some service. Here the civil authorities did nothing at all, and had
it not been for the Church the whole colony would have grown up in
absolute illiteracy. A school for boys was established at Quebec in
Champlain's day, and during the next hundred and fifty years it was
followed by about thirty others. More than a dozen elementary schools
for girls were also established under ecclesiastical auspices. Yet
the amount of secular education imparted by all these seminaries was
astoundingly small, and they did but little to leaven the general
illiteracy of the population. Only the children of the towns attended
the schools, and the program of study was of the most elementary
character. Religious instruction was given the first place and
received so much attention that there was little time in school hours
for anything else. The girls fared better than the boys on the whole,
for the nuns taught them to sew and to knit as well as to read and to
write.

So far as secular education was concerned, therefore, the English
conquest found the colony in almost utter stagnation. Not one in five
hundred among the habitants, it was said, could read or write. Outside
the immediate circle of clergy, officials, and notaries, ignorance of
even the rudiments of education was almost universal. There were no
newspapers in the colony and very few books save those used in the
services of worship. Greysolon Du Lhut, the king of the voyageurs, for
example, was a man of means and education, but his entire library,
as disclosed by his will, consisted of a world atlas and a set of
Josephus. The priests did not encourage the reading of secular books,
and La Hontan recounts the troubles which he had in keeping one
militant _curé_ from tearing his precious volumes to pieces. New
France was at that period not a land where freedom dwelt with
knowledge.