allegiance has changed.

To speak of the habitants of New France as downtrodden or oppressed,
dispirited or despairing, like the peasantry of the old land in the
days before the great Revolution, as some historians have done, is to
speak untruthfully. These people were neither serfs nor peons. The
habitant, as Charlevoix puts it, "breathed from his birth the air of
liberty"; he had his rights and he maintained them. Shut off from the
rest of the world, knowing only what the Church and civil government
allowed him to know, he became provincial in his horizon and
conservative in his habits of mind. The paternal policy of the
authorities sapped his initiative and left him little scope for
personal enterprise, so that he passed for being a dull fellow. Yet
the annals of forest trade and Indian diplomacy prove that the New
World possessed no sharper wits than his. Beneath a somewhat ungainly
exterior the yeoman and the trader of New France concealed qualities
of cunning, tact, and quick judgment to a surprising degree.

These various types in the population of New France, officials,
missionaries, seigneurs, voyageurs, habitants, were all the scions of
a proud race, admirably fitted to form the rank and file in a great
crusade. It was not their fault that France failed to dominate the
Western Hemisphere.




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE