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

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 explorers and forest merchants by the hundred. The most venturesome voyageurs, the most intrepid traders, and the most untiring missionaries were Frenchmen. No European stock showed such versatility in its relations with the aborigines; none proved so ready to bear all manner of hardship and discomfort for the