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The French race in Canada, as a separate people, represents much that is interesting, much that is unique in origin and evolution, much that is picturesque in character and environment. Beginning early in the seventeenth century with tiny pioneer settlements on the St. Lawrence—which at the time of Wolfe’s victory in 1759 had grown to a population of only 69,000—the French people had maintained for more than a hundred years an unequal, eventful struggle with the slow, steady, ever-advancing force of English settlers on the Atlantic, with the power of Britain on the sea, and with the ever-present menace and almost unceasing hostility of the Iroquois. They had to endure or overcome the inertia or feebleness of French administrations in distant Paris; the fitful and passing regard of Kings who knew little of and cared less for the vast region their loyal subjects sought to preserve or conquer for the Crown; the corruption and indifference of local administrators.

Yet these few and afterward scattered people, from their historic, original vantage point on the ramparts of Quebec, stamped a record of great achievement across the map of America. They swept down the center of the continent and left memorials of their possession scattered throughout the Ohio and Missouri and Mississippi valleys of the United States and in the still spoken mother tongue of Louisiana. They stormed the northern fortresses of cold and wilderness and savage life and made the story of exploits on lake and river, in primeval forest and lonely wastes, their own. In later days they have faced the dominating characteristics of English-speaking Canada and the pressure to the south of great masses of a still more alien people; while at the same time they have preserved their language, held to their faith and conserved their own national identity.

Montmorenci Falls, Quebec

To understand fully, or to indicate even faintly, the causes which have embedded in this continent of teeming millions, amid our great commercialized, wealth-loving masses of English-speaking people, a bit of mediæval Europe and preserved it through centuries of strife and turmoil and change, something more than the ordinary records of history must be reviewed. What is meant will not be found in the pages of political annals, in the story of the rise and fall of public men, in the interminable difficulties and natural divergencies of party life in a land of restricted or of enlarged liberties. To comprehend the position of French Canada, to grasp the real picturesqueness and romance of its position, to realize the nature of its people, the by-paths of history should be studied and they will not be found—except occasionally—in the passing view of tourists, in the feelings of English Canadians living amongst the French amid conditions not altogether congenial, or in the pages of controversial historians dwelling almost entirely upon unavoidable and obvious racial complications.

The habitant is usually voiceless as to the past—to a stranger almost always so; the parish priest is full of it, and frank regarding it, but his viewpoint is, properly and naturally, that of the Church which he regards as the father and mother and brother and sister of his people; the French Canadian press is frequently edited by Frenchmen from Paris, who clearly can know little of the workings of the peasant mind or of undercurrents of thought in a people who are French and yet separated from France by centuries of time, thousands of miles and ever-growing divergencies of life. There has been something exceptional and unusual in the French Canadian’s condition and process of development—influences there were which have been already briefly summarized. Religion, it is true, moulded him to a considerable extent and language isolated him in a marked manner. But neither religion nor language, nor both combined, have held the Spanish communities of South America in close touch with the past nor preserved amongst them the institutions, laws and loyalty of another century. The Scotchman, who is described as “twisting his creeds with an iron twist” and who of all English-speaking peoples is the most dominant and assertive in racial type, has settled amongst French Canadians and in many cases lost in a few generations his language and his religion and his race—even at times finding his name corrupted.

Yet the French Canadian goes down into New England, up into the Canadian West, across the western border into Dakota or Minnesota, over the provincial line into Eastern or Northern Ontario, and settles in little communities where he preserves the customs and traditions and language and religious law of his race to an amazing extent. A million of these sturdy people are to be found in the United States today and nearly half a million in the provinces other than Quebec. Nor does the second or third generation under these circumstances become, as might be expected, merged and lost in the Anglo-Saxon atmosphere of their environment. They may become good Canadians in a broad sense or good Americans in a national sense, but they still remain French for causes which no superficial judgment will ever comprehend and in a nationality which, in certain obvious respects, is distinct from that of France.

In this latter fact rests the germ of much interesting speculation. Had the French Canadians remained in close touch with France the Church might have lost its influence as in the mother-land; the people might have become republicanized as was the case there, and then gradually moulded along the lines of American institutions; the social life and thought of the masses and the classes would have been controlled by the looser forms and varied, changing character of the French nation in Europe; the large birth-rate and natural increase of population in French Canada would not have been an ever-present factor in its expansion and influence. But other conditions prevailed. Abandonment by France caused reaction and dependence upon England; English appreciation of local loyalty at a critical period was shown in the preservation of laws and conservation of a religion alien to those of her own people; this, in turn, antagonized the Puritans of New England and helped to prevent a rapprochement of the American friends of Lafayette and of the French Republic with the people of Quebec. The departure of so many of the officers and aristocrats of the old régime after the Peace of 1763 made possible a democratic development fitted to meet the later grant of full liberty and self-government by England; the Church remained and became established, as the Church of the people, in a sense which it failed to maintain in France itself; while the gradual evolution of constitutional government brought the people into a wider circle of national union and power without the loss of laws, or faith, or language.

