There was, however, one mitigating feature in the situation.  The hand of home authority was rigid and its beckonings were precise; but as a practical matter it could be, and sometimes was, disregarded altogether.  Not that the colonial officials ever defied the King or his ministers, or ever failed to profess their intent to follow the royal instructions loyally and to the letter.  They had a much safer plan.  When the provisions of a royal decree seemed impractical or unwise, it was easy enough to let them stand unenforced.  Such decrees were duly registered in the records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec and were then promptly pigeonholed so that no one outside the little circle of officials at the Chateau de St. Louis ever heard of them.  In one case a new intendant on coming to the colony unearthed a royal mandate of great importance which had been kept from public knowledge for twenty years.

Absolutism, paternalism, and religious solidarity were characteristic of both France and her colonies in the great century of overseas expansion.  There was no self-government, no freedom of individual initiative, and very little heresy either at home or abroad.  The factors which made France strong in Europe, her unity, her subordination of all other things to the military needs of the nation, her fostering of the sense of nationalism—­these appeared prominently in Canada and helped to make the colony strong as well.  Historians of New France have been at pains to explain why the colony ultimately succumbed to the combined attacks of New England by land and of Old England by sea.  For a full century New France had as its next-door neighbor a group of English colonies whose combined populations outnumbered her own at a ratio of about fifteen to one.  The relative numbers and resources of the two areas were about the same, proportionately, as those of the United States and Canada at the present day.  The marvel is not that French dominion in America finally came to an end but that it managed to endure so long.

CHAPTER II

A VOYAGEUR OF BRITTANY

The closing quarter of the fifteenth century in Europe has usually been regarded by historians as marking the end of the Middle Ages.  The era of feudal chaos had drawn to a close and states were being welded together under the leadership of strong dynasties.  With this consolidation came the desire for expansion, for acquiring new lands, and for opening up new channels of influence.  Spain, Portugal, and England were first in the field of active exploration, searching for stores of precious metals and for new routes to the coasts of Ormuz and of India.  In this quest for a short route to the half-fabulous empires of Asia they had literally stumbled upon a new continent which they had made haste to exploit.  France, meanwhile, was dissipating her energies on Spanish and Italian battlefields.  It was not until the