Halifax and Havre or
Plymouth, and not between Quebec and Halifax. Even the French settlers
came of different stocks. The Acadians were chiefly men of La Rochelle
and the Loire, while the Canadians came, for the most part, from the
coast provinces stretching from Normandy and Picardy to Poitou and
Bordeaux.

The situation in Canada proper presented the British authorities with a
problem new in their imperial experience. Hitherto, save for Acadia and
New Netherland, where the settlers were few in numbers and, even in
New Netherland, closely akin to the conquerors in race, religion, and
speech, no colony containing men of European stocks had been acquired
by conquest. Canada held some sixty or seventy thousand settlers,
French and Catholic almost to a man. Despite the inefficiency of French
colonial methods the plantation had taken firm root. The colony had
developed a strength, a social structure, and an individuality all its
own. Along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu the settlements lay close
and compact; the habitants' whitewashed cottages lined the river banks
only a few arpents apart. The social cohesion of the colony was equally
marked. Alike in government, in religion, and in industry, it was a land
where authority was strong. Governor and intendant, feudal seigneur,
bishop and Jesuit superior, ruled each in his own sphere and provided a
rigid mold and framework for the growth of the colony. There were, it
is true, limits to the reach of the arm of authority. Beyond Montreal
stretched a vast wilderness merging at some uncertain point into the
other wilderness that was Louisiana. Along the waterways which threaded
this great No Man's Land the coureurs-de-bois roamed with little heed to
law or license, glad to escape from the paternal strictness that irked
youth on the lower St. Lawrence. But the liberty of these rovers of the
forest was not liberty after the English pattern; the coureur-de-bois
was of an entirely different type from the pioneers of British stock who
were even then pushing their way through the gaps in the Alleghanies
and making homes in the backwoods. Priest and seigneur, habitant and
coureur-de-bois were one and all difficult to fit into accepted English
ways. Clearly Canada promised to strain the digestive capacity of the
British lion.

The present western provinces of the Dominion were still the haunt of
Indian and buffalo. French-Canadian explorers and fur traders, it is
true, had penetrate