Intellectually, the people of New France comprised on the one hand a
small élite and on the other a great unlettered mass. There was
no middle class between. Yet the population of the colony always
contained, especially among its officials and clergy, a sprinkling of
educated and scholarly men. These have given us a literature of travel
and description which is extensive and of high, quality. No other
American colony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put so
much, of its annals into print; the _Rélations_ of the Jesuits alone
were sufficient to fill forty-one volumes, and they form but a small
part of the entire literary output.




CHAPTER VIII

SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA


From the beginning of the colony there ran in the minds of French
officialdom the idea that the social order should rest upon a
seigneurial basis. Historians have commonly attributed to Richelieu
the genesis of New World feudalism, but without good reason, for its
beginnings antedated the time of the great minister. The charter
issued to the ill-starred La Roche in 1598 empowered him "to grant
lands to gentlemen in the forms of fiefs and seigneuries," and the
different viceroys who had titular charge of the colony before the
Company of One Hundred Associates took charge in 1627 had similar
powers. Several seigneurial grants in the region of Quebec had, in