Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/806

786 them, when emancipated from the thralldom of the Church, abreast of the most enlightened and progressive nations of the world. When that time comes, they will cease to be regarded as a burden upon the Dominion and a barrier to its progress. They will be recognized as equals, in every sense of the word, of their brethren of British origin, and their rapid increase will be viewed as a benefit rather than a disaster to the Dominion.

It is difficult to understand why the growth of the French-Canadian people should excite misgivings in the minds of the statesmen of Canada. The French race outside of Quebec has increased but slowly. It has never been successful in colonizing. In France itself the growth of the population is exceptionally slow; in the colonies of the republic the progress is even less. While Canada was a colony of France, owing to frequent wars and the exactions of the seigniors and the Church, the population in a century and a half had reached only 65,000; it is only since they have been emancipated from feudal serfdom and enjoyed the blessings of free institutions that they have developed any marked power of reproduction. In one hundred and twenty years under British rule they have increased to nearly 2,000,000, and this rapid increase has been aided little if any by immigration from France. It is due almost entirely to natural increase, and to natural increase it must be restricted in the future.

The growth of the French population on this continent has been rapid, but not phenomenal. It bears no comparison with the extraordinary expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race, even in the Dominion of Canada. Quebec had a population of 100,000, and there was a French colony on the east side of the Detroit River before there were any English-speaking inhabitants in Ontario, where they now number nearly 2,000,000. With all the advantages of a start of a century and a half, the French in Ontario do not exceed 120,000, and in the entire Dominion not over 1,500,000, out of a total of 4,500,000. Until the western movement of the Ontario farmers, some eight years ago, the spread of the French race in Ontario was almost unnoticed. It was confined almost exclusively to laborers employed by lumbering firms in their mills and in the woods, a fluctuating population as little disposed to remain permanently away from their native land as the Chinese on the Pacific coast. While Ontario is rapidly colonizing Manitoba and the vast Northwest Territories, and filling up her waste lands at home, Quebec is making but slow progress in comparison in its work of gallicizing Ontario, and her people prefer expatriation to facing the hardships incidental to pioneer life in the inhospitable wilderness north of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa. Of the seven provinces of the Dominion, Quebec is the only one in which they possess a controlling influence; in the others, and in the United States, they are merely hewers of wood and drawers of water for the more energetic and intelligent Anglo-Saxon.