It was this combination of circumstances which kept French Canada as a country within a country, a people within a nation and belonging to an empire alien in tongue and faith, a race alone amidst the bounding activities of a great continent given over to the Anglo-Saxon. The people in the first place preserved united faith in one great Church and without the dividing influences which inevitably come from the religious freedom of Protestantism. The Church was itself apart from the inherited difficulties of centuries in Continental Europe; it stood for race as well as for faith and remained a living factor in the life of the people. The language was preserved by British law, cultivated by racial pride, promoted by religious and ecclesiastical influence, helped by partisan complications in the rest of Canada. British constitutional institutions, meantime, aided in conserving the essentials of French Canadian life by bringing the non-essentials into harmony with people elsewhere in Canada and thus avoided a conflict of sentiment, of agitation and legislation, perhaps of civil war, which might have eventually submerged the Province and its racial type.

To the trinity of elements—religion, laws and language—which are generally and vaguely supposed to have preserved the French type in Canada, must, therefore, be added another. It was the influence of free institutions in Quebec, and in the rest of Canada, which by a gradual process of negation at times and construction at other times enabled this trinity of elements to adjust itself to an opposing and dangerous environment and to, at the same time, modify that environment at points where conflict would have been perilous in the last degree. The early stage of self-government prevented a discontent which in 1812 would have thrown the French people into the arms of the American republic and eventually stripped them of their special privileges; the knowledge that Britain had gone far in the direction of freedom, and would go further, prevented the rebellion of 1837 from being more than a passing émeute which did not develop permanent hostility between French and English Canadians as a serious civil war would have done; the union of 1841 with Upper Canada, while still conserving their language and laws and faith, brought a wider development of self-government, though one which had special complications of its own; the Confederation of 1867 set a seal upon real deadlock or difficulty between the races, established still more clearly and effectively the rights of the French Canadian, broadened his sphere of possible expansion, and promoted toleration in the English people while it helped a judicious moderation in the French.

Self-government within certain limits was, therefore, the keynote of a condition which might never otherwise have endured, and liberty was a British birthright acquired for French Canada by Wolfe upon the Heights of Abraham, preserved for it by Wellington upon the field of Waterloo, conserved for it by Brock and De Salaberry on Canadian battle-grounds. Without it French Canada might have worshipped and fallen at the shrine of French military glory, imitated the weaknesses of French social life, shared in the collapse of French religious vitality. Without it, and British power combined, as another alternative, French Canada might have fallen under the dominance of the United States by pressure of republican developments, or at a later stage by the force of economic considerations.

This view does not minimize the great power of the Church in its possible resistance to the conditions named, but it deals with the creation of a force which, as already stated, stood behind and with the Church in preserving the essentials of racial solidarity—language, laws and religion—by the smoothing down of asperities and the preventing of a serious issue with the stronger racial type of the continent. Not that self-government in itself was intended to produce this result or was expected to do so. In the earlier days it was indeed looked upon with suspicion as possibly leading to the very opposite conclusion—a flooding of the dykes and ramparts of the Church by the forces of a democracy which had so far shown itself chiefly in the French Revolution or in English religious independence and, in another century, was to evolve the loose social system of the United States and the political socialism of Europe.

As a national or racial unit French Canada has taken its part in the making and keeping of the Canadian Dominion. It was, to summarize briefly, a loyal element in the American wars of 1776 and 1812, a restless, dissatisfied, uncertain, but in the end, and in the main, a passive force during the so-called Rebellion of 1837. It was a people reaching out for the light of constitutional government and groping in the darkness of experiment, ignorance and prejudice for the knowledge of how to use liberties which were not very clearly defined or understood during the years from 1837 to 1860; it was a force for national unity in the days of constructive statecraft which followed the creation of Confederation in 1867; it has, in later years, assumed a position of determined Canadianism and of intense pride in and love for this Canadian soil—even when that soil includes in the mind of the habitant little more than the boundaries of his Province. With it all has been preserved and intensified the thought of Champlain on the Rock of Quebec, the aim of Frontenac in his struggle with the Indians, the work of Montcalm in his efforts to hold the country for his King, the spirit of the modern crusade for preservation of the French language, the sentiment of the priest and politician, of the habitant, of the merchant, of the poet or the writer of today—France is here!

But it is a France isolated from the flag of the Republic and apart from weaknesses of the looser social system of the mother-land. It is a France of the past, of tradition and history; a France replete with romance and religion and patriotism. This sentimental feeling is accompanied by one of passive loyalty to Great Britain, of a friendliness which is satisfied and even gratified at the existing relationship with the British Empire. At any great crisis the French race in Canada would loyally support the flag under which they have been reared, but it would be done from a sense of duty, of obligation, of individual and racial advantage, rather than from any such sentimental feeling as the French Canadians have for their own mother-land of the past. Even this measure of imperial loyalty, however, is marvelous and it is due to two special elements in the history of French Canada—the liberality with which Great Britain guaranteed and preserved to its people their peculiar institutions, and the generosity with which she conceded to them the benefits of gradual self-government.