Stories grew in terms of prodigious
achievement as they passed from tongue to tongue, and the scant regard
for anything approaching the truth in these matters became a national
eccentricity. The habitant was boastful in all that concerned himself
or his race; never did a people feel more firmly assured that it was
the salt of the earth. He was proud of his ancestry, and proud of his
allegiance; and so are his descendants of today even though their
allegiance has changed.
To speak of the habitants of New France as downtrodden or oppressed,
dispirited or despairing, like the peasantry of the old land in the
days before the great Revolution, as some historians have done, is to
speak untruthfully. These people were neither serfs nor peons. The
habitant, as Charlevoix puts it, "breathed from his birth the air of
liberty"; he had his rights and he maintained them. Shut off from the
rest of the world, knowing only what the Church and civil government
allowed him to know, he became provincial in his horizon and
conservative in his habits of mind. The paternal policy of the
authorities sapped his initiative and left him little scope for
personal enterprise, so that he passed for being a dull fellow. Yet
the annals of forest trade and Indian diplomacy prove that the New
World possessed no sharper wits than his. Beneath a somewhat ungainly
exterior the yeoman and the trader of New France concealed qualities
of cunning, tact, and quick judgment to a surprising degree.
Pages:
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189