# Canada and the Canadian Question/Chapter 2

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CHAPTER II
THE FRENCH PROVINCE
The eldest first. Canada proper was a French colony. To the habitans, as the Quebec peasantry are called, it is a French colony still; for they know no Canadians but those of their own race. French enterprise it was that first looked down from the high-pooped barque, in which, without chart or quadrant, it had braved the wide and wild Atlantic, upon the St. Lawrence, then running between forests full of bears, moose, and beavers, and roamed by a few human wolves in the shape of Red Indians. The true Canada is the river explored by Jacques Cartier, with its shores, its affluents, and the country of which it is the outlet. A royal river it is, bearing on its broad breast of waters Atlantic steamers a thousand miles from its mouth, and running between high banks, while its rival, the Mississippi, spreads over vast flats of mud; its weak point being that the frost of Canadian winter binds it half the year in chains which invention has been tasked in vain to loose. Quebec and Montreal are the only historic cities of the Dominion, and Quebec alone retains its ​historic aspect. Even in Quebec there are in the way of buildings but scanty remnants of the Bourbon days. But the citadel, the prize of battle between the races, the key and throne of empire, stills crowns the rock which stands a majestic warder at the portal of the Upper St. Lawrence; and the city with its narrow, steep, and crooked streets, crouching close under its guardian fortress, recalls an age of military force and fear in contrast to the cities of the New World, with their broad and straight streets spreading out freely in the security of industrial peace.
Quebec is a surviving offset of the France of the Bourbons, cut off by conquest from the mother country and her revolutions. Its character has been perpetuated by isolation like the form of an antediluvian animal preserved in Siberian ice. Just now the ice is in appearance freezing harder than ever, though there are ominous crackings and rumblings which to the listening car seem to portend dissolution, and do certainly portend critical change. The Bourbon monarchy is gone, and very faintly is its image replaced in the heart of the French Canadian by that of the alien monarchy of Great Britain. The aristocracy is gone, since the seigniories instituted by Louis XIV—poor counterparts of Old World seigniories even while they existed—have been bought up and abolished, though a slight influence is retained by a few old families. The power of the notary rests on a foundation of adamant which no conquest or revolution can overthrow. But it and all other powers, political or social, are small compared with that of the priest. Quebec is a theory. While Rome has been losing her hold on Old France and on all the European nations, she has retained, nay tightened, it here. The people are the sheep of the priest. He is their political as well as their spiritual chief and nominates the ​politician, who serves the interest of the Church at Quebec or at Ottawa. The faith of the peasantry is medieval. It is in Quebec alone on the Western Continent that miracles are still performed. The shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré is thronged with pilgrims and thickly hung with votive offerings, though her cures are confined to ailments of a certain class, chiefly nervous, and she has not restored a limb or healed anybody of cancer. A bishop writing to the people of his diocese about his visit to Rome assumes that they receive as undoubted truth the legend of the three fountains marking the three boundings of St Paul's head after it had been cut off, and that of St. Zeno and his 10,203 companions in martyrdom. Not only have the clergy been the spiritual guides and masters of the French Canadian, they have been the preservers and champions of his nationality, and they have thus combined the influence of the tribune with that of the priest.
The habitant is a French peasant of the Bourbon day. The "Angelus" would be his picture, only that in the "Angelus" the devotion of the man seems less thorough than that of the woman, whereas the habitant and his wife are alike devout. He is simple, ignorant, submissive, credulous, unprogressive, but kindly, courteous, and probably, as his wants are few, not unhappy. If, in short, there is an Arcadia anywhere, in his village most likely it is to be found. He tills in the most primitive manner his paternal lot, reduced by subdivision, executed lengthways, to a riband-like strip, with, if possible, a water-front; the river having been the only highway of an unprosperous colony when the lots were first laid out. His food is home-raised, and includes a good deal of peasoup, which affords jokes to the mockers. His raiment is homespun, and beneath his roof the hum of the spinning-​wheel is still heard. His wife is the robust and active partner of his toil. Their cabin, though very humble, is clean. Such decorations as it has are religious. The Church services are to the pair the poetry and pageantry of life. If either reads anything it is the prayer-book. There are, however, Chansons Populaires, though probably more read by the cultivated than by the people, and there is a folk-lore brought apparently from Old France, perhaps from the France before Christianity. The domestic affections among the habitans are strong; that grand source of happiness at least is theirs; and two or more branches of the same family are found living in harmony under the same roof The habitant is not cultivated or aspiring, but his life is above that of the troglodyte of La Terre.
Close observers think that they can still trace the race characters of the two districts of Old France from which the French Canadians came, and distinguish the Breton Celt from the more solid and shrewder Norman; but the general characteristics prevail. It is denied that the language is a patois, such as a Parisian could not understand, though there are in it old Breton and Norman words and phrases. English words and phrases have also intruded, but these French patriotism is now trying to weed out.
The French Canadians breed apace. To them, as to the Irish, the Church preaches early marriage and speedy re-marriage in the interest of morality, and to multiply the number of the faithful, perhaps also with an eye to fees. From a return just laid before the Quebec Legislature it appears that for the grant of a hundred acres of land bestowed as a reward upon families boasting twelve or more children, there are ​1009 claimants. One family numbers twenty-three; a family of twenty-six has been known. There is no saying what bound there would be to the extension of the French if they did not prefer pills made of paper with a likeness of the Virgin to vaccination as a preventive of smallpox. As it is, they are overflowing in multitudes into New England, and threaten, in conjunction with the Irish, who are also settling there in great numbers, to supplant the Puritan in his old abode. They are also displacing the English in Eastern Ontario, and making the politicians of the province feel their power. The digestive forces of Canada have been too weak to assimilate the French element even politically as those of the great mass of American Englishry have assimilated, sufficiently at least for the purposes of political union, the French population of Louisiana. Instead of being assimilated, the French Canadians assimilate, and Scotch regiments disbanded among them have become French in language, in religion, and in everything but name and face. The factories of New England welcome the French not only on account of the cheapness of their labour, but because they are tractable, amenable to factory discipline, and not addicted to industrial war.
Farming is not the only pursuit of the French Canadians in their own country. With it they combine one of a more stirring kind. They furnish a large proportion of the lumbermen. The forest wealth of Canada is immense, though it is now, unfortunately, being fast reduced not only by the axe, but by forest fires, which the carelessness of trappers or tramps kindles, and which are terrible in their destructive range, while governments, their thoughts engrossed by the party conflict, have left the forests to take care of themselves. ​For lumbering winter, when the snow makes slides, is the season, so that the French peasant may combine it with the cultivation of his little farm. Picturesque writers dwell with rapture on the romance of life in the lumber shanty, the forest ringing with the axe, the glories of the winter landscape by sunlight and by moonlight, the healthiness of the work, the vigour and skill which it calls forth, and the joviality of the gangs, touching with poetry even "the huge pan of fat pork fried and floating in gravy." In the dangerous work of guiding the logs down the stream, above all, great nerve as well as agility is displayed. The lumber shanty is also a school of temperance, for in it no liquor is allowed. Nor does religion fail to say her mass there, or to unpack her bale of ecclesiastical wares.
The land east of Quebec city is poor; even with the help of the lumber trade subsistence is rapidly outrun by population, and if there were not this ready outflow into the adjoining states of the American Union, Quebec would be a second Ireland, and an analogy would be presented which might be useful in teaching Irish reformers to deal with the fundamental problem of congestion rather than try to feed a heedless and thriftless people with statutory parliaments. But the priest looks on emigration with an evil eye; it takes away his flock, and those who return, as not a few do when they have earned some money in the New England factory, are apt to bring back with them the mental habits of a free commonwealth. Schemes of "repatriation" have been formed, but of course in vain, and desperate attempts are being made to turn the current of emigration northwards to Lake St. John. Shipment to the French settlement in Manitoba is ​another device of the same policy; but the star of French colonisation in Manitoba is waning low. This is one quarter from which danger threatens the Church's "ancient and solitary reign." Another is the railway, which, by bringing the peasant and his wife within the attraction of the city with its luxuries and vanities, corrupts the rural simplicity and contentment approved with good reason by the Church. Hence fulminations of clerical wrath against social corruption which would prove the Church's system a failure if they were taken literally and without allowance for the fervour of the pulpit.
