Canada and the Canadian Question/Chapter 4

Jacques Cartier, though venerated as the founder of the French Colony, was only the discoverer of the St. Lawrence (1535). He made trial of the climate by wintering at Quebec, where he lost many of his crew by cold, hunger, and scurvy, and he opened relations with the Indians in a rather sinister way by kidnapping a chief with three of his tribe. But he formed no permanent settlement: Roberval, his contemporary and successor in the enterprise, totally failed. The real founder of Canada did not appear on the scene until seventy years after. This was Samuel de Champlain (1603–35), one of that striking group of characters to which the sixteenth century gave birth, and which combined the force, hardihood, and romance of feudalism with the larger views and higher objects of the Reformation era. The man would have been a crusader in the thirteenth century who in the sixteenth was a maritime adventurer and the founder of a colony. Champlain, though it does not appear that he ever was of the Reformed faith, and though he ultimately became ​connected with the Jesuits, had fought for Henry IV, and must therefore have belonged to the more liberal and patriotic party of Roman Catholics. At this time there was beginning to be an exodus of Huguenots to New France, like that of the persecuted Puritans to New England, which came a few years afterwards. Henry IV seems to have encouraged the movement, seeing perhaps how the tide was running in France and guessing what was in store, when his protection should have been withdrawn, for the party to which he had belonged. Had New France been colonised by Huguenots, bringing with them the energy, the industry, the intelligence, and the love of freedom which marked them in their own country, New England would have had a formidable rival, and to the French, not to the English race and tongue the American continent might now belong. French writers look back with a wistful eye to the glory that might have been. As it was, Quebec, with France herself and everything belonging to her, fell into the hands of the Catholic Reaction, and of its incarnation and apostle the Jesuit. The Jesuit of course devoutly excluded the Huguenot, carefully searching vessels lest they should have brought over any one tainted with the pestilence of heresy. Not only did he exclude the Huguenot, but as far as possible he excluded the Jansenist. By this he did the Colony incomparably more harm than he ever, by his boasted activity as a civiliser and educator, did it good. In fact, during the early stages of its history, while it remained under Jesuit domination, it was not a colony at all. It was a Jesuit mission grafted on a station of the fur trade.

The Jesuit missionaries, who came to the settlement in 1625, did for the glory of God and of their Order things which have found in our own day a brilliant and sympathetic chronicler. Our accounts of their exploits are derived from ​"Relations," written by themselves and published in France, for the purpose of exalting the name of the Order, exciting sympathy with it, and opening the purses of the devout, all of which purposes, not excepting the last, they effectually served. Nor is it possible to put unreserved confidence in the narratives of men the most sensible of whom lived in an atmosphere of miracle, divine and diabolical, saw demons aiming darts at them, received supernatural warnings, and beheld fiery crosses traversing the sky. Yet there can be no doubt that Jesuitism had in New France its heroes and its martyrs. It had martyrs who, with a fortitude which nothing but sincere enthusiasm could have sustained, braved the perils and hardships of the wilderness, endured the worse horrors of life in the Indian hut, and underwent without flinching at the hands of the Iroquois tortures equal physically at least to those which their European brethren were inflicting, or causing to be inflicted, on heretics in the dungeons of the Inquisition. These were at all events victories of the higher over the lower man. It was certain that the Order would draw into it at first some pure enthusiasts; and it was likely that these would wish to go, and would by the policy of the Order be sent, rather to the missionary field than to that of European propagandism and intrigue. Jesuitism is redeemed by its missionary element impersonated in Xavier and Brebœuf. It was their own version of Christianity of course that the Sons of Loyola taught. Perhaps it was a Christianity in some respects not uncongenial to the Indian. "You burn your enemies," said a Jesuit to an Algonquin chief, "and God does the same." In the pictures of lost souls tormented by demons which were presented to them, the Indian might see his own practices ascribed to the Supreme Being. An Indian woman whom the Fathers were ​trying to convert, refused to be sent to Heaven when they had told her that her dead children were in Hell. Nor can their philosophic eulogist forbear smiling at the frivolity, not to say fetichism, of some of their religious ideas and practices. The missionaries are always looking out with peculiar eagerness for dying children whom, by baptism, in the furtive administration of which rather equivocal stratagems are sometimes employed, they send, as they think, straight from Hell to Paradise. Their thaumaturgy might justify the Indian in calling them, as he did, the French medicine men.

