A Historical Geography of the British Colonies Part 9

[Sidenote: _Chartered Companies ill suited to France._]

The truth was that Chartered Companies were alien to the genius of France, or at any rate of Roman Catholic France--the France of the Bourbons. Her greatest ministers, Richelieu and Colbert, were, it is true, loth to discard the system. They wished to give French merchants a direct interest in building up a colonial empire. They saw the English working by means of companies. They saw the Dutch giving to the state the outward semblance of private enterprise.

Companies, they argued, would promote French trade and colonization, as they had promoted the trade and colonization of rival nations. But Richelieu and Colbert were despotic ministers of arbitrary Kings; the companies which they created were as lifeless and as helpless as their t.i.tles were high-sounding and pretentious. They lasted as long, and only as long, as they were backed by the Crown. They were swept away as easily as they were formed; and they left no lasting impress on French colonial history.

[Sidenote: _Canada under the Crown._]

We may take it then that, in 1663, Canada in effect pa.s.sed to the French King and became what would now be styled a Crown Colony.

Strong hands ministered to it, and it grew in strength. New France was fostered, was ruled and organized, was supplied, though sometimes sparingly, with means of defence and offence. It was developed on rigidly prescribed lines. It was given a social and political system.

Capable and enterprising men were concerned in making its history, and its history was made on a distinct type imported from the Old World, and little modified by the New. What this system was, and how far under it the colonists were able to cope with their coloured foes, will be told in the remaining pages of this chapter.

[Sidenote: _The Government of Canada._]

[Sidenote: _The Supreme Council._]

The Government of Canada was a despotism. Under the {95} King of France, whose word was law, the whole power was centred in the Governor, the Intendant, and the Council, known at first as the Supreme Council, afterwards as the Superior or the Sovereign Council.

This Council was created by royal edict in April, 1663. It was at once a legislative body, and a High Court of Justice. It consisted of the Governor, the Intendant, the bishop, and five other councillors, afterwards increased to seven, and again to twelve. The councillors were appointed by the King, and held office usually for life. They deliberated, they legislated, they judged, they wrangled among themselves; they followed the lead of Governor, Intendant, or bishop, according as one or the other was strongest for the time being, and the strongest for the time being was the man who had the ear of the King and his minister.

[Sidenote: _The law of Canada._]

[Sidenote: _The courts of justice._]

The law of the land was the Customary Law of Paris, supplemented by three kinds of ordinances. There were the royal edicts sent out from France and registered by the Council in Canada; there were the decrees made by the Council; and in the third place, there were the ordinances of the Intendant, who was invested with legislative authority by the King. The Council, as has been stated, was a judicial as well as a legislative body. It was the court of appeal for the colony, and in early days it was also a court of first instance. There were minor courts of justice, too, established by the Council, and three judges of the three districts of Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal respectively, appointed by the King. In addition, the feudal Seigniors[3] of Canada exercised a petty, and usually little more than nominal, jurisdiction among their va.s.sals, while the Intendant enjoyed {96} extensive judicial powers, emanating from and subordinate to the King alone.

[Footnote 3: The judicial powers of the Seignior varied. In a very few cases the Seignior could administer _haute justice_, i.e. try crimes on the Seigniory which were punishable with death. For all important cases there was right of appeal. See Kingsford's _History of Canada_, vol. i, p. 365, and Parkman's _Old Regime in Canada_ (14th ed.), pp. 252, 269.]

[Sidenote: _The Governor._]

The highest executive officer was the Governor. He had control of the armed forces, and was responsible for the peace and safety of New France. He called out the militia when he thought fit; foreign policy and native policy were in his charge. In old and troubled times distance gave to the Governors of colonies and provinces actual power far exceeding the terms or the intent of their commission. They were the men on the spot. They held the sword; and, when a serious crisis arose, their word was obeyed. Especially was this the case in Canada, cut off for half the year from communication with France, and girt with foreign and with savage foes. Few years pa.s.sed without wars or rumours of wars. Each Canadian settlement was a garrison; and strength, if not full authority, tended to centre in the hands of the commander of the forces, the trained soldier who held for the time the Governorship of Canada.

[Sidenote: _The Intendant._]

Yet, unless he had, like Count Frontenac, great force of character, or was in favour at the Court of Versailles, and when war was not imminent, his influence was hardly more, it was often less, than that of the Intendant. The Governor was the representative of the Crown.

