Crusaders of New France | Page 4

were eight or ten miles
square! The dogmatic way in which the colonial officials were told to
do this and that, to encourage one thing and to discourage another, all
by superiors who displayed an astounding ignorance of New World
conditions, must have been a severe trial to the patience of those
hard-working officials who were never without great practical
difficulties immediately before their eyes.
Not enough heed was paid, moreover, to the advice of men who were
on the spot. It is true that the recommendations sent home to France by
the Governor and by the Intendant were often contradictory, but even
where the two officials were agreed there was no certainty that their
counsel would be taken. With greater freedom and discretion the
colonial government could have accomplished much more in the way
of developing trade and industry; but for every step the acquiescence of
the home authorities had first to be secured. To obtain this consent
always entailed a great loss of time, and when the approval arrived the
opportunity too often had passed. From November until May there was
absolutely no communication between Quebec and Paris save that in a
great emergency, if France and England happened to be at peace, a
dispatch might be sent by dint of great hardship to Boston with a
precarious chance that it would get across to the French ambassador in
London. Ordinarily the officials sent their requests for instructions by
the home-going vessels from Quebec in the autumn and received their
answers by the ships which came in the following spring. If any plans
were formulated after the last ship sailed in October, it ordinarily took
eighteen months before the royal approval could be had for putting
them into effect. The routine machinery of paternalism thus ran with
exasperating slowness.
There was, however, one mitigating feature in the situation. The hand
of home authority was rigid and its beckonings were precise; but as a
practical matter it could be, and sometimes was, disregarded altogether.
Not that the colonial officials ever defied the King or his ministers, or
ever failed to profess their intent to follow the royal instructions loyally

and to the letter. They had a much safer plan. When the provisions of a
royal decree seemed impractical or unwise, it was easy enough to let
them stand unenforced. Such decrees were duly registered in the
records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec and were then promptly
pigeonholed so that no one outside the little circle of officials at the
Château de St. Louis ever heard of them. In one case a new intendant
on coming to the colony unearthed a royal mandate of great importance
which had been kept from public knowledge for twenty years.
Absolutism, paternalism, and religious solidarity were characteristic of
both France and her colonies in the great century of overseas expansion.
There was no self-government, no freedom of individual initiative, and
very little heresy either at home or abroad. The factors which made
France strong in Europe, her unity, her subordination of all other things
to the military needs of the nation, her fostering of the sense of
nationalism--these appeared prominently in Canada and helped to make
the colony strong as well. Historians of New France have been at pains
to explain why the colony ultimately succumbed to the combined
attacks of New England by land and of Old England by sea. For a full
century New France had as its next-door neighbor a group of English
colonies whose combined populations outnumbered her own at a ratio
of about fifteen to one. The relative numbers and resources of the two
areas were about the same, proportionately, as those of the United
States and Canada at the present day. The marvel is not that French
dominion in America finally came to an end but that it managed to
endure so long.

CHAPTER II
A VOYAGEUR OF BRITTANY
The closing quarter of the fifteenth century in Europe has usually been
regarded by historians as marking the end of the Middle Ages. The era
of feudal chaos had drawn to a close and states were being welded
together under the leadership of strong dynasties. With this
consolidation came the desire for expansion, for acquiring new lands,

and for opening up new channels of influence. Spain, Portugal, and
England were first in the field of active exploration, searching for
stores of precious metals and for new routes to the coasts of Ormuz and
of India. In this quest for a short route to the half-fabulous empires of
Asia they had literally stumbled upon a new continent which they had
made haste to exploit. France, meanwhile, was dissipating her energies
on Spanish and Italian battlefields. It was not until the peace of
Cambrai in 1529 ended the struggle with Spain