While the people are poor the Church is, for such a country, immensely rich. Not Versailles or the Pyramids bespoke the power of the king more clearly than the great Church and the monastery rising above the cabins bespeak the power of the priest. Exactly how great the wealth of the Church in Quebec is cannot be told; no politician dares to move for a return. A hundred millions of dollars (£20,000,000 stg.) would probably be a low estimate of her realised property, while her income is reckoned at ten millions. Bishop Laval acquired from the Government the seigniories of the Petit Nation, the Island of Jesus, and Beaupré, the last of which, beginning a few miles below Quebec, runs along the St. Lawrence for sixteen leagues, with a depth of six leagues measured from the river. Favours have more recently been obtained from obsequious governments, while all legal facilities are given by legislatures not less obsequious. The Church has, by law transmitted from the Bourbon days and recognised at the Conquest, the right of taking from all members of her own communion tithe (though the amount of the impost has been reduced to ​a twenty-sixth) and money for building and repairing churches. Masses for souls are everywhere a source of revenue to her. She is always investing with profit. Besetting the people from the cradle to the grave with her friars and her nuns, she daily gathers in money, of which none ever leaves her coffers, even for taxes, since she asserts her sacred immunity from taxation. Lotteries, in spite of their affinity to gambling, are sanctioned to add to the holy fund. To add to the holy fund priests do not disdain to peddle ecclesiastical amulets and trinkets. Nor does Ste. Anne de Beaupré perform her cures for nothing. Meantime the mayor of St. Jean Baptiste, a village annexed to Montreal, states that of the seventy-five hundred people of that village, six thousand are too poor to protect themselves against smallpox, and the city must come to their assistance, while Le Canadien of Quebec calls upon the governments of the Dominion and the Province to provide work for the people of the counties below Quebec whose crops are a failure, ​warning them that unless the Matane Railway be pushed on to give the people bread there will be an exodus which will be ruinous to the Dominion. The treasury of the Province is empty, and her financiers are fain to levy political tribute on the Confederation or to raid by taxation of financial companies on the strongbox of the commercial Protestants at Montreal. The Reformation was perhaps to a greater extent than is commonly supposed a movement of economical self-preservation on the part of communities whose land and wealth were being absorbed by the Church.
The champions of the Church say that for all that she takes she gives full value in the shape of morality and charity. Her charity, if it means the control of charitable institutions, is not unconnected with her finance. It is probably on financial grounds, in part, that she is at this moment struggling to keep the lunatic asylums in her hands. But she has made the people in her way moral, as well as in her way religious. Her rule is almost Genevan in its austerity; balls and low dresses are denounced as well as Opera Bouffe. The relations of the sexes are watched with a jealous eye. Probably the most favourable specimen of the Roman Catholic system anywhere to be found is in Quebec, where, be it remembered, the Church has been under British rule, linked to a British province, tempered in her action by British influences, and stimulated by Protestant emulation. Nevertheless, looking to the condition of the people on the one hand, and the vast array of churches, convents, and rectories on the other, we are reminded of Edmond About's saying about the peasantry of the Romagna, who were backward and unprosperous though they had fourteen thousand monks preaching to them the gospel of labour.
What the mind of the Church is respecting popular ​education we know from the history of countries such as Southern Italy, Spain, the Roman Catholic provinces of Austria, and the Spanish colonies in South America, where she has had it all her own way. The Jesuit boasts of his services to education in Canada and elsewhere he has no doubt cultivated the art to great perfection after his kind; but the objects of his attention as an educator have been youths destined for the priesthood, or sons of the rich and powerful whom it was his aim to draw into his net, and to whom he imparts a set of showy and superficial accomplishments serving mainly to allay the thirst for truth. In Quebec the Church has it not all her own way. She is exposed to the rivalry and criticism of a body of Protestants on the spot, and of a still larger body in the Dominion. She has therefore taken up popular education, but she has taken it up without zeal and given it an ecclesiastical turn. The days may have gone by when by a Statute of the Province of Quebec school trustees were authorised by law to sign with a mark; but illiteracy still prevails. The mayor of a town cannot always write. Mr. Arthur Buies, a French Canadian journalist of eminence, cites a witness who, having held a high official position, and lived in a rural district for fifty years, deposes that among the men between twenty and forty not one in twenty can read, and not one in fifty can write; that they will tell you that they have been at school but have forgotten all they learned; and that what the "all" was you will be able to guess when you know that the teachers were mostly young girls taken from the convents with a salary of from 200 to 400 francs a year, and chosen because their priests were unable to pay the convent tuition fees. This account seems to be borne out by the inquiries ​of the Massachusetts School Inspector among the French Canadian immigrants in Massachusetts, though these are likely to be not among the least active-minded or intelligent of the community from which they come. In fact education for the masses is probably little more than preparation for the first communion. The series of school books in use in the Province is highly ecclesiastical and very poor.
