The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism | Page 8

and sometimes not enforced at all. Unlike the Parliament of Paris, the Sovereign Council at Quebec never refused to register a royal edict. What would have happened in the event of its doing so is a query that legal antiquarians might find difficult to answer. Even a sovereign decree bearing the Bourbon sign-manual could not gain the force of law in Canada except by being spread upon the council's records. In France the king could come clattering with his escort to the council hall and there, by his so termed 'bed of justice,' compel the registration of his decrees. But the Chateau of St Louis at Quebec was too far away for any such violent procedure.
The colonial council never sought to find out what would follow an open defiance of the royal wishes. It had a safer plan. Decrees were always promptly registered; but when they did not suit the councillors they were just as promptly pigeon-holed, and the people of the colony were thus left in complete ignorance of the new regulations. On one occasion the intendant Raudot, in looking over the council records for legal light on a case before him, found a royal decree which had been registered by the council some twenty years before, but not an inkling of which had ever reached the people to whom it had conveyed new rights against their seigneurs. 'It was the interest of the attorney-general as a seigneur, as it was also the interest of other councillors who are seigneurs, that the provisions of this decree should never be made public,' is the frank way in which the intendant explained the matter in one of his dispatches to the king. The fact is that the royal arm, supremely powerful at home, lost a good deal of its strength when stretched across a thousand leagues of ocean. If anything happened amiss after the ships left Quebec in the late summer, there was no regular means of making report to the king for a full twelvemonth. The royal reply could not be had at the earliest until the ensuing spring; if the king's advisers desired to look into matters fully it sometimes happened that another year passed before the royal decision reached Quebec. By that time matters had often righted themselves, or the issue had been forgotten. At any rate the direct influence of the crown was much less effective than it would have been had the colony been within easy reach. The governor and intendant were accordingly endowed by the force of circumstances with large discretionary powers. When they agreed it was possible to order things about as they chose. When they disagreed on any project the matter went off to the king for decision, which often meant that it was shelved indefinitely.
The administration of New France was not efficient. There were too many officials for the size and needs of the colony. Their respective spheres of authority were too loosely defined. Nor did the crown desire to have every one working in harmony. A moderate amount of friction-- provided it did not wholly clog the wheels of administration --was not deemed an unmixed evil. It served to make each official a tale-bearer against his colleague, so that the home authorities might count on getting all sides to every story. The financial situation, moreover, was always precarious. At no time could New France pay its own way; every second dispatch from the governor and intendant asked the king for money or for things that cost money. Louis XIV was astonishingly generous in the face of so many of these demands upon his exchequer, but the more he gave the more he was asked to give. When the stress of European wars curtailed the king's bounty the colonial authorities began to issue paper money; the issues were gradually increased; the paper soon depreciated, and in its closing years the colony fairly wallowed in the slough of almost worthless fiat currency.
In addition to meeting the annual deficit of the colony the royal authorities encouraged and assisted emigration to New France. Whole shiploads of settlers were at times gathered and sent to Quebec. The seigneurs, by the terms of their grants, should have been active in this work; but very few of them took any share in it. Nearly the entire task of applying a stimulus to emigration was thrust on the king and his officials at home. Year after gear the governor and intendant grew increasingly urgent in repeated requests for more settlers, until a rebuke arrived in a suggestion 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