Although, on the face of it, a mere toleration had been granted to the Church of Rome, and the powers and privileges of an established Church had been expressly refused, and although the Crown had expressly forbidden the exercise of any episcopal or vicarial power, except such as was indispensably necessary for the free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion, nevertheless 'the superintendent of the Church of Rome', as the Anglican bishop informs us he should be termed, was 'in the actual enjoyment of all the powers and privileges of the most plenary episcopal authority'. Fortunate indeed was it for the permanence of British rule that this was so; for, had it been otherwise, and the strong sword of the Church been thrown into the scale of its adversaries, it is difficult to see how, amidst the internal and external troubles of the years between 1790 and 1840, the maintenance of British rule could have been preserved without greater efforts than the then temper of British statesmen would have sanctioned. Moreover, while the spiritual power of the bishop was great, he was dependent for his living upon the Government. It appears that his relative financial position contrasted very unfavourably with that of the country clergy, who received a twenty-sixth of all the grain, the total sum allotted to them amounting to about £26,000 a year.

The bishop of the Anglican Church was somewhat Position of hostile; but he was in the unfortunate position of being Church. Anglican a shepherd without a flock, as the French Canadians were, of course, Catholics, and the English in the towns were, for the most part, Dissenters. In 1793, when a bishop was appointed, there were only six Church of England clergymen in the province, and not a single Anglican church in the city of Quebec, the English service being read in the Roman Catholic churches before or after their services. If the energies of the English Church had been concentrated upon Upper Canada, where, amidst a strongly Protestant community, there was no English church and only three clergymen, its future influence

might have been greater. Instead, it aimed at the questionable form of an English establishment in Lower Canada. According to the notions of the time the Anglican bishop was made a member of the Executive Council. Dorchester thereupon recommended that the Roman Catholic bishop should receive equal treatment. 'Such royal favours,' he wrote, 'should come spontaneously, and not as the result of noise and tumult.' The home authorities were less wise, and nothing was done in the matter till a much later date. Still, throughout the whole period, the officials of the Roman Catholic Church, with very few exceptions, remained faithful to the British Connexion; and the priest was a conservative force which counteracted the influence of the radical avocat and notary. The French Canadians were pre-eminently a religious people, and in the war which broke out between Great Britain and France their sympathies, which would otherwise have been with the land of their origin, were alienated from a mother-country which had become atheistic and republican. Apart from religious considerations, there was little temptation to the habitants to venture upon the stormy seas of Canadians. revolution. Although the feudal system still existed in fact as well as in name, the lot of the tenants was by no means a hard one. They lived in very much the same style as did the seigniors, who were diminished in number and importance. The habitants were the sole occupiers of nearly all the cultivated land in the province, the seigniors and ecclesiastical bodies, to whom the lands were granted, having conceded the greater part of them, with little or no reserve, to the cultivators in small parcels of from one to one hundred acres. In almost every case the holdings were of an oblong shape, ranging in width of river frontage from one to five lineal arpents' and in depth from ten to eighty arpents. Each habitant cultivated as much land as he could manage with the help of his own family, and as was necessary for its 1 A lineal arpent equalled 192 English feet.

Conserva

tism of French

support. Having within themselves from year to year all Seigniorial the necessaries of life, the Canadians were wholly indepen- and system of dent, and in no part of the world was equality of situation tenure. more nearly attained. The obligations of the habitants were by no means heavy. They had to pay the annual cens et rentes. The former was a moderate annual tax imposed in recognition of the seignior's direct authority. The latter was a rent payable sometimes in kind, sometimes in money, and sometimes in both. The amount of the cens et rentes varied in different seigniories, but it was not high. In addition, the tenant paid a fine upon any change of ownership, whether by sale, gift, or inheritance other than in direct descent. This fine, termed lods et ventes, was fixed in Canada at one-twelfth, of which the seignior usually remitted onethird. To prevent fraudulent transfers, the seignior had the right of buying the tenant's interest at the alleged price at any time within forty days from receiving notice of sale. In addition there was the 'banal' right of the lord that all grain grown by the tenant must be ground at the seigniorial mill. (On the other hand it must be remembered that there was the onerous obligation on the seignior of having a well-equipped mill ready for grain which might never come.) Although the actual amount of the rent which the tenant paid for the land was a matter of private agreement, the usual payment was about two sous for every arpent.1 The effect of this system of land tenure was well described at a later date in Lord Durham's Report. The habitant obtained his land on a tenure singularly calculated to promote his immediate comfort and to check his desire to better his condition. He was placed at once in a life of constant and unvarying labour, of great material comfort and feudal dependence. ... Under such circumstances a race of men habituated to the incessant labour of a rude and unskilled agriculture, and habitually fond of social enjoyments, congregated together in rural 1 An arpent was a little less than an acre.

6

Effects of communities', remaining always the same uninstructed, system. inactive, unprogressive people'. Along the alluvial banks of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries they cleared two or three strips of land, cultivated them in the worst method of small farming, and established a series of continuous villages, which gave the country the appearance of a never-ending street.' In this state of things the mass of the community exhibited in the new world the characteristics of the peasantry of Europe. Society was dense', and the evils resulting from density of population were not wholly unknown. The Canadian habitants were kindly, frugal, industrious, and honest, very sociable, cheerful, and hospitable, and distinguished for a courtesy and real politeness which pervaded every class of society. In all essentials they were still French, but French in important respects dissimilar to those of contemporary France. They resembled rather the French of the provinces under the old régime.

AUTHORITIES

Shortt and Doughty, op. cit., contains the correspondence relating to the introduction of the Constitutional Act.

The Act is printed in Houston, op. cit. Mr. Lymburner's speech at the Bar of the House of Commons against the bill is summarized in Christie, op. cit. vol. i, ch. iii.

The leading authority on the French seigniorial system is The Seigniorial System in Canada, by W. B. Munro (Harvard Historical Studies, vol. xiii). New York, 1907.

There is an elaborate study of the French-Canadian habitant, The Habitant of St. Justin, by Léon Gerin, in the Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, vol. iv, new series.

CHAPTER IV

LOWER CANADA BETWEEN 1792 AND 1812

Canada.

SUCH being the character of the people, it offered un- Situation congenial soil for the seed of the revolutionary agitator. in Lower But though this was the case, the presence in Canada of French emissaries sent by the French minister to the United States, and American dislike of Great Britain, had some disturbing effect upon Canadian affairs. Dorchester landed at Quebec in September, 1793, and in the following year issued a Proclamation requiring magistrates and officers of militia to take rigorous measures against these emissaries. An attempt to embody one thousand of the militia met with complete failure, so far as the French Canadians were concerned. There was doubtless exaggeration in the account given by an English official that the people were generally refractory and disobedient and had set their curés at defiance; but on the other hand there was almost universal apathy and great reluctance to embark in war on Great Britain's account. The ground-swell of republicanism was felt enough in Canada to produce a crazy attempt at an insurrection, and to cause the promotion of Constitutional Associations at Quebec and Montreal which were joined by the leading men of both nationalities. An alien Act strengthening the hands of the Government against suspicious strangers was passed in 1794; and the tone of the popular Assembly remained thoroughly loyal.

While Dorchester was harassed by troubles within Lower Canada, he also found himself at issue with the new Lieutenant