The school history is a characteristic work. It scarcely mentions British Canada, treats the British as alien intruders, exults in French victories over them, imputes to them insidious designs of crushing French nationality, and glorifies the priesthood for having preserved it from their attacks. Lord Durham, the author of the hated union with British Canada, is accused of having scattered money broadcast for that object, and Sir John Colborne is charged with ravaging the country at the head of seven or eight thousand men when the rebellion was over and order had been restored. The Conquest, the pupil is taught to believe, was followed by eighty years of persecution, of religious intolerance, and of despotism, during which England was following, with regard to Canada, the sinister policy which she had pursued with regard to Ireland. This is a primer sanctioned by the Council of Public Instruction in a province styled British. There is at present no ill-feeling among the French Canadians against Great Britain. British rule has been too mild to provoke hatred. British Royalty when it visits Quebec is perfectly well received. But Great Britain is a foreign country to the French Canadian.
There is in Quebec a circle of French literary men con​taining some names of eminence; but it is hardly more connected with the Church and her people than was the literary circle of the eighteenth century with the Church and her people in France. It draws its intellectual aliment from Paris, where some of its members are well known, and M. Frechette, the poet of French Canada, has won a crown. Probably it is itself better known at Paris than in Quebec.
In this Paradise of Faith there is a serpent called the Parti Rouge, though it is not Dynamitard or Atheist, but merely Liberal, or at most free-thinking, and opposed to clerical domination. It had at Montreal a literary society called the Institut Canadien. This society, for taking heterodox literature, was excommunicated as a body by the Church. Guibord, one of its members, died under the ban, and the Church refused to let him be buried in the Catholic cemetery where he had owned a lot. The Provincial courts upheld the sentence of the Church. But the Privy Council on appeal, after debating the question, as Carlyle says, with the iron gravity of Roman augurs, decided that men must, according to the Canon Law, be excommunicated individually, not in the lump; consequently that Guibord had not lost his right to burial in the cemetery. The Church showed fight, the militia were under orders, a huge block of granite was prepared to protect the grave from desecration, a collision seemed to be impending, when the Bishop of Montreal cut the knot by proclaiming that in whatever spot the excommunicate might be laid that spot would thereby be cut off from the rest of the ground and deconsecrated; so that in the rest of the ground the faithful might sleep. uncontaminated and in peace.
