The provisions of this act for changing all seigneurial tenures into freehold are long and somewhat technical.  They would not interest the reader.  In brief, it was arranged that the valid rights of each seigneur should be translated by special commissioners into an annual money rental, and that the habitants should pay this annual sum.  The seigneur was required to pay no quit-rent to the public treasury.  What he would have paid, by reason of getting his own lands into freehold, was applied pro rata to the reduction of the annual rentals payable by the habitants.  It was arranged, furthermore, that any habitant might commute this yearly rental by paying his seigneur a lump sum such as would represent his rent capitalized at the rate of six per cent.

The whole undertaking was difficult and complicated.  A great many perplexing questions arose, and a special court had to be created to deal with them. [Footnote:  This court was constituted of four judges of the Court of the Queen’s Bench and nine judges of the Superior Court of Lower Canada, as follows:  Sir Louis H. La Fontaine, Chief Justice; Justices Duval, Aylwin, and Caron of the Court of the Queen’s Bench; the Hon. Edward Bowen, Chief Justice; Justices Morin, Mondelet, Vanfelson, Day, Smith, Meredith, Short, and Badgley of the Superior Court.] On the whole however, the commissioners performed their tasks carefully and without causing undue friction.  Class prejudice was strong, and by most of the seigneurs the whole scheme was regarded as a high-handed piece of legislative confiscation.  They opposed it bitterly from first to last.  Among the habitants, however, the abolition of the old tenure was popular, for it meant, in their opinion, that every one would henceforth be a real landowner.  But in the long run it signified nothing of the sort.  Very few of the habitants took advantage of the provision which enabled them to pay a lump sum in lieu of an annual rental.  Down to the present day the great majority of them continue to pay their rente constituee as did their fathers before them.  With due adherence to ancient custom they pay it each St Martin’s Day, and to the man whom they still call ‘the seigneur.’  Seigneur he is no longer; for the act of 1854 abolished not only the emoluments, but the honours attaching to this rank.  But traditions live long in isolated communities, and the habitants of the St Lawrence valley still give, along with their annual rent, a great deal of old-time deference to the man who holds the lands upon which they live.

The twilight of European feudalism was more prolonged in French Canada than in any other land.  Its prolongation was unfortunate.  For several decades preceding 1854 it had failed to adjust itself to the new environment, and its continuance was an obstacle to the economic progress of Canada.  Its abolition was wise—­a generation or two earlier it would have been even wiser.  All this is not to say, however, that the seigneurial system did not