to incoming settlers who thus find land less open to free settlement in situations best adapted for agriculture.’  It was, therefore, ordered that if any applicant for lands should be by any seigneur denied a reasonable grant on the customary terms, the intendant should forthwith step in and issue a deed on his own authority.  In this case the annual payments were to go to the colonial treasury, and not to the seigneur.  This decree simplified matters considerably.  After it became the law of the colony no one desiring land from a seigneur’s ungranted domain was expected to offer anything above the customary annual dues and services.  The seigneur had no legal right to demand more.  By one stroke of the royal pen the Canadian seigneur had lost all right of ownership in his seigneury; he became from this time on a trustee holding lands in trust for the future immigrant and for the sons of the people.  However his lands might grow in value, the seigneur, according to the letter of the law, could exact no more from new tenants than from those who had first settled upon his estate.  This was a revolutionary change; it put the seigneurial system in Canada on a basis wholly different from that in France; it proved that the king regarded the system as useful only in so far as it actively contributed to the progress of the colony.  Where it stood in the way of progress he was prepared to apply the knife even at its very vitals.

Unfortunately for those most concerned, however, the royal orders were not allowed to become common knowledge in the colony.  The decree was registered and duly promulgated; then quickly forgotten.  Few of the habitants seem to have ever heard of it; newcomers, of course, knew nothing of their rights under its provisions.  Seigneurs continued to get special terms for advantageous locations, the applicants for lands being usually quite willing to pay a bonus whenever they could afford to do so.  Now and then some one, having heard of the royal arret, would appeal to the intendant, whereupon the seigneur made haste to straighten out things satisfactorily.  Then, as now, the presumption was that the people knew the law, and were in a position to take advantage of its protecting features; but the agencies of information were so few that the provisions of a new decree rarely became common property.

The second of the two arrets of Marly was designed to uphold the hands of those seigneurs who were trying to do right.  The king and his ministers were convinced, from the information which had come to them, that not all the ‘cunning and chicane’ in land dealings came from the seigneurs.  The habitants were themselves in part to blame.  In many cases settlers had taken good lands, had cut down a few trees, thinking thereby to make a technical compliance with requirements, and were spending their energies in the fur trade.  It was the royal opinion that real homesteading should be insisted upon, and he decreed, accordingly, that wherever a habitant did