The Intendant was the King's agent, the steward of his province, his own man. He was a civilian, usually a lawyer, and therefore, in most cases, of greater business capacity, and more skilled in penmanship, than the Governor with his military training. His intimate relations with King and minister, coupled with experience of legal advocacy, tended to give more weight to his representations than to those of the Governor at the Court of France. The Intendant, not the Governor, presided at the Council; and as legislator or judge, he was responsible to the King alone. In time of peace, and in matters of internal administration, he had perhaps more real power than the Governor, and even when fighting times called the {97} soldier to the front, the Intendant, dealing with supplies and accounts, controlled in great measure the sinews of war.

[Sidenote: _The bishop._]

By the side of the Governor and the Intendant at the council sat the bishop, spiritually supreme, and with power by no means confined to spiritual matters. How strong, politically, was the Church in France before the Revolution, the cardinal prime ministers bear witness, and the priest-ridden wives and mistresses of the Bourbon Kings. It was stronger still in Canada. Priests formed no small part of the scanty population of New France; they made a large part of its history. The schools and hospitals were built by the Church, and the Church owned much of the land. Well organized and disciplined, with clear and definite aims, the ministers of the Church made their power felt in council chamber and in palace; too often they ruled the rulers; and the first and greatest bishop of Canada, Bishop Laval, made or unmade the Governors of New France.

[Sidenote: _Defects in the political system of New France.

Centralization of power._]

Such was the political system of Canada, while Canada was a province of France. Power was centralized, and the ordinary safeguards of freedom were wholly wanting. Executive, legislative, and judicial functions were placed in the same hands. There was not a shred of popular representation, there was not even a vestige of munic.i.p.al rights.[4] Canada was good for priests and, to some extent, for soldiers; there was room in it and a living for an agricultural peasantry, and for the trapper and backwoodsman, who was a law to himself. Where the St. Lawrence flowed by the island of Montreal, or under the rock of Quebec, there were the beginnings of cities with dwellers in them, but there were no citizens in Canada.

[Footnote 4: Count Frontenac on first arriving in Canada attempted to give the Canadians some voice in the government by calling together the three estates, and by allowing the citizens of Quebec to elect three aldermen. He incurred the royal displeasure by his proceedings, and his measures came to nothing. See Parkman's _Count Frontenac and New France_ (14th ed.), pp. 16, &c., and see below, p. 107.]

{98} [Sidenote: _Friction between the officials._]

Though power was centralized, it was not entrusted locally to one man alone. The maxim of despotism is _Divide et impera_; and on this principle the Kings of France ruled Canada. The Governor and the Intendant each corresponded directly with the King and his minister.

Each was wholly independent of the other, and yet their respective functions were not clearly enough defined to prevent friction and deadlock. The other members of the Council were subordinate neither to the Governor nor to the Intendant, in so far that they were appointed, and could be removed, by the King alone. For this division of authority there was some excuse. On the a.s.sumption that both the Governor and the Intendant might be thieves, it was prudent to set a thief to catch a thief. The system minimized the possibility of tyranny in a distant dependency, where the colonists had no voice in making the laws, and no control over the administration. One all-powerful officer might have become a tyrant; but two or more, if evilly disposed, might be trusted to expose each other's misdoings with a view to securing favour at home. Chartered Companies took the same line in this respect as the French Kings. The British East India Company held their Governor-General in check through his Council; the Dutch East India Company created in their dependencies the office of Independent Fiscal, which corresponded in great measure to that of Intendant.[5] But the plan devised by Louis XIV and Colbert for the government of Canada had grave defects. Division of authority meant weakness, where strength was urgently needed; it led to personal jealousy, to party feeling, to corruption, and to intrigue; it lessened the sense of responsibility, for each officer could throw the blame on another; and it left the fortunes of Canada in the hands of the man who, for the time being, had, irrespective of any office he held, the {99} strongest character, or the least scruple, or the largest share of Court favour.

[Footnote 5: See vol. iv of this series, pt. 1, p. 75 and notes.]

