The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism | Page 9

that the king was not minded to depopulate
France in order to people his colonies. The influx of settlers was
relatively large during the years 1663-72. Then it dwindled perceptibly,
although immigrants kept coming year by year so long as war did not
completely cut off communication with France. The colony gained
bravely, moreover, through its own natural increase, for the colonial
birth-rate was high, large families being everywhere the rule. In 1673
the population of New France was figured at about seven thousand; in
1760 it had reached nearly fifty thousand.
The development of agriculture on the seigneurial lands did not,
however, keep pace with growth in population. It was hard to keep

settlers to the prosaic task of tilling the soil. There were too many
distractions, chief among them the lure of the Indian trade. The traffic
in furs offered large profits and equally large risks; but it always
yielded a full dividend of adventure and hair-raising experience. The
fascination of the forest life gripped the young men of the colony, and
they left for the wilderness by the hundred. There is a roving strain in
Norman blood. It brought the Norseman to France and Sicily; it took
his descendants from the plough and sent them over the waters of the
New World, from the St Lawrence to the Lakes and from the Lakes to
the Gulf of Mexico. Church and state joined hands in attempt to keep
them at home. Royal decrees of outlawry and ecclesiastical edicts of
excommunication were issued against them. Seigneurs stipulated that
their lands would be forfeited unless so many arpents were put under
crop each year. But all to little avail. So far as developing the
permanent resources of the colony were concerned these coureurs de
bois might just as well have remained in France. Once in a while a
horde of them descended to Quebec or Montreal, disposed of their furs
to merchants, filled themselves with brandy and turned bedlam loose in
the town. Then before the authorities could unwind the red tape of legal
procedure they were off again to the wilds.
This Indian trade, despite the large and valuable cargoes of beaver pelts
which it enabled New France to send home, was a curse to the colony.
It drew from husbandry the best blood of the land, the young men of
strength, initiative, and perseverance. It wrecked the health and
character of thousands. It drew the Church and the civil government
into profitless quarrels. The bishop flayed the governor for letting this
trade go on. The governor could not, dared not, and sometimes did not
want to stop it. At any rate it was a great obstacle to agricultural
progress. With it and other distractions in existence the clearing of the
seigneuries proceeded very slowly. At the close of French dominion in
1760 the amount of cultivated land was only about three hundred
thousand arpents, or about five acres for every head of population--not
a very satisfactory showing for a century of Bourbon imperialism in the
St Lawrence valley.
Yet the colony, when the English conquerors came upon it in 1759, was

far from being on its last legs. It had overcome the worst of its
obstacles and had created a foundation upon which solid building might
be done. Its people had reached the stage of rude but tolerable comfort.
Its highways of trade and intercourse had been freed from the danger of
Indian raids. It had some small industries and was able to raise almost
the whole of its own food-supply. The traveller who passed along the
great river from Quebec to Montreal in the early autumn might see, as
Peter Kalm in his Travels tells us he saw, field upon field of waving
grain extending from the shores inward as far as the eye could reach,
broken only here and there by tracts of meadow and woodland. The
outposts of an empire at least had been established.

CHAPTER II
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS
A good many people, as Robert Louis Stevenson once assured us, have
a taste for 'heroic forms of excitement.' And it is well for the element of
interest in history that this has been so at all ages and among all races
of men. The most picturesque and fascinating figures in the recorded
annals of nations have been the pioneers,--the men who have not been
content to do what other men of their day were doing. Without them
and their achievements history might still be read for information, but
not for pleasure; it might still instruct, but it would hardly inspire.
In the narratives of colonization there is ample evidence that
Frenchmen of the seventeenth century were not lacking in their thirst
for excitement, whether heroic or otherwise. Their race furnished the
New World with