In spite of all the self-devotion of the Fathers and all their heroism, their missions came almost to naught. They had the misfortune to be confronted by the Iroquois, of all Red Indians and of all savages the most valiant, the most politic, and the most fiendish. Champlain, by allying himself with the Huron enemies of the Iroquois, rashly stirred the terrible swarm. By the Iroquois the Hurons, among whom the Jesuits had planted their missionaries and made converts, were overthrown, and in 1649 utterly destroyed. To a Huron it naturally appeared hard that this should be the reward of allegiance to the true God; nor does it seem impossible that by the change the convert may have lost something of the warlike character necessary to save him in the ruthless struggle for existence. A few of the Iroquois themselves were afterwards converted, and the descendants of such converts, under the name of the Caughnawagas, steer the tourist down the Lachine rapids to Montreal. Mr. Parkman gives the Jesuit credit for having by contact softened the manners of the Indians generally; but this seems hardly consistent with his own statements that the Fathers connived at the torture of prisoners by their Indian converts, and that when the Jesuits had become, as in course of time they did, more ​political than missionary, the converts were launched in scalping parties against the colonists of New England.

The palm of religious heroism must be shared by the Jesuits with the Ursulines. The "Relations" of the Jesuits had fired the hearts of devout women in France with the same missionary enthusiasm, mingled, as the historian fails not to see, with a yearning for personal distinction. These women performed miracles as hospital nurses and as angels of charity in the struggling and suffering settlements, while they were props of a system under which the Colony could hardly be anything but a hospital and an almshouse. A hospital was founded at Montreal, to afford a theatre for the religious activity of these ladies, before there was any need of one, and when the money and the labour were sorely required for other purposes by a settlement feebly struggling for existence. Marie de l'Incarnation seems to have rivalled St. Catherine or St. Theresa in the intensity of her self-devotion, in her erotic transports, and in all that is most characteristic of a female saint. Jeanne le Ber, another saint, was the Simeon Stylites of her sex: she shut herself up for twenty years in a cell behind the altar, rarely speaking, and inflicting on herself incredible mortifications. This might be seraphic, but it was not a practical model for the settler's wife.

If the heroic efforts of the Jesuit as missionary were baffled by adverse circumstances, as the organiser of a colony he failed through the inherent and fatal falsity of his ideal. His object, as he avowed, was to make Quebec a Northern Paraguay, in other words, a community of human sheep absolutely devoted and submissive to their ecclesiastical shepherd. But human sheep are not colonial pioneers. Nor was the ascetic view of the world or the palm held out to self-torturing saintship likely to stimulate the agricultural ​or commercial effort necessary to place a colony on a sound material basis. The Puritans of New England, it has been justly observed, however austere and however narrow might be their religion, believed in a Giver of material as well as spiritual blessings, and in the material as well as in the spiritual sphere laboured with all their might to carry into effect the Divine intention. To make a Paraguay, moreover, it was necessary that the temporal and spiritual powers should be united in the hands of the priest. To bring this about was in New France, as everywhere else, the Jesuit's constant aim. With the help of devout Governors he to a great extent succeeded, and the result was that petitions were sent to France praying "that an end might be put to the Gehenna produced by the union of the temporal with the spiritual power." The moral code under Jesuit rule was Genevan in its rigour as well as ultra-ecclesiastical in its formality. For breach of its ordinances men were whipped like dogs. It was enforced, as was complained at the time, not only by the confessional, but by a system of espionage which made the Jesuit master of all family secrets and tyrant of all households. To the Jesuit his Canadian realm seemed a spiritual Paradise and the Gate of Heaven, albeit the blessed souls in it lived in constant peril of famine and of the tomahawk. But it seemed by no means a Paradise to some untamed spirits, whose energy as pioneers, though unhallowed, the Colony perhaps could ill afford to lose. These fled from it to the free life of the forest, and became as bushrangers the perpetual scandal of the Government. A genuine and great service was done by the priests in opposing the brandy trade, which was playing havoc among the Indians, and we need not regard the insinuation of a governor with whom they had quarrelled, that they wished themselves to engross the profits ​of the trade. It is probable, however, that before its fall, the Order had become not only political but commercial in Quebec, as it had in Europe, where the scandalous bankruptcy of one of its commercial houses was among the immediate causes of its suppression. One of the governors at least reports that it was getting the fur trade into its hands. It shared the inevitable fate of all the Orders, which, beginning with a seraphic ideal and a renunciation of all worldly goods, fell from their unattainable aim into corporate ambition, pursuit of inordinate wealth, and a corruption which, contrasted with their professions, brought on them hatred, contempt, and at last the whirlwind of destruction.