[Sidenote: _Emigration from France to Canada._]

[Sidenote: _The settlers and_]

The King of France created the government of Canada. He created also the people. In less than ten years from the date when he took the colony in hand the population was more than doubled. Shiploads of male emigrants were sent out from France, and cargoes of future wives and mothers. Wedlock was prescribed, celibacy was proscribed, bounties were, in Roman fashion, given to early marriages and to large families. The privilege of remaining single was reserved for priests and nuns; the lay members of the community were bidden to be fruitful and multiply, and they obeyed the King's commands with much success. They were honest folk, the Canadian settlers, not convicted felons sent out from French prisons. No doubt there were among the emigrants men and women who were glad to leave France, and of whom France was glad to be rid; but there was no convict strain in the population, and the _coureurs de bois_, unlicensed though they were, were not mere outlaws, like the Australian bushrangers.

[Sidenote: _the Feudal System._]

[Sidenote: _Canadian feudalism was purely artificial._]

When an emigrant came to Canada, he could not return to France without a pa.s.sport, but he might possibly drift into the backwoods or to the Dutch or English colonies. Efforts were therefore made to attach him to the soil. For this purpose a kind of Feudal System was introduced, somewhat diluted to suit the place and the time. The essence of feudalism in bygone days had been military tenure and oligarchy. Time had been in France when the n.o.bles were stronger than the King, but in the reign of Louis XIV they were little more than courtiers. They had become ornamental rather than useful; yet even under a Bourbon despotism, tradition, long descent, ownership of wide and well-cultivated lands, and rights over a considerable number of serfs or peasants, gave the French n.o.blesse considerable social influence. In Canada feudalism had no military {100} aspect. There was, it is true, a Canadian militia, but it had no connexion with the feudal tenure of land. Very few of the Canadian Seigniors were of n.o.ble birth, all were poor, their honours were brand new, their domains were backwoods with occasional clearings, their va.s.sals were nearly as good men as themselves. The Feudal System in Canada was not born of the soil, it was simply a device of a benevolent despot for allotting and settling land, for artificially grading and cla.s.sifying an artificially-formed people, and for giving to a new country some element of old-world respectability.

[Sidenote: _The Seigniors._]

[Sidenote: _The Habitans and their tenure._]

The Seignior held his land, in most cases, directly from the Crown.

He held it as a free gift from the King by t.i.tle of faith and homage.

He held it on condition of bringing it into cultivation; and, if he sold his Seigniory, one-fifth of the price as a rule was paid to the Crown. There was no immemorial t.i.tle to the land. The t.i.tle was given by an arbitrary overlord, and by the same could be revoked. The condition of cultivation was annexed in order to promote settlement, and inasmuch as most Seigniors, owing to poverty and the size of the holdings, could not themselves fulfil the condition, they granted lands in turn to other settlers, who held of them as they held of the King. These other settlers were the _Habitans_, the cultivators of the soil, and their tenancy was the tenure of _cens et rente_, whence they were known in legal phrase as _Censitaires_. In other words, they paid a small rent in money, or in kind, or in both. If they sold their holdings, the Seignior received one-twelfth of the purchase-money. They were required to grind their corn at the Seignior's mill, to pay for the privilege of fishing one fish in every eleven caught, and to comply with sundry other small demands, in addition to having justice meted out occasionally at the Seignior's hands.

These conditions may have been found in some instances petty and annoying, but to Frenchmen of the seventeenth {101} and eighteenth century they can hardly have been onerous. They were limited and safeguarded, as they had been created, by the royal will; and it was not till the year 1854, after Canada had known British rule for nearly a hundred years, that they were swept away. That a purely artificial system should have lasted so long and caused apparently so little friction and discontent, argues no little skill in those who invented it, and proves that it was not ill suited to the wants, and harmonized with the traditions, of the colonists of Canada. It is impossible to imagine the Puritan settler in New England submitting to such minute regulations, taking his corn to a Seignior's mill, baking his bread at a Seignior's oven, paying homage to another settler set over him by a distant King. But Frenchmen could be drilled and organized. They understood being planted out in rows, like so many trees. Their religion and their training tended to unquestioning obedience, and they throve in quiet sort under restrictions which the grim and stubborn New Englander would have trodden under foot.

[Sidenote: _Military colonization in Canada._]

[Sidenote: _The Carignan Regiment._]

Though feudalism on the St. Lawrence had no military basis, military colonization played a great part in the early settlement of Canada.

