1640.]

THE HUNDRED ASSOCIATES.

247

the church and a house for the Jesuits.

Both were

of pine wood; and this year, 1640, both were burned to the ground, to be afterwards rebuilt in stone. The Jesuits, however, continued to occupy their rude mission-house of Notre-Dame des Anges, on the St. Charles, where we first found them.

The country around Quebec was still an unbroken wilderness, with the exception of a small clearing made by the Sieur Giffard on his seigniory of Beauport, another made by M. de Puiseaux between Quebec and Sillery, and possibly one or two feeble attempts in other quarters.1 The total population did not much exceed two hundred, including women and children. Of this number, by far the greater part were agents of the fur company known as the "Hundred Associates," and men in their employ. Some of these had brought over their families. remaining inhabitants were priests, nuns, and a very few colonists.

The

The Company of the Hundred Associates was bound by its charter to send to Canada four thousand colonists before the year 1643.2 It had neither the means nor the will to fulfil this engagement. Some of its members were willing to make personal sacrifices for promoting the missions, and building up

1 For Giffard, Puiseaux, and other colonists, compare Langevin, Notes sur les Archives de Notre-Dame de Beauport, 5, 6, 7; Ferland, Notes sur les Archives de N. D. de Québec, 22, 24 (1863); Ibid., Cours d'Histoire du Canada, i. 266; Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 45; Faillon. Histoire de la Colonie Française, I. c. iv., v.

2 See "Pioneers of France," 441.

a colony purely Catholic. Others thought only of the profits of trade; and the practical affairs of the company had passed entirely into the hands of this portion of its members. They sought to evade obligations the fulfilment of which would have ruined. them. Instead of sending out colonists, they granted lands with the condition that the grantees should furnish a certain number of settlers to clear and till them, and these were to be credited to the Company.1 The grantees took the land, but rarely fulfilled the condition. Some of these grants were corrupt and iniquitous. Thus, a son of Lauson, president of the Company, received, in the name of a third person, a tract of land on the south side of the St. Lawrence of sixty leagues front. To this were added all the islands in that river, excepting those of Montreal and Orleans, together with the exclusive right of fishing in it through its whole extent. Lauson sent out not a single colonist to these vast concessions.

There was no real motive for emigration. No persecution expelled the colonist from his home; for none but good Catholics were tolerated in New France. The settler could not trade with the In

1 This appears in many early grants of the Company. Thus, in a grant to Simon Le Maître, Jan. 15, 1636, "que les hommes que le dit . . . fera passer en la N. F. tourneront à la décharge de la dite Compagnie,” etc., etc. — See Pièces sur la Tenure Seigneuriale, published by the Canadian government, passim.

2 Archives du Séminaire de Villemarie, cited by Faillon, i. 350. Lauson's father owned Montreal. The son's grant extended from the river St. Francis to a point far above Montreal - La Fontaine,

Mémoire sur la Famille de Lauson.

1640.]

CONVENTS.

HOSPITALS.

249

dians, except on condition of selling again to the Company at a fixed price. He might hunt, but he could not fish; and he was forced to beg or buy food for years before he could obtain it from that rude soil in sufficient quantity for the wants of his family. The Company imported provisions every year for those in its employ; and of these supplies a portion was needed for the relief of starving settlers. Giffard and his seven men on his seigniory of Beauport were for some time the only settlers - excepting, perhaps, the Hébert family — who could support themselves throughout the year. The rigor of the climate repelled the emigrant; nor were the attractions which Father Le Jeune held forth - "piety, freedom, and independence"-of a nature to entice him across the sea, when it is remembered that this freedom consisted in subjection to the arbitrary will of a priest and a soldier, and in the liability, should he forget to go to mass, of being made fast to a post with a collar and chain, like a dog.

Aside from the fur trade of the Company, the whole life of the colony was in missions, convents, religious schools, and hospitals. Here on the rock of Quebec were the appendages, useful and otherwise, of an old-established civilization. While as yet there were no inhabitants, and no immediate hope of any, there were institutions for the care of children, the sick, and the decrepit. All these were supported by a charity in most cases precarious. The Jesuits relied chiefly on the Company, who by the terms of

their patent were obliged to maintain religious worship. Of the origin of the convent, hospital, aud seminary I shall soon have occasion to speak.

Quebec wore an aspect half military, half monastic. At sunrise and sunset, a squad of soldiers in the pay of the Company paraded in the fort; and, as in Champlain's time, the bells of the church rang morning, noon, and night. Confessions, masses, and penances were punctiliously observed; and, from the governor to the meanest laborer, the Jesuit watched and guided all. The social atmosphere of New England itself was not more suffocating. By day and by night, at home, at church, or at his daily work, the colonist lived under the eyes of busy and over-zealous priests. At times, the denizens of Quebec grew restless. In 1639, deputies were covertly sent to beg relief in France, and "to represent the hell in which the consciences of the colony were kept by the union of the temporal and spiritual authority in the same hands."2 In 1642, partial and ineffective measures

1 It is a principle of the Jesuits, that each of its establishments shall find a support of its own, and not be a burden on the general funds of the Society. The Relations are full of appeals to the charity of devout persons in behalf of the missions.

"Of what use to the country at this period could have been two communities of cloistered nuns?" asks the modern historian of the Ursulines of Quebec; and he answers by citing the words of Pope Gregory the Great, who, when Rome was ravaged by famine, pestilence, and the barbarians, declared that his only hope was in the prayers of the three thousand nuns then assembled in the holy city. Les Ursulines de Québec. Introd., xi.

2 "Pour leur representer la gehenne où estoient les consciences de la Colonie, de se voir gouverné pas les mesmes personnes pour le spirituel et pour le temporel." - Le Clerc, i. 478.

1636-46.]

THE PRIEST AS A RULER.

251

were taken, with the countenance of Richelieu, for introducing into New France an Order less greedy of seigniories and endowments than the Jesuits, and less prone to political encroachment.1 No favorable result followed; and the colony remained as before, in a pitiful state of cramping and dwarfing vassalage.

This is the view of a heretic. It was the aim of the founders of New France to build on a foundation purely and supremely Catholic. What this involved is plain; for no degree of personal virtue is a guaranty against the evils which attach to the temporal rule of ecclesiastics. Burning with love and devotion to Christ and his immaculate Mother, the fervent and conscientious priest regards with mixed pity and indignation those who fail in this supreme allegiance. Piety and charity alike demand that he should bring back the rash wanderer to the fold of his divine Master, and snatch him from the perdition into which his guilt must otherwise plunge him. And while he, the priest, himself yields reverence and obedience to the Superior, in whom he sees the representative of Deity, it behooves him, in his degree, to require obedience from those whom he imagines that God has confided to his guidance. His conscience, then, acts in perfect accord with the love of power innate in the human heart. These allied forces mingle with a perplexing subtlety; pride, disguised even from itself,

1 Declaration de Pierre Breant, par devant les Notaires du Roy, MS. The Order was that of the Capuchins, who, like the the Récollets, are a branch of the Franciscans. Their introduction into Canada was prevented; but they established themselves in Mainę.