Women
and children were pressed into service in the busy seasons. Yet the
colony abounded in idle men, and mendicancy at one time assumed such
proportions as to require the enforcement of stringent penalties. The
authorities were partly to blame for the development of this trait,
for upon the slightest excuse they took the habitant from his daily
routine and set him to help with warlike expeditions against the
Indians and the English, or called him to build roads or to repair the
fortifications. And the lure of the fur trade, which drew the most
vigorous young men of the land off the farms into the forest, was
another obstacle to the growth of yeomanry. Moreover, the curious and
inconvenient shape of the farms, most of them mere ribbons of land,
with a narrow frontage and disproportionate depth, handicapped all
efforts to cultivate the fields in an intelligent way. Finally, there
was the general poverty of the people. With a large family to support,
for families of ten to fifteen children were not uncommon, it was hard
for the settler to make both ends meet from the annual yield of a few
_arpents_, however fertile. The habitant, therefore, took the shortest
cut to everything, getting what he could out of his land in the
quickest possible way with no reference to the ultimate improvement
of the farm itself. If he ever managed to get a little money, he was
likely to spend it at once and to become as impecunious as before.
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