at home. To speak of them as 'slaves to the corvees and
unpaid military service, debarred from education and
crammed with gross fictions as an aid to their docility
and their value as food for powder,' [Footnote: A. G.
Bradley, The fight with France for North America (London,
1905, p. 388).] is to display a rare combination of
hopeless bigotry and crass ignorance. The habitant of
the old regime in Canada was neither a slave nor a serf;
neither down-trodden nor maltreated; neither was he docile
and spineless when his own rights were at issue. So often
has all this been shown that it is high time an end were
made of these fictions concerning the woes of Canadian
folk-life in the days before the conquest.

We have ample testimony concerning the relations of
seigneur and habitant in early Canada, and it comes from
many quarters. First of all there are the title-deeds of
lands, thousands of which have been preserved in the
various notarial archives. It ought to be explained, in
passing, that when a seigneur wished to make a grant of
land the services of a notary were enlisted. Notaries
were plentiful; the census of 1681 enumerated twenty-four
of them in a population of less than ten thousand. The
notary made his documents in the presence of the parties,
had them signed, witnessed, and sealed with due formality.
The seigneur kept one copy, the habitant another, and
the notary kept the original. In the course of time,
therefore, each notary accumulated quite a collection or
cadastre of legal records which he kept carefully. At
his death they were passed over to the general registry,