Quebec, the Paradise of the Jesuits, had a competitor and an object of jealousy in Montreal, founded in 1642 by Maisonneuve, whose figure belongs to the same group as that of Champlain, though he was more of a religious devotee. Montreal was under the influence of the Sulpicians, a branch of whose Order, the Recollets, had preceded the Jesuits in the Canadian Mission. Quebec accused Montreal of Jansenism and received with a slight sneer of incredulity Montreal miracles, even when they were so little trying to a child-like faith as that of the man's head which talked after being severed from the body. Sulpicianism, on the other hand, spoke with delicate irony of the Jesuit Relations, and insinuated a comparison between them and the tales of the East Indian traveller who made a valiant soldier, when he had fired away his last bullet, load his musket with his own teeth. After the lapse of two centuries and a half this battle between Jesuit and Sulpician, Ultramontane and Gallican, has been renewed.

As an agricultural or commercial settlement New France remained a failure, its only trade being the fur trade, while ​the Iroquois incessantly prowled around it like wolves and picked off the tillers of the fields who worked with the loaded arquebuse by their sides. The Home Government generally had its hands full of home troubles and distractions, while such aid as was sent from private sources was sent not to the colony but to the mission. Richelieu, when engaged in reorganising the monarchy on the centralising principle, did not fail to turn his thoughts to the colony. He reformed the Constitution of the Commercial Company, which was in fact its only government other than the priesthood, and sent it soldiers, though in numbers wholly inadequate to its defence. But then came the troubles of the Fronde. When these were past, and over the wreck of feudal independence rose in all its might and glory the administrative despotism of Louis XIV, a dead-lift effort was made to inspire life, after the autocratic fashion, into the colony, and make it the starting-point of a French and Catholic empire which, extinguishing the English and Dutch colonies, should embrace the whole of the continent. The regiment of Carignan-Salières was sent out in 1665 and repressed the Iroquois, while a not less potent agency in the salvation of the Settlement was the advent, as governor, of Frontenac, the Clive of Quebec. By the side of the plumed governor, who, like the governors of provinces in France represented the feudal aristocracy surviving in its state and in its military character under the king, though shorn of its political and military power, came in less showy costume the Royal Intendant, to whom in all administrative matters the power had been transferred. The Intendant Talon was a colonial Colbert—able, active, and upright like his chief; and, like his chief, he did all that could be done under the radically false system of monopoly and protectionism to animate ​and foster trade. To recruit the population, which between asceticism and the Iroquois was at a very low ebb, large consignments of young women were shipped out by despotic fiat from France, and marriage was encouraged in the same style by means of premiums on offspring and penalties on celibacy. Feudalism, such as it was in France since its teeth had been drawn by the Monarchy—feudalism, that is not political or military but only manorial—was imported into the colony as the land system of the French realm; and a number of seigniories were carved out under which the settlers held their lands as censitaires, like the copyholders under an English manor, though with the feudal forms of investiture instead of entry on the court roll. The militia was kept in the hands of a king's officer, and the criminal jurisdiction of the seignior was very small. Some of the feudal incidents, such as the obligation to use the lord's mill and oven, must have been almost a dead letter; but there was an oppressive fee to the lords on sales. So much of democracy there was on the American soil even under Bourbon rule that the peasant would brook no name that savoured of villeinage, but styled himself the habitant. The colony was also endowed with a noblesse formed out of rather sorry materials, such as the disbanded officers of the Carignan regiment and plebeian settlers whose vanity led them to buy social rank. The result, as plainly appears and might have been surely foreseen, was not a genuine aristocracy, but a false caste of insolence, idleness, and vagabondage, though the genius of the New World so far asserted itself that the colonial gentleman, unlike the gentleman of the mother country, was permitted without loss of rank to engage in trade.

