does not, however, appear that military service was a condition on which the seigniors of Canada held their grants, as was the case in France under the old feudal tenure.  The king and his representative in his royal province held such powers in their own hands.  The seignior had as little influence in the government of the country as he had in military affairs.  He might be chosen to the superior council at the royal pleasure, and was bound to obey the orders of the governor whenever the militia were called out.  The whole province was formed into a militia district, so that in time of war the inhabitants might be obliged to perform military service under the royal governor or commander-in-chief of the regular forces.  A captain was appointed for each parish—­generally conterminous with a seigniory—­and in some cases there were two or three.  These captains were frequently chosen from the seigniors, many of whom—­in the Richelieu district entirely—­were officers of royal regiments, notably of the Carignan-Salieres.  The seigniors had, as in France, the right of dispensing justice, but with the exception of the Seminary of St Sulpice of Montreal, it was only in very rare instances they exercised their judicial powers, and then simply in cases of inferior jurisdiction (basse justice).  The superior council and intendant adjudicated in all matters of civil and criminal importance.

The whole success of the seigniorial system, as a means of settling the country, depended on the extent to which the seigniors were able to grant their lands en censive or en roture.  The censitaire who held his lands in this way could not himself sub-infeudate.  The grantee en roture was governed by the same rules as the one en censive except with respect to the descent of lands in cases of intestacy.  All land grants to the censitaires—­or as they preferred to call themselves in Canada, habitants—­were invariably shaped like a parallelogram, with a narrow frontage on the river varying from two to three arpents, and with a depth from four to eight arpents.  These farms, in the course of time assumed the appearance of a continuous settlement on the river and became known in local phraseology as Cotes—­for example, Cote de Neiges, Cote St. Louis, Cote St. Paul, and many other picturesque villages on the banks of the St. Lawrence.  In the first century of settlement the government induced the officers and soldiers of the Carignan-Salieres regiment to settle lands along the Richelieu river and to build palisaded villages for the purposes of defence against the war-like Iroquois; but, in the rural parts of the province generally, the people appear to have followed their own convenience with respect to the location of their farms and dwellings, and chose the banks of the river as affording the easiest means of intercommunication.  The narrow oblong grants, made in the original settlement of the province, became narrower still as the original occupants died and their property was divided among the heirs under the civil law.  Consequently at the present day the traveller who visits French Canada sees the whole country divided into extremely long and narrow parallelograms each with fences and piles of stones as boundaries in innumerable cases.