ran with exasperating slowness.

There was, however, one mitigating feature in the situation. The hand
of home authority was rigid and its beckonings were precise; but as
a practical matter it could be, and sometimes was, disregarded
altogether. Not that the colonial officials ever defied the King or
his ministers, or ever failed to profess their intent to follow the
royal instructions loyally and to the letter. They had a much safer
plan. When the provisions of a royal decree seemed impractical or
unwise, it was easy enough to let them stand unenforced. Such decrees
were duly registered in the records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec
and were then promptly pigeonholed so that no one outside the little
circle of officials at the Château de St. Louis ever heard of them.
In one case a new intendant on coming to the colony unearthed a royal
mandate of great importance which had been kept from public knowledge
for twenty years.

Absolutism, paternalism, and religious solidarity were characteristic
of both France and her colonies in the great century of overseas
expansion. There was no self-government, no freedom of individual
initiative, and very little heresy either at home or abroad.
The factors which made France strong in Europe, her unity, her
subordination of all other things to the military needs of the nation,
her fostering of the sense of nationalism--these appeared prominently
in Canada and helped to make the colony strong as well. Historians of
New France have been at pains to explain why the colony ultimately
succumbed to the combined attacks of New England by land and of Old
England by sea. For a full century New France had as its next-door
neighbor a group of English colonies whose combined populations
outnumbered her own at a ratio of about fifteen to one. The relative