In New as in Old France the despotism was absolute. ​The Supreme Council which was instituted at this time (1663), and ousted the Commercial Company from all political power, was only another name for the rule of the Royal Governor, of the Intendant, and in matters ecclesiastical of the Bishop. The Intendant by his decrees regulated not only the police but commercial and civil life. Of the local self-government, which formed the soul and the hope of New England, not a germ was allowed to appear. One Governor conceived the idea of providing the colony with a miniature counterpart of the States-General; but he was at once given to understand that the Court, far from wishing to extend the venerable institution to the colonies, was disposed to regard it as obsolete at home. It is needless to say that no organ or expression of public opinion was allowed. The colony was of course under the French criminal law, with its arbitrary imprisonment and judicial torture.

Louis XIV, albeit devout, and more devout than ever when he had fallen under the influence of the Maintenon, still meant to be King of the Church as well as of the State. He had not even shrunk, when his royal dignity was in question, from bullying the Pope. Relations were somewhat strained between the representatives of the Royal power and the head of the Church, Bishop Laval. This prelate, whose name is still great in French Canada and is borne by the Laval University, was the paragon. of asceticism in his day. He lay on a bed full of vermin; he ate tainted meat; the wonder is that he escaped canonisation. He was a fast ally of the Jesuits, and a champion of the doctrines which they then preached and are now again preaching on the same field respecting the supremacy and infallibility of the Pope, the independence and liberty of the Church, and the duty of the State to submit to the Church in case of any conflict ​between them.^[2] Laval, who particularly prided himself on his humility, had frequent disputes with the Governors about precedence, in which the Governors showed more spirit than is shown by politicians when threatened with ecclesiastical displeasure at the present day. They said to the churchman in effect, like their precursor Poutrincourt, "It is your business to obey me on earth and to guide me to heaven." A curb, and a strong curb, was legally imposed on the Episcopal power and ambition by the Royal ordinance, which decreed that the tenure of the curés should be fixed, as in France, and that they should be no longer removable at the Bishop's will.

It is needless to say that Monopoly and Protectionism failed to give new life to industry and commerce. Decrees forbidding merchants to trade with the Indians, forbidding them to sell goods at retail except in August, September, and October, forbidding trade anywhere above Quebec, forbidding the sale of clothing or domestic articles ready-made, forbidding trade with the New England Colonies, that is with the natural market, forbidding any one to go there without a passport—decrees giving a monopolist company power to make domiciliary visits for the discovery and destruction of foreign goods, ordering that vessels engaged in foreign commerce should be treated as pirates, and that every one found with an article of foreign manufacture in his possession should be fined^[3]—with other like ordinances, produced the same sort of results which similar policy, pursued by men less excusable in error than Colbert and Talon, is now producing in the same field. Nor could exclusion from the natural market be compensated in those days any more than ​in these by the creation of a forced market in the West Indies or elsewhere. An attempt of the beneficent King to speed the plough by the introduction of negro slavery had no better success, being baffled at once by the climate. The colony made nothing and produced nothing except beaver skins, to be exported to France in payment for the supplies of all kinds which it drew thence. It was consequently bankrupt, coin fled from it, giving place to bad paper, and at last to card money. Even the trade in beaver skins was so bedevilled by monopoly and government regulation that at one time the company destroyed three-fourths of the stock on their hands to avert a glut. In the fur trade, however, was such life as the colony had apart from the activity of the clergy. Into this were drawn all those who preferred the freedom of the forest to the paternal despotism of the Intendant and the priest. A strange and wild life it was. The bushrangers (coureurs des bois) threw off civilisation, lived with the Indians, intermarried with them, learned Indian habits, became more than half Indians themselves, and some-times were made chiefs of Indian tribes. They took to war-paint and feathers. They took even to scalping, and were in consequence treated by Wolfe as out of the laws of war. They regarded themselves, however, as gentlemen, and it is said that some of the best families in Quebec are descended from this stock.

Closely connected with the spirit of this roving life was the adventurous passion for discovery, which reached its climax in the marvellous exploration of the Mississippi by La Salle. As explorers the French were not less superior to the staid and plodding New Englander than they were inferior to him in industry, commerce, and the qualities requisite for building up a commonwealth. To the Jesuit ​missionaries, too, is due the credit of wonderful exploration, notably on the Upper Lakes. It was natural also that in the magnificence of their schemes, military and territorial, the French should have the pre-eminence. With no other basis than a settlement of a few thousands of people on the St. Lawrence they aspired to the extension of their Empire by a chain of military posts westward to the Mississippi and down its whole course to New Orleans. In their vaulting ambition the men of New France were true Frenchmen.

