no effort of the King to people his waste domain,
not with ten thousand peasants, but with twenty times ten thousand
Frenchmen of every station,--the most industrious, most instructed, most
disciplined by adversity and capable of self-rule, that the country
could boast. While La Galissoniere was asking for colonists, the agents
of the Crown, set on by priestly fanaticism, or designing selfishness
masked with fanaticism, were pouring volleys of musketry into Huguenot
congregations, imprisoning for life those innocent of all but their
faith,--the men in the galleys, the women in the pestiferous dungeons of
Aigues Mortes,--hanging their ministers, kidnapping their children, and
reviving, in short, the dragonnades. Now, as in the past century, many
of the victims escaped to the British colonies, and became a part of
them. The Huguenots would have hailed as a boon the permission to
emigrate under the fleur-de-lis, and build up a Protestant France in the
valleys of the West. It would have been a bane of absolutism, but a
national glory; would have set bounds to English colonization, and
changed the face of the continent. The opportunity was spurned. The
dominant Church clung to its policy of rule and ruin. France built its
best colony on a principle of exclusion, and failed; England reversed
the system, and succeeded.

[Footnote 1: _Censuses of Canada_, iv. 61. Rameau _(La France aux
Colonies,_ ii. 81) estimates the Canadian population, in 1755, at
sixty-six thousand, besides _voyageurs_, Indian traders, etc. Vaudreuil,
in 1760, places it at seventy thousand.]

I have shown elsewhere the aspects of Canada, where a rigid scion of the
old European tree was set to grow in the wilderness. The military
Governor, holding his miniature Court on the rock of Quebec; the feudal
proprietors, whose domains lined the shores of the St. Lawrence; the
peasant; the roving bushranger; the half-tamed savage, with crucifix and
scalping-knife; priests; friars; nuns; and soldiers,--mingled to form a
society the most picturesque on the continent. What distinguished it
from the France that produced it was a total absence of revolt against
the laws of its being,--an absolute conservatism, an unquestioning
acceptance of Church and King. The Canadian, ignorant of everything but
what the priest saw fit to teach him, had never heard of Voltaire; and
if he had known him, would have thought him a devil. He had, it is true,
a spirit of insubordination bor