French endeavoured in more than one of their institutions to combine
industrial pursuits with the ordinary branches of an elementary
education. For instance, attached to the Seminary was a sort of
farm-school, established in the parish of St. Joachim, below Quebec, the
object of which was to train the humbler class of pupils in agricultural
as well as certain mechanical pursuits. The manual arts were also taught
in the institutions under the charge of the Ursulines and Congregation.
We find, for example, a French King giving a thousand francs to a
sisterhood of Montreal to buy wool, and the same sum to teach young
girls to knit. We also read of the same Sovereign maintaining a teacher
of navigation and surveying at Quebec on the modest salary of four
hundred francs a-year. But all accounts of the days of the French regime
go to show that, despite the zealous efforts of the religious bodies to
improve the education of the colonists, secular instruction was at a
very low ebb. One writer tells us that 'even the children of officers
and gentlemen scarcely knew how to read and write; they were ignorant of
the first elements of geography and history.' These were, in fact, days
of darkness everywhere, so far as the masses were concerned. Neither
England nor France had a system of popular education. Yet it is
undoubted that on the whole the inhabitants of Canada had far superior
moral and educational advantages than were enjoyed during those times by
the mass of people in England and France. Even in the days of Walpole
and Hannah More the ignorance of the English peasantry was only equalled
by their poverty and moral depravity. [Footnote: Green in his 'History
of the English People' says:--Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow
were sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to
his son, instructed him in the art of seduction as part of a polite
education. At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the
poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to
conceive, for the vast increase of population which followed on the