Under this method of measurement, the rate of natural increase per head is only one-third of what it was in colonial times. Even the Roman Catholic "Habitant," therefore, has felt the effect of the general decline of birthrate throughout the western world in the period since the beginning of the industrial revolution.