cenes about his
own hearth and in them alone were his thought and affections centered.

The one wider interest which the habitant treasured was love for the
Catholic Church of his fathers and of his own spiritual hopes. It
thus happened that when France in revolution assailed and for a time
overthrew the Church within her borders, the heart of French Canada was
not with France but with the persecuted Church; she hated the spirit of
revolutionary France. Te Deums were sung at Quebec in thanksgiving for
the defeats of Napoleon. In language and what literary culture they
possessed, in traditions and tastes, the conquered people remained
French, but they had no allegiance divided between Canada and France.
To this day they are proud to be simply Canadians, rooted in the soil
of Canada, with no debt of patriotic gratitude to the France from which
they sprang or to the Britain which obtained political dominance over
their ancestors after a long agony of war. To the British Crown many of
them feel a certain attachment because of the liberty guaranteed to them
to pursue their own ideals of happiness. In preserving their type
of social life, their faith and language, they have shown a resolute
tenacity. To this day they are as different in these things from their
fellow-citizens of British origin in the rest of Canada as were their
ancestors from the English colonies which lay on their borders.

The French in Canada are still a separate people. From time to time
a nervous fear seizes them lest too many of their race may be lost to
their old ideals in the Anglo-Saxon world surging about them. Then they
listen readily to appeals to their racial unity and draw more sharply
than ever the lines of division between themselves and the rest of North
America. They remain a fragment of an older France, remote and isolated,
still dreaming dreams like those of Frontenac of old of the dominance of
their race in North America and asserting passionately their rights in
the soil of Canada to which, first of Europeans, they came. At the mouth
of the Mississippi in the Louisiana founded by Louis XIV, along the St.
Lawrence in the Canada of Champlain and Frontenac, with a resolution
more than half pathetic, and in a world that gives little heed, men of
French race are still on guard to preserve in America the lineaments of
that older France, long since decayed in Europe, which was above all the
eldest daughter of the Church.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC