r tithes. They attend mass. At birth,
marriage and death--the cure is their guide and friend. He teaches
them in their schools. He advises them in their family affairs. He
counsels them in their business. At times he even dictates their
politics; but when you remember that French is the language spoken,
that primary education is of the slimmest, though all doors are open
for a promising pupil to advance, you wonder whether constant tutelage
of a benevolent church may not be a good thing in a chaotic, confused
and restless age. The habitant lives on his little long narrow strip
of a farm running back from the river front. He fishes a little. He
works on the river and in the lumber camps of the Back Country. He
raises a little tobacco, hay, a pig, a cow, a little horse and a family
of from ten to twenty. When the daughters marry--as they are
encouraged to do at the earliest possible age--the farm is subdivided
among the sons; and when it will subdivide no longer, there is a
migration to the Back Country, or to a French settlement in the
Northwest, where another cure will shepherd the flock; and the
habitant, blessed at his birth and blessed at his marriage, is usually
blessed at his death at the ripe age of ninety or a hundred. It is a
simple and on the whole a very happy, if not progressive, life. Some
years ago, when hard times prevailed in Canada and the manufacturing
cities of New England offered what seemed big wages to habitants, who
considered themselves rich on one hundred dollars a year--a great
migration took place across the border; but it was not a happy move for
these simple children of the soil. They missed the shepherding of
their beloved cure, and the movement has almost stopped. Also you find
Jean Ba'tiste in the redwoods of California as lumber-jack, or plying a
canoe on MacKenzie River. The best fur-traders of the North to-day are
half-breeds with a strain of French Canadian blood.

If you take a look at the map of Quebec under its new boundaries up
into Labrador--it seems absurd to call a region three times the area of
Germany "a province"--you will see that only the fringe of the river
fronts has been peopled. This is owing to the old system of parceling
out the land in mile strips back from the river--a system that
antedated the railroads, when every man's train was a paddle and the
waterfront. Beyond, back up from the rivers, lies literally a
no-man's-land of furs plentiful as of o