Halifax. Even the French settlers came of different stocks. The
Acadians were chiefly men of La Rochelle and the Loire, while the
Canadians came, for the most part, from the coast provinces
stretching from Normandy and Picardy to Poitou and Bordeaux.

The situation in Canada proper presented the British authorities
with a problem new in their imperial experience. Hitherto, save
for Acadia and New Netherland, where the settlers were few in
numbers and, even in New Netherland, closely akin to the
conquerors in race, religion, and speech, no colony containing
men of European stocks had been acquired by conquest. Canada held
some sixty or seventy thousand settlers, French and Catholic
almost to a man. Despite the inefficiency of French colonial
methods the plantation had taken firm root. The colony had
developed a strength, a social structure, and an individuality
all its own. Along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu the
settlements lay close and compact; the habitants' whitewashed
cottages lined the river banks only a few arpents apart. The
social cohesion of the colony was equally marked. Alike in
government, in religion, and in industry, it was a land where
authority was strong. Governor and intendant, feudal seigneur,
bishop and Jesuit superior, ruled each in his own sphere and
provided a rigid mold and framework for the growth of the colony.
There were, it is true, limits to the reach of the arm of
authority. Beyond Montreal stretched a vast wilderness merging at
some uncertain point into the other wilderness that was
Louisiana. Along the waterways which threaded this great No Man's
Land the coureurs-de-bois roamed with little heed to law or
license, glad to escape from the paternal strictness that irked
youth on the lower St. Lawrence. But the liberty of these rovers