e seminaries was
astoundingly small, and they did but little to leaven the general
illiteracy of the population. Only the children of the towns attended
the schools, and the program of study was of the most elementary
character. Religious instruction was given the first place and
received so much attention that there was little time in school hours
for anything else. The girls fared better than the boys on the whole,
for the nuns taught them to sew and to knit as well as to read and to
write.

So far as secular education was concerned, therefore, the English
conquest found the colony in almost utter stagnation. Not one in five
hundred among the habitants, it was said, could read or write. Outside
the immediate circle of clergy, officials, and notaries, ignorance of
even the rudiments of education was almost universal. There were no
newspapers in the colony and very few books save those used in the
services of worship. Greysolon Du Lhut, the king of the voyageurs, for
example, was a man of means and education, but his entire library,
as disclosed by his will, consisted of a world atlas and a set of
Josephus. The priests did not encourage the reading of secular books,
and La Hontan recounts the troubles which he had in keeping one
militant _cure_ from tearing his precious volumes to pieces. New
France was at that period not a land where freedom dwelt with
knowledge.

Intellectually, the people of New France comprised on the one hand a
small elite and on the other a great unlettered mass. There was
no middle class between. Yet the population of the colony always
contained, especially among its officials and clergy, a sprinkling of
educated and scholarly men. These have given us a literature of travel
and description which is extensive and of high, quality. No other
American colony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put so
much, of its annals into print; the _Relations_ of the Jesuits alone
were sufficient to fill forty-one volumes, and they form but a small
part of the entire literary output.

CHAPTER VIII

SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA

From the beginning of the colony there ran in the minds of French
officialdom the idea that the social order should rest upon a
seigneurial basis. Historians have commonly attributed to Richelieu
the genesis of New World feudalism, but without good reason, for its
beginnings antedated the time of the great minister. The charter
issued to the ill-starred La Roche in 1598