Till lately, however, the Church of Quebec remained a ​true daughter of the Church of monarchical France, and kept her Gallican tradition, giving Cæsar his due, and living at peace with the civil power. But at length the same change has passed over her which has passed over the Roman Catholic Churches of Europe, since, having lost the allegiance of the national governments, they have been compelled to throw themselves for support on their spiritual centre, and to exalt without limit the authority of the Pope. Ultramontanism has come, and in its van the Jesuit bearing with him the Encyclical and Syllabus, his own work. Having, besides his surpassing skill in intrigue, the ecclesiastical influences of the time in his favour, he captures the Episcopate, fills the Church with his spirit, extends his empire on all sides. The Sulpician order, Gallican in sentiment, whose great seminary rises over Montreal, after a bitter struggle goes down before him, and resigns to him in part the cure of the wealthy city. Against the University, the last fortress of Gallicanism or Liberal Catholicism, his batteries have opened. From his own pulpit, or through the lips of bishops who speak as he prompts, he denounces Gallicanism as a pestilent error, brands Liberal Catholicism, the Catholicism of Montalembert and Lacordaire, as insidious poison, reasserts in the language of the Encyclical the medieval claims of the Papacy to domination over conscience and over the civil power, scornfully repels the idea that the priest is to confine himself to the sacristy, claims for him the right of interference in elections, the censorship of literature and of the public press. Against Protestantism and its pretended rights he proclaims open war; it has no rights, he says; it is merely a triumphant imposture; no religion has any right, or ought to be treated by the State as having any, but that of Rome. Rome is the rightful sovereign of all consciences; and will again, when she ​can, assert her authority by the same means as before. War is declared against religious liberty, progress, and the organic principles of modern civilisation. On such a course the ship of the French Church of Quebec is now steering, with the Jesuit at the helm. If she holds on, a collision can hardly fail to ensue. It has been said very truly that the Jesuit always fails. This world would be strangely ordered if he did not. His wisdom has never been equal to his craft. When by craft he had got James II into his hands, he, by want of wisdom, hurried the king along the road to ruin. He may do the same with the Nationalist party and politicians of Quebec. In the history of the Order, as often as the marve-lous labours of the sons of Loyola in majorem Dei gloriam seemed on the point of being crowned with success there has come an afflavit Deus et dissipati sunt. But though the Jesuit has always failed, his failures have been tremendously costly to humanity.
The ascendency of Ultramontanism has been aided by the change which has taken place in the position of the clergy. They used to hold their cures, under an ordinance of Louis XIV, by a fixed tenure, like the freehold of an English rector. But they have now been put generally on the footing of missionaries, removable at the pleasure of the bishop, The old-fashioned cur, a man something like the English rector of the old school, quiet and sociable, is passing away, and his place is being taken by a personage of a more stirring spirit, and better suited to be the minister of Ultramontane ambition.
With this advance of ecclesiastical pretensions comes a sympathetic growth of nationalist aspiration. The dream of a French nation on this continent has long been hovering before the minds of French Canadians, though it is hard to say how far the idea has ever assumed a distinct shape or formed a ​definite motive of action. The Abbé Gingras in a pamphlet some years ago, after glorifying the Dark Ages, justifying the Inquisition, and reviving the claims of Innocent III, set forth what he deemed the necessary policy of French Canadian statesmen towards the Dominion, describing it as one of conciliation, more or less elastic, with the creation of a papal and French nationality always in view as its covert aim. But now the twin movement has taken a more pronounced form. M. Honoré Mercier has risen to lead Ultramontanism and Nationalism at once, and has been raised by their joint forces to the Premiership of the Province, while the old Conservative or Bleu party, which corresponded to the Gallican party in the Church, has suffered a complete overthrow. M. Mercier proclaims himself the devout liegeman of the Pope wears a papal decoration on his breast, seeks the papal blessing before going into an election contest, champions all ecclesiastical claims, restores to the Jesuits their estates, and boasts to a great Roman Catholic assemblage at Baltimore that he has thereby redressed the wrong done by George III. At the same time he avows his Nationalism in language that makes British cars tingle. At the unveiling of a joint memorial to Brebœuf, the Jesuit martyr, and Jacques Cartier, the French discoverer, he bids the Red and Blue party of Quebec blend their ensigns in the Tricolor. He celebrates his political victory in a hall profusely decorated with French flags, while only one Dominion flag is to be seen. "Gentlemen," he says, pointing to the Tricolor, "this flag you know; it is the national flag. The government which you have you know; it is the national government. The party which I have before me I know. This flag, this government, and this party are to-night honoured by the National Club. It is a national triumph which we celebrate to-night, and not ​national merely in name but national in tendencies, aspirations, and sentiments." The French Canadian nation telegraphs its salutations to the Pope, and the Pope telegraphs back his benediction to the French Canadian nation. On a day in September 1887 the French flag was hoisted above the British flag on the Parliament House of Quebec in honour of the French frigate La Minerve. This was afterwards said to have been an accident. It was an accident full of omen.
