| Emigration from France to Canada. The settlers and |
The King of France created the government of Canada. He created also the people. In less than ten years from the date when he took the colony in hand the population was more than doubled. Shiploads of male emigrants were sent out from France, and cargoes of future wives and mothers. Wedlock was prescribed, celibacy was proscribed, bounties were, in Roman fashion, given to early marriages and to large families. The privilege of remaining single was reserved for priests and nuns; the lay members of the community were bidden to be fruitful and multiply, and they obeyed the King's commands with much success. They were honest folk, the Canadian settlers, not convicted felons sent out from French prisons. No doubt there were among the emigrants men and women who were glad to leave France, and of whom France was glad to be rid; but there was no convict strain in the population, and the coureurs de bois, unlicensed though they were, were not mere outlaws, like the Australian bushrangers.
| the Feudal System. Canadian feudalism was purely artificial. |
When an emigrant came to Canada, he could not return to France without a passport, but he might possibly drift into the backwoods or to the Dutch or English colonies. Efforts were therefore made to attach him to the soil. For this purpose a kind of Feudal System was introduced, somewhat diluted to suit the place and the time. The essence of feudalism in bygone days had been military tenure and oligarchy. Time had been in France when the nobles were stronger than the King, but in the reign of Louis XIV they were little more than courtiers. They had become ornamental rather than useful; yet even under a Bourbon despotism, tradition, long descent, ownership of wide and well-cultivated lands, and rights over a considerable number of serfs or peasants, gave the French noblesse considerable social influence. In Canada feudalism had no military aspect. There was, it is true, a Canadian militia, but it had no connexion with the feudal tenure of land. Very few of the Canadian Seigniors were of noble birth, all were poor, their honours were brand new, their domains were backwoods with occasional clearings, their vassals were nearly as good men as themselves. The Feudal System in Canada was not born of the soil, it was simply a device of a benevolent despot for allotting and settling land, for artificially grading and classifying an artificially-formed people, and for giving to a new country some element of old-world respectability.
| The Seigniors. The Habitans and their tenure. |
The Seignior held his land, in most cases, directly from the Crown. He held it as a free gift from the King by title of faith and homage. He held it on condition of bringing it into cultivation; and, if he sold his Seigniory, one-fifth of the price as a rule was paid to the Crown. There was no immemorial title to the land. The title was given by an arbitrary overlord, and by the same could be revoked. The condition of cultivation was annexed in order to promote settlement, and inasmuch as most Seigniors, owing to poverty and the size of the holdings, could not themselves fulfil the condition, they granted lands in turn to other settlers, who held of them as they held of the King. These other settlers were the Habitans, the cultivators of the soil, and their tenancy was the tenure of cens et rente, whence they were known in legal phrase as Censitaires. In other words, they paid a small rent in money, or in kind, or in both. If they sold their holdings, the Seignior received one-twelfth of the purchase-money. They were required to grind their corn at the Seignior's mill, to pay for the privilege of fishing one fish in every eleven caught, and to comply with sundry other small demands, in addition to having justice meted out occasionally at the Seignior's hands.
These conditions may have been found in some instances petty and annoying, but to Frenchmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth century they can hardly have been onerous. They were limited and safeguarded, as they had been created, by the royal will; and it was not till the year 1854, after Canada had known British rule for nearly a hundred years, that they were swept away. That a purely artificial system should have lasted so long and caused apparently so little friction and discontent, argues no little skill in those who invented it, and proves that it was not ill suited to the wants, and harmonized with the traditions, of the colonists of Canada. It is impossible to imagine the Puritan settler in New England submitting to such minute regulations, taking his corn to a Seignior's mill, baking his bread at a Seignior's oven, paying homage to another settler set over him by a distant King. But Frenchmen could be drilled and organized. They understood being planted out in rows, like so many trees. Their religion and their training tended to unquestioning obedience, and they throve in quiet sort under restrictions which the grim and stubborn New Englander would have trodden under foot.
| Military colonization in Canada. The Carignan Regiment. |
Though feudalism on the St. Lawrence had no military basis, military colonization played a great part in the early settlement of Canada. The Intendant, Talon, Colbert's right-hand man in his Canadian schemes, took in this matter the Romans for his model. As the Romans planted military colonies along the frontiers of their provinces, including Gaul itself, so Colbert and Talon determined to ensure the security of Canada by placing a barrier of soldier-colonists on the border. There was a famous French regiment known as the Carignan-Salières Regiment. It had been raised in Savoy by a Prince of Carignan. It had lately fought with distinction side by side with the Austrians against the Turks, and in 1665, under Colonel de Salières, was sent out to Canada, the first regiment of the line which had ever landed in New France. The main outlet for Iroquois incursions was the line of the Richelieu river. On that river forts were built and garrisoned, and along its banks and also along the St. Lawrence, between the mouth of the Richelieu and the island of Montreal, time-expired soldiers were planted out as settlers. Officers and men alike were given grants of land and bounties in money, and the soldiers were kept for a year by the King, while building their houses and clearing their land. The theory was that the officers should be Seigniors, and that the soldiers who had served under them should become tenants of their old commanders. Where the lands were most exposed, the houses were grouped together within palisades. Elsewhere they were detached from one another, forming a line of dwellings along the river-side, whence the settlements were known as côtés.
| Size of the Seigniories. |