Supposing a despotic administration to be inspired by probity and beneficence, its eye cannot see nor can its arm reach across the Atlantic. Colbert meant very well to the colony, and even his King meant well. But after Louis XIV and Colbert came Louis XV and the Regency, Pompadour and Dubois. Then began in the unhappy dependency a reign of unbridled corruption and abuse. Peculation and extortion to an enormous extent were carried on by a gang of officials, at the head of which was the Intendant Bigot, whose chateau near Quebec was a sort of outpost of the Pare aux Cerfs. It is astonishing that, vexed as they were with imposts, pillaged as they were by scoundrels in office, and harassed as they were by compulsory service in the militia and on public works, the peasants of Quebec should have remained true as they did to their King and to France. Pompadour was not so hostile as Maintenon to Huguenots, and would not have opposed their settling in New France. But the Huguenot was now extinct; in his place had come Voltaire.

The historian bespeaks our sympathy and admiration, not only for the missionary, but for the parish priest, who went about through the sparse settlements of a wild peasantry, along the inhospitable shore, performing Mass, baptising, confessing, and preaching, in defiance of great hardship and no ​small peril. These men, no doubt, after the downfall of asceticism, kept alive such religion and such morality as there was. But of morality there seems in the closing days of the colony to have been as little as there was of industry or trade. The soldiery, the bushrangers, the fur trade and its roystering fairs, the association with the Indians, the habits and examples of Pompadourian Intendants, appear by their united agencies of corruption to have morally ruined the Northern Paraguay. Of education there had never been any except that which the Jesuits gave to the boys destined for the priesthood, or to the sons of the few people of quality. French gaiety remained; so, we are told, did the polish of French manners, and the Colonists, we are also told, spoke French well.

The French colonist, however, if he was backward in the arts of peace was not to be despised in war. This he showed in the long conflict with the English colonies and their mother country which fills the closing period of this history. The very absence of industrial and commercial pursuits preserved the military character. The bushranger was the best of bushfighters and could act in perfect unison with his savage comrade the Red Indian. The New Englanders, though they came of the Ironside blood and bad the making of the best soldiers in them, were not soldiers, but traders and mechanics. Wolfe speaks very disparagingly of his Colonial Rangers. The first capture of Louisbourg by a Colonial army supported only by a British fleet was a stroke of luck, due to the mutinous state of the garrison and the weakness of the Commandant. Moreover the English colonies were divided in their councils: they had with the independence and self-reliance the stiff-neckedness of republicans, and the weakness in joint action which it entails. It was ​very hard to bring each colony to take its part in any common enterprise or furnish its contingent to any common force. The French, on the other hand, were united under the absolute command of the Royal Governor, who could call them all to arms and dispose of everything they had for the King's service. Nor were the French nobles, by whom the governorship was held, ill-fitted for the military part of their work. Frontenac especially was a man of great genius for war as well as of iron character; he left a name dreaded by the English Colonists and renowned in Canadian history, though sullied by his murderous employment of the savage; not that anybody abstained from the use of this vile auxiliary, whose subsequent introduction into the revolutionary war by the British was not the horrible innovation which rhetoric painted it, though assuredly it was a crime as well as a blunder. Superior as they were in population and in wealth, the English colonies might have been lost had they not been united, as far as they were capable of union, and supported by their mother country. As soon as her arm, after a long and desperate struggle, had laid low their formidable rival and assured their safety, she was made to feel what had been their real tie to her.

The conquest of Quebec is familiar to all; and has been narrated by Mr. Parkman in the two most charming volumes, perhaps, even of his charming series. If he fails in anything, perhaps it is in not perfectly painting the character of Wolfe, one of the most interesting, if not one of the most important or dazzling, figures in military history. Near the famous battle-field on which the steadiness of the British soldier, reserving his fire for the decisive volley while his comrades were falling fast around him, determined that to his race, not to the French, should belong the New World and its hopes, ​stands the monument raised by the victor to the joint memory of Wolfe and Montcalm. The warlike aristocracy of France and the military duty of England could not have encountered each other in more typical forms. Voltaire, more philosopher and philanthropist than patriot, celebrated by a feast the transfer of New France from the realm of despotism to that of freedom. Mr. Parkman says: "A happier calamity never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by the British arms."