provinces, they ministered only to the ambition of the king, and
contributed to the dissipation and extravagance of a voluptuous court.

But while those features of the ancient feudal system, which were
calculated to give power to the nobles, had been eliminated by the
centralizing influence of the king, the system still continued in the
provinces to govern the relations between the _noblesse_ and the
peasantry who possessed their lands on old feudal conditions regulated
by the customary or civil law. These conditions were, on the whole,
still burdensome. The noble who spent all his time in attendance on
the court at Versailles or other royal palaces could keep his purse
equal to his pleasures only by constant demands on his feudal tenants,
who dared no more refuse to obey his behests than he himself ventured
to flout the royal will.

Deeply engrafted as it still was on the social system of the parent
state, the feudal tenure was naturally transferred to the colony of
New France, but only with such modifications as were suited to the
conditions of a new country. Indeed all the abuses that might hinder
settlement or prevent agricultural development were carefully lopped
off. Canada was given its _seigneurs_, or lords of the manor, who
would pay fealty and homage to the sovereign himself, or to the feudal
superior from whom they directly received their territorial estate,
and they in their turn leased lands to peasants, or tillers of the
soil, who held them on the modified conditions of the tenure of old
France. It was not expedient, and indeed not possible, to transfer a
whole body of nobles to the wilderness of the new world--they were as
a class too wedded to the gay life of France--and all that could be
done was to establish a feudal tenure to promote colonization, and at
the same time possibly create a landed gentry who might be a shadowy