Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/803

Rh During the one hundred and fifty years that France held possession of Canada, the population increased but slowly. In 1763, four years after the conquest, it was estimated at about 65,000. Under British rule, in one hundred and twenty-five years it has grown to about 1,500,000 in Canada, and it is estimated that there are nearly half a million of the race in the United States.

The increase of population in the Province of Quebec has, however, been attended with some disadvantage as well as profit to the Church. The system of subdividing and over-cropping farms has impoverished the soil and led to much poverty in the older communities. Adventurous colonists as the early French were, their descendants manifest little inclination to establish settlements in the wilderness. They prefer, when crowded out of their old homes on the banks of the St. Lawrence, to emigrate to the New England States, where they can obtain in the manufacturing establishments employment better suited to their taste and social instinct, and larger remuneration than can be had in their own country. This exodus became so extensive during a period of depression some seven years ago that it excited alarm in the minds of the ecclesiastical and political leaders of the province. The Quebec Legislature, which is practically controlled by the clergy, and the Dominion Parliament, in which they hold the balance of power, voted large sums to repatriate the self-exiled population, but their efforts were attended with anything but gratifying results.

About that time the Province of Manitoba, which had been partly colonized by the French prior to the purchase of the Hudson Bay Territories by the Dominion, was thrown open to settlement by the establishment of railway communication with the Red River Valley. A determined effort was made by the French-Canadian loaders to convert this land of promise into another Quebec, in which the French language, French laws and customs, and the Roman Catholic religion, should prevail. With that end in view, through the influence of Sir George Cartier, Manitoba was originally made a small province, in which the French half-breeds had a large majority. To wean them from their nomadic habits, and to give them an influence altogether disproportionate to their numbers and intelligence, they and their children were granted extensive tracts of land in the Red River Valley, and large inducements were held out to the French Canadians in the United States to locate lands and settle in the neighborhood of their Metis kindred. Some were persuaded to repatriate themselves and assist in carrying out the designs of their leaders, but the vast majority preferred to remain in the manufacturing towns of New England.

From Ontario a steady stream of settlers flowed into Manitoba, and, in a very short time, the hopes of Quebec were blighted. The French element was swamped by the flood from Ontario. The control of the province passed into the hands of the Ontarians, the