French historians, De Tocqueville, has somewhere remarked that "the
physiognomy of a government may be best judged in the colonies....
When I wish to study the spirit and faults of the administration of
Louis XIV," he writes, "I must go to Canada, for its deformity is
there seen as through a microscope." That is entirely true. The
history of New France in its picturesque alternation of sunshine and
shadow, of victory and defeat, of pageant and tragedy, is a chronicle
that is Gallic to the core. In the early annals of the northland one
can find silhouetted in sharp relief examples of all that was best and
all that was worst in the life of Old France. The political framework
of the colony, with its strict centralization, the paternal regulation
of industry and commerce, the flood of missionary zeal which poured
in upon it, the heroism and courage of its priests and voyageurs, the
venality of its administrative officials, the anachronism of a feudal
land-tenure, the bizarre externals of its social life, the versatility
of its people--all these reflected the paternity of New France.

The most striking weakness of French colonial policy in the
seventeenth century was its failure to realize how vastly different
was the environment of North America from that of Central Europe.
Institutions were transplanted bodily, and then amazement was
expressed at Versailles because they did not seem to thrive in the new
soil. Detailed instructions to officials in New France were framed by
men who had not the slightest grasp of the colony's needs or problems.
One busybody wrote to the colonial Intendant that a bake-oven should
be established in every seigneury and that the _habitants_ should
be ordered to bring their dough there to be made into bread. The
Intendant had to remind him that, in the long cold winters of the St.
Lawrence valley, the dough would be frozen stiff if the habitants,
with their dwellings so widely scattered, were required to do