him through life a grim reminder of his combative habits in early days.  But warfare was only an avocation; the first fruits of the land absorbed his main interest throughout the larger part of his days.  Each of these men had others like him, and the peculiar circumstances of the colony found places for them all.  The seigneurs of Old Canada did not form a homogeneous class; men of widely differing tastes and attainments were included among them.  There were workers and drones; there were men who made a signal success as seigneurs, and others who made an utter failure.  But taken as a group there was nothing very commonplace about them, and it is to her two hundred seigneurs or thereabouts that New France owes much of the glamour that marks her tragic history.

CHAPTER IV

SEIGNEUR AND HABITANT

In its attitude toward the seigneurs the crown was always generous.  The seigneuries were large, and from the seigneurs the king asked no more than that they should help to colonize their grants with settlers.  It was expected, in turn, that the seigneurs would show a like spirit in all dealings with their dependants.  Many of them did; but some did not.  On the whole, however, the habitants who took farms within the seigneuries fared pretty well in the matter of the feudal dues and services demanded from them.  Compared with the seigneurial tenantry of Old France their obligations were few in number, and imposed almost no burden at all.

This is a matter upon which a great deal of nonsense has been written by English writers on the early history of Canada, most of whom have been able to see nothing but the spectre of paternalism in every domain of colonial life.  It is quite true, as Tocqueville tells us, that the physiognomy of a government can be best judged in its colonies, for there its merits and faults appear as through a microscope.  But in Canada it was the merits rather than the faults of French feudalism which came to the front in bold relief.  There it was that seigneurial polity put its best foot forward.  It showed that so long as defence was of more importance than opulence the institution could fully justify its existence.  Against the seigneurial system as such no element in the population of New France ever raised, so far as the records attest, one word of protest during the entire period of French dominion.  The habitants, as every shred of reliable contemporary evidence goes to prove, were altogether contented with the terms upon which they held their lands, and thought only of the great measure of freedom from burdens which they enjoyed as compared with their friends at home.  To speak of them as ’slaves to the corvees and unpaid military service, debarred from education and crammed with gross fictions as an aid to their docility and their value as food for powder,’ [Footnote:  A. G. Bradley, The fight with France for North America (London, 1905, p. 388).] is to display a rare combination of hopeless bigotry and crass ignorance.  The habitant of the old regime in Canada was neither a slave nor a serf; neither down-trodden nor maltreated; neither was he docile and spineless when his own rights were at issue.  So often has all this been shown that it is high time an end were made of these fictions concerning the woes of Canadian folk-life in the days before the conquest.