to a gift of twenty livres, called ‘the king’s gift.’  The same decree imposed a penalty upon all fathers who had not married their sons at twenty and their daughters at sixteen.  In the same spirit, it enacted also that all Canadians having ten children living should be entitled to a pension of three hundred livres annually; four hundred livres was the reward for twelve.  ’Marry early’ was the royal mandate.  Colbert, writing to Talon in 1668, says:  ’I pray you to commend it to the consideration of the whole people, that their prosperity, their subsistence, and all that is dear to them, depend on a general resolution, never to be departed from, to marry youths at eighteen or nineteen years and girls at fourteen or fifteen; since abundance can never come to them except through the abundance of men.’  And this was not enough; Colbert went on:  ’Those who may seem to have absolutely renounced marriage should be made to bear additional burdens, and be excluded from all honours; it would be well even to add some mark of infamy.’  The unfortunate bachelor seems to have been treated somewhat as a public malefactor.  Talon issued an order forbidding unmarried volontaires to hunt with the Indians or go into the woods, if they did not marry fifteen days after the arrival of the ships from France.  And a case is recorded of one Francois Lenoir, of Montreal, who was brought before the judge because, being unmarried, he had gone to trade with the Indians.  He pleaded guilty, and pledged himself to marry next year after the arrival of the ships, or failing that, to give one hundred and fifty livres to the church of Montreal and a like sum to the hospital.  He kept his money and married within the term.

The matrimonial zeal of Colbert and Talon did not slight the noblemen and officers.  Captain de la Mothe, marrying and taking up his abode in the country, received sixteen hundred livres.  During the years 1665-68 six thousand livres were expended to aid the marriage of young gentlewomen without means, and six thousand to enable four captains, three lieutenants, five ensigns, and a few minor officers to settle and marry in the colony.

A word must be said as to the character of the young women.  Some writers have cast unfair aspersions upon the girls sent out from France to marry in Canada.  After a serious study of the question, we are in a position to state that these girls were most carefully selected.  Some of them were orphans reared in charitable institutions under the king’s protection; they were called les filles du roi.  The rest belonged to honest families, and their parents, overburdened with children, were willing to send them to a new country where they would be well provided for.  In 1670 Colbert wrote to the archbishop of Rouen:  ’As in the parishes about Rouen fifty or sixty girls might be found who would be very glad to go to Canada to be married, I beg you to employ your credit and authority with the cures of thirty or forty