An old man went up to her, hat in hand, and said with tears in his
     voice: 

     “Madame, it is my son who unfortunately is tipsy, but be sure that
     I shall bring him to make his apologies and meanwhile I beg you to
     accept mine for his boorishness.”

I ought to add that the whole parish spoke with indignation of the conduct of the young man.  The delinquent had committed a double offence.  He had been rude to their benefactress, and besides, violating a French Canadian custom, he had passed a carriage without asking permission.[33]

This must have been before 1813 for in that year this good Madame Tache died:  even so early was youth restive under the old traditions of deference and subordination.  Already some even of the seigneurs were saying that the system retarded settlement.  It would have suited the seigneurs to have their holdings converted into freehold, for then they could have held the unsettled land as their own property instead of being under obligation to grant it for a nominal rental to censitaires.  But to make this conversion would have been too kind to the seigneurs; so the matter dragged on for a long time.

The grievances of the habitant against the seigneurs were numerous, some of them real, some fanciful.  It seemed anomalous that, in a British colony in the nineteenth century, there should be men holding great tracts of land with rights over their tenants, as some authors have seriously claimed, extending from the power of trying them for petty offences to that of inflicting the death penalty.  This last right was, in any case, only nominal and was never exercised by any seigneur in Canada; but even the claim that it existed shows how high were the authority and privilege of the seigneur.  A right like the corvee had a sinister meaning.  One of the greatest hardships of the old regime, in France it meant that, on demand, the peasant must drop his own work to join in making highways, in carrying from one place to another the effects of a regiment, and other unwelcome tasks, all without pay.  In Canada it was milder.  The seigneur levied a corvee of so many days’ labour, which he employed on the useful task of improving the highway.  Some seigneurs required that at the times they chose, the habitants should work for them a certain number of days, usually six, in each year.  They could even make the habitants work without pay at building a manor house; a few of the massive stone mansions still fairly numerous in the Province of Quebec were constructed by such labour.  Not unnaturally the habitant came to feel it odious and humiliating to be obliged thus to give his labour at another’s order.