wered on the _savans_ of
France, Baron Cuvier, for instance; and he fell into a passion, and,
being a French scholar, sang forth, in a paroxysm of gout, this
_refrain_:--

"Travaillez, travaillez, bon tonnelier,
Racommodez, racommodez, ton Cuvier."

And yet he was by no means an ignorant man--was at heart a true John
Bull, and had travelled and seen the world. He was blinded by an
unquenchable hatred of France, a hatred which has now ceased in England
in consequence of the facility of intercourse, but which is revived in
France against England by those who think _la gloire_ preferable to
peace and honour.

The miserable feudal system in Lower Canada has kept the French
population in abeyance; that population is literally dormant, and the
resources of the country unused; a Seigneur, now often anything but a
Frenchman, holds an immense tract, parcelled out into little slips
amongst a peasantry, whose ideas are as limited as their lands.
Generation after generation has tilled these patches, until they are
exhausted; and thus the few proprietors who have been able to emancipate
themselves from the Seignoral thraldom sell as fast as they can obtain
purchasers; and the Seignories lapse, by failure of descent or by
cutting off the entail, as it may be termed, under the dominion of
foreigners, to the people.

It is surprising that British capitalists do not turn their attention
more to Lower Canada, where land is thus to be bought very cheap, and
which only requires manuring, a treatment that it rarely receives from
a Canadian, to bring it into heart again, and where the vast extent of
the British townships, held in free and common soccage, opens such a
field for the agriculturist.

These townships are rapidly opening up and improving, and the sales of
the British American Land Company may in round numbers be said to
average L20,000 a year, or more than 40,000 acres, averaging ten
shillings an acre.

The day's wages for a labourer on a farm in Lower Canada may be stated
at two shillings currency, about one shilling and eightpence sterling,
with food and lodging; but, excepting in the towns and in the eastern
townships, the labourers are Canadians, elsewhere chiefly Irish. In the
large towns also they are Irish, and two shillings and sixpence is the
usual price of a day's work at Montreal.

There is a great demand for English or Scotch labourers in the townships
where provisions are reasonable, and the materials fo