Between Old France and the New France of the priests a gulf was set by the Atheist Revolution. There seems to have been some change of feeling in the minds of the Quebec clergy when Napoleon restored the Church, and when afterwards the old régime came back with the Bourbons. But since 1830 Liberalism, with the interlude of the Empire, has reigned again in Old France and repelled clerical sympathy. The Liberals of Quebec cultivate their connection with the mother country, who begins on her part to meet their advances and to show renewed interest in her great colony. But the moral sovereign of Quebec is the Pope, and the outcome of this movement, if it bears fruit at all, will be a French and Papal nation. The hearts of the French Canadians were, however, deeply moved by the spectacle of the Franco-German War. "If any one," said Sir George Cartier at that time, "would know to-day how far we are Frenchmen, I answer: Go into the towns, go into the country, accost the humblest among us and relate to him the events of that gigantic struggle which has fixed the attention of the world; announce to him that France is conquered; then place your hand upon his breast, and tell me what can make his heart beat if it be not love for his country?"
Lord Durham, coming immediately after what was called a rebellion, but was really rather a war between the two races ​in Lower Canada, describes not only the estrangement of the races but their mutual bitterness as extreme. The bitterness has in great measure passed away; the estrangement remains. There is hardly any intermarriage; marriages of Roman Catholics with Protestants are in fact interdicted by the Church of Rome. There is hardly any social intercourse either of young or old. Lord Durham said that the two races meet in the jury-box only for the utter subversion of justice. In any political case, or any case in which an appeal can be made to the sentiment of race, they meet only for the sub-version of justice still at least a disagreement of the jury is sure to result. The politicians have to act with British colleagues, with whom they must also associate. They have to speak English, because while French as well as English is recognised in the Parliament at Ottawa a member speaking French only cannot produce much effect; and some of them, Mr. Laurier and Mr. Chapleau for example, are among the very best English speakers. But constant intercourse is confined to the leaders; the British and French members generally, even at Ottawa, live much apart.
As the French population in Quebec increases, the British population decreases; it is likely in time to be thrust out altogether from the whole of the Province except a quarter of Montreal. In the city of Quebec there are now, it is believed. not more than six or seven thousand British remaining, and, as the shipbuilding trade has fled from its former seat, the British element being bound up with commerce, it is likely that the decline will go on. The eastern townships on the south of the St. Lawrence were once entirely British, and were under English law while the rest of the Province was under the Custom of Paris; but that district is now rapidly passing into French hands. The Bishop has the power of ​creating an ecclesiastical parish which by subtle links draws after it the civil and the municipal parish. The British farmer is harassed by an increase of his assessment as well as by social influences adverse to his peace and comfort. He becomes ready to sell out, and the Church advances money to the Frenchmen for the purchase at an easy rate, which she can do with profit to herself, because in the Frenchman's hands the farm becomes subject to tithe and Church repairs. One Protestant church after another is closed and in one parish after another French is proclaimed as the only language in which the records are to be kept. The commerce and wealth of Montreal are still in British hands, the reactionary ecclesiasticism of the French being little propitious to commercial pursuits. But commercial Montreal in French Quebec is becoming an outpost of an alien territory; proposals have been made for transferring it from Quebec to Ontario, close to the border of which it lies. Under the present jurisdiction it runs no small risk of being despoiled by the needy financiers of a separate race, as would Belfast if the taxing power in Ireland were committed to Roman Catholic and Celtic hands. Meanwhile the British traders of Montreal think of little but their trade, or of their pleasure, and make no head against the progress of the foe. In truth to make head something like a martyr spirit is required, for the Church can punish in his trade or profession the man who dares to show himself her enemy. Free and bold voices are heard, but they are few, and the ears to which they speak are for the most part closed against anything which, by disturbing quiet, might interfere with the interests of trade.
The less Ultramontane element of the Roman Catholic Church still holds its ground in the Laval University at Quebec, to which Liberals resort, and which has hitherto held ​Jesuit ascendency at bay. Protestantism has its flourishing place of high education in McGill University, at Montreal, while the Church of England has a small University at Lennoxville. Amongst the strongest bulwarks of Protestantism in the Province is the Presbyterian College at Montreal.
There are French Protestants in the Province to the number, it is said, of about 10,000. These are by origin converts from Roman Catholicism, and may be regarded with interest, as a recurrence of the tendency which gave birth to the Huguenots, but seemed to have been thoroughly crushed out of existence between Ultramontanism on the one hand and Voltaire on the other. They have produced, in the person of Mr. Joly, who was for a short time Provincial Premier, the most thoroughly upright and the most universally respected among the public men of the Province.
