astery of
Canada, a fever of excitement ran through New England about these perils
of witchcraft. When, in 1692, Phips became Governor of Massachusetts,
he named a special court to try accused persons. The court considered
hundreds of cases and condemned and hanged nineteen persons for wholly
imaginary crimes. Whatever the faults of the rule of the priests at
Quebec, they never equaled this in brutality or surpassed it in blind
superstition. In New England we find bitter religious persecution. In
Canada there was none: the door was completely closed to Protestants and
the family within were all of one mind. There was no one to persecute.

The old contrast between French and English ideals still endures. At
Quebec there was an early zeal for education. In 1638, the year in which
Harvard College was organized, a college and a school for training the
French youth and the natives were founded at Quebec. In the next year
the Ursuline nuns established at Quebec the convent which through all
the intervening years has continued its important work of educating
girls. In zeal for education Quebec was therefore not behind Boston. But
the spirit was different. Quebec believed that safety lay in control by
the Church, and this control it still maintains. Massachusetts came in
time to believe that safety lay in freeing education from any spiritual
authority. Today Laval University at Quebec and Harvard University at
Cambridge represent the outcome of these differing modes of thought.
Other forces were working to produce essentially different types. The
printing-press Quebec did not know; and, down to the final overthrow
of the French power in 1763, no newspaper or book was issued in Canada.
Massachusetts, on the other hand, had a printing-press as early as in
1638 and soon books were being printed in the colony. Of course, in the
spirit of the time, there was a strict censorship. But, by 1722, this
had come to an end, and after that the newspaper, unknown in Canada, was
busy and free in its task of helping to mold the thought of the English
colonies in America.

CHAPTER III. France Loses Acadia

The Peace of Ryswick in 1697 had settled nothing finally. France was
still strong enough to aim at the mastery of Europe and America. England
was torn by internal faction and would not prepare to face her menacing
enemy. Always the English have disliked a great standing army. Now,
despite the entreaties of a king who knew the real dange