The Intendant, Talon, Colbert's right-hand man in his Canadian schemes, took in this matter the Romans for his model. As the Romans planted military colonies along the frontiers of their provinces, including Gaul itself, so Colbert and Talon determined to ensure the security of Canada by placing a barrier of soldier-colonists on the border. There was a famous French regiment known as the Carignan-Salieres Regiment. It had been raised in Savoy by a Prince of Carignan. It had lately fought with distinction side by side with the Austrians against the Turks, and in 1665, under Colonel de Salieres, was sent out to Canada, the first regiment of the line which had ever landed in New France. The main outlet for Iroquois incursions was the line of the Richelieu river. On that river forts were {102} built and garrisoned, and along its banks and also along the St. Lawrence, between the mouth of the Richelieu and the island of Montreal, time-expired soldiers were planted out as settlers.

Officers and men alike were given grants of land and bounties in money, and the soldiers were kept for a year by the King, while building their houses and clearing their land. The theory was that the officers should be Seigniors, and that the soldiers who had served under them should become tenants of their old commanders.

Where the lands were most exposed, the houses were grouped together within palisades. Elsewhere they were detached from one another, forming a line of dwellings along the river-side, whence the settlements were known as _cotes_.

[Sidenote: _Size of the Seigniories._]

The usual size of a Seigniory, whether granted to a soldier or to a civilian, was four arpents in front by forty in depth. In other words, an arpent[6] being rather less than an acre, the frontage of a Seigniory was about 260 yards long, while the depth was about 2,600, or a mile and a half. This long hinterland contained the corn land, the timber, and the hunting-grounds, but the most valuable and distinctive feature in the Seigniories was the river frontage. In a word, Canadian colonization consisted of a series of river-side settlements, forming a long, narrow, military frontier, with a wilderness behind.

[Footnote 6: The _arpent de Paris_ was .845 of an acre or 36801.7 English square feet; therefore one side of the arpent was about 64 yards.]

[Sidenote: _Strong contrasts in Canadian history._]

Such was the colony, its land, and its people. There is no exact parallel to be found in the story of other European colonies. None of them, perhaps, started with such very strong contrasts. Canada was not a seaboard colony, it was a purely inland colony; yet its settlements were so many little ports, and its active life was mainly by, and on, the water. It was pre-eminently not a colony of towns or of townsfolk, yet Quebec was as much the heart of Canada as Paris was of France, and the conquest of Canada consisted {103} in the taking of Quebec and Montreal. It was not a plantation colony, it was not a mining colony, it was not a pastoral colony; it was a colony of agriculturists and hunters, and its trade, such as it was, came not so much from agriculture as from the chase. No colonists were ever more carefully drilled and organized than the Canadian agriculturists; none ever lived a life of more unbounded freedom than the Canadian _coureurs de bois_. The drilling and organization of the one element, and the roving enterprise of the other, combined to produce a good fighting population; but the extremes in either case were too great to result in forming a community, which should be at once stable and progressive. What was natural in Canada was not colonization. What was colonization, that is to say permanent European settlement in the land, was purely artificial. The system of settlement was cleverly conceived, and skilfully as well as humanely carried into effect; but it depended not on law so much as on the personal will of an absolute master. It was wanting in safeguards, it was wanting in elasticity, it stunted individual effort, and it contained no element of growth. A full-blown colony was called into being under regulations which implied childhood, and the result was to leave the Canadians contented so long as they knew no other rules of life, but to leave them standing still, while their English rivals, neither too lawless nor too conservative, grew out of infancy into clumsy manhood, and proved their strength when the fullness of the time was come.

[Sidenote: _Arrival of De Tracy, De Courcelles, and Talon._]

On June 30, 1665, the Marquis de Tracy arrived at Quebec. He had been appointed by the King of France Lieutenant-General for the time being of all his American possessions, including the West Indies; and, before coming to Canada, he had visited Cayenne and the French West India Islands. His mission was temporary, to put the colony in a proper state of defence, and to inaugurate the system of administration devised by the King. The new Governor {104} of Canada, De Courcelles, and the Intendant, Talon, landed in September of the same year. They were good men for their respective posts--the one a keen soldier, the other, Talon, a born administrator, whose power of organization and creative genius left a lasting mark on New France.

[Sidenote: _Operations against the Iroquois._]