The point at which the empire of the Church in Quebec and the Jesuit's ideal polity are most threatened, is the junction with the American Republic, produced by the overflow already noticed, of the French population into the north-eastern States of the Union. This exodus the Church, while she deplores and dreads it, is constantly augmenting, both by her encouragement of early marriages and by her own absorption of wealth. She may send her priests with the exiles and try to extend her reign of childlike submission and uninquiring faith over Massachusetts; but in this she will not succeed. Nor will she be able to prevent the connection. between the French from being the conduit of American ideas fatal to faith and tithes. Among the Roman Catholics of Quebec itself there are sectional divisions which may some day lead to rupture, while the intellectual tendencies of the age being what they are, the Parti Rouge is not likely to decrease. There are those who suspect that even M. Mercier ​himself is less narrow in his convictions than from his public professions and actions has appeared. At this moment he is said to be braving Ultramontane ire by transferring the lunatic asylums from religious to secular keeping. But it is in the quarter of the exodus that we may look with most assurance for the beginning of the end.
In the meantime, however, the French Canadians in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, remain French Canadians. They form settlements by themselves. They cling to their language and their religion. They remain in close communication with those whom they have left behind, and population circulates between the two divisions. Thus New France now stretches across the Line into the the United States, one section of her being on the British side of the Line, the other section, the proportion of which already amounts to two-sevenths, and is always increasing, on the other side. Let those who dream of a war between Canada and the United States ponder this fact, and remember that they would have to call upon one part of New France to take arms in a British quarrel against the other part.
At Montreal there is a large settlement of Irish, who show their gregarious tendency by dwelling together in a quarter of the city called Griffintown, In the relations of the Irish to the French Catholics difference of race sharpened by industrial competition seems to predominate over identity of religion, to the advantage of the British Protestants, whom the combined force would overwhelm.
* ↑ With regard to this and the following chapter, the writer owes acknowledgment to Picturesque Canada, edited by Principal Grant, D. D., and also to the article by Dr. Prosper Bender, on the French Canadian Peasantry, in the Magazine of American History, August. 1890.
* ↑ See an interesting article by Mr. Edward Farrer, a distinguished Canadian journalist, in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1882.
* ↑ In Ontario a forest-ranger has now been appointed, in the person of Mr. Phipps, who had done good service in calling attention to the subject.
* ↑ See Picturesque Canada, vol. i., "Lumbering," where a complete and very interesting description of the trade and all that relates to it will be found.
* ↑ Parkman's Old Régime in Canada, p. 164.
* ↑ The tithe was by law only on cereals. The habitant took to growing peas to evade the impost; but the Church followed him up and he gave way. Of late he has taken to growing hay, but the Church again follows him up, and this time her exaction is the more severe because a heavy tax has been imposed on hay by the United States. In cities, the Church has begun to impose a poll tax on those who do not pay tithes. The cure generally succeeds in collecting by ecclesiastical authority, though resort is sometimes had to the Parish Commissioners' Courts. A district magistrate at Sherbrooke, not long ago, condemned a habitant to pay $4 (two years' tax of $2 per annum) imposed by the Bishop of St. Hyacinthe. The magistrate, who is a lawyer of thirty years' standing, based his decision partly on the decree of the bishop and partly on the fact that defendant's family had the spiritual services of the curé, for which he awarded a quantum meruit. The case is reported in the Revue Legale, a law report edited by a judge of the Superior Court of Montreal, without any question of its soundness. In the Province there has also been a long struggle against paying titles to the movable missionaries. But the Superior Court has also sustained this impost, though the old French edict declares that settled curés alone had the right to collect tithes.
* ↑ See for this the article "Romanism in Canada" in the Presbyterian Review, New York, July, 1886.
* ↑ Arthur Buies, La Lanterne, Montreal, 1884, p. 112.
* ↑ Abrégé d'Histoire du Canada a l'usage des Jeunes Etudiants de la Province de Québec, par F. X. Toussaint, Professeur à l'Ecole Normale-Laval. Approuvé par le Conseil de l'Instruction Publique, Montreal, 1886.