CHAPTER  19
1663-1763.  

THE RULERS  OF CANADA.

THE government of Canada was formed in its chiei features after the government of a French province.  Throughout France the past and the present stood side by side.  The kingdom had a double administration ; or, rather, the shadow of the old administration and the substance of the new.  The government of provinces had long been held by the high nobles, often kindred to the Crown; and hence, in former times, great perils had arisen, amounting during the civil wars to the danger of dismemberment.  The high nobles were still governors of provinces; but here, as elsewhere, they had ceased to be dangerous.  Titles, honors, and ceremonial they had in abundance; but they were deprived of real power.  Close beside them was the royal intendant, an obscure figure, lost amid the vainglories of the feudal sunset, but in the name of the King holding the reins of government,  a check and a spy on his gorgeous colleague.  He was the King's agent; of modest birth, springing from the legal class; owing his present to the King, and dependent on him for his future; learned in the law and trained to administration.  It was by such instruments that the powerful centralization of the monarchy enforced itself throughout the kingdom, and, penetrating beneath the crust of old prescriptions, supplanted without seeming to supplant them.  The courtier noble looked down in the pride of rank on the busy man in black at his side; but this man in black, with the troop of officials at his beck, controlled finance, the royal courts, public works, and all the administrative business of the province.

The governor-general and the intendant of Canada answered to those of a French province.  The governor, excepting in the earliest period of the colony, was a military noble,  in most cases bearing a title and sometimes of high rank.  The intendant, as in France, was usually drawn from the gens de role, or legal class.  The mutual relations of the two officers were modified by the circumstances about them.  The governor was superior in rank to the intendant; he commanded the troops, conducted relations with foreign colonies and Indian tribes, and took precedence on all occasions of ceremony.  Unlike a provincial governor in France, he had great and substantial power.  The King and the minister, his sole masters, were a thousand leagues distant, and he controlled the whole military force.  If he abused his position, there was no remedy but in appeal to the court, which alone could hold him in check.  There were local governors at Montreal and Three Rivers; but their power was carefully curbed, and they were forbidden to fine or imprison any person without authority from Quebec.

The intendant was virtually a spy on the governor-general, of whose proceedings and of everything else that took place he was required to make report.  Every year he wrote to the minister of state one, two, three, or four letters, often forty or fifty pages long, filled with the secrets of the colony, political and personal, great and small, set forth with a minuteness often interesting, often instructive, and often excessively tedious.  The governor, too, wrote letters of pitiless length; and each of the colleagues was jealous of the letters of the other.  In truth, their relations to each other were so critical, and perfect harmony so rare, that they might almost be described as natural enemies.  The court, it is certain, did not desire their perfect accord; nor, on the other hand, did it wish them to quarrel: it aimed to keep them on such terms that, without deranging the machinery of administration, each should be a check on the other.  The governor, the intendant, and the supreme council or court were absolute masters of Canada under the pleasure of the King.  Legislative, judicial, and executive power, all centred in them.  We have seen already the very unpromising beginnings of the supreme council.  It had consisted at first of the governor, the bishop, and five councillors chosen by them.  The intendant was soon added, to form the ruling triumvirate; but the appointment of the councillors, the occasion of so many quarrels, was afterwards exercised by the King himself.  Even the name of the council underwent a change in the interest of his autocracy, and he commanded that it should no longer be called the Supreme, but only the Superior Council.  The same change had just been imposed on all the high tribunals of France.  Under the shadow of the fleur-de-lis, the King alone was to be supreme.  

In 1675 the number of councillors was increased to seven, and in 1703 it was again increased to twelve; but the character of the council or court remained the same.  It issued decrees for the civil, commercial, and financial government of the colony, and gave judgment in civil and criminal causes according to the royal ordinances and the Coutume de Paris.  It exercised also the function of registration borrowed from the parliament of Paris.  That body, it will be remembered, had no analogy whatever with the English parliament.  Its ordinary functions were not legislative, but judicial; and it was composed of judges hereditary under certain conditions.  Nevertheless, it had long acted as a check on the royal power through its right of registration.  No royal edict had the force of law till entered upon its books, and this custom had so deep a root in the monarchical constitution of France, that even Louis XIV., in the flush of his power, did not attempt to abolish it.  He did better; he ordered his decrees to be registered, and the humbled parliament submissively obeyed.  In like manner all edicts, ordinances, or declarations relating to Canada were entered on the registers of the superior council at Quebec.  The order of registration was commonly affixed to the edict or other mandate, and nobody dreamed of disobeying it.  

The council or court had its attorney-general, who heard complaints, and brought them before the tribunal if he thought necessary; its secretary, who kept its registers, and its huissiers or attendant officers.  It sat once a week; and, though it was the highest court of appeal, it exercised at first original jurisdiction in very trivial cases.  It was empowered to establish subordinate courts or judges throughout the colony.  Besides these, there was a judge appointed by the King for each of the three districts into which Canada was divided,  those of Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal.  To each of the three royal judges were joined a clerk and an attorney-general, under the supervision and control of the attorney-general of the superior court, to which tribunal appeal lay from all the subordinate jurisdictions.  The jurisdiction of the seigniors within their own limits has already been mentioned.  They were entitled by the terms of their grants to the exercise of "high, middle, and low justice;" but most of them were practically restricted to the last of the three, —• that is, to petty disputes between the habitants, involving not more than sixty sous, or offences for which the fine did not exceed ten sous.  Thus limited, their judgments were often useful in saving time, trouble, and money to the disputants.  The corporate seigniors of Montreal long continued to hold a feudal court in form, with attorney-general, clerk, and huissier ; but very few other seigniors were in a condition to imitate them.  Added to all these tribunals was the bishop's court at Quebec, to try causes held to be within the province of the Church.

The office of judge in Canada was no sinecure.  The people were of a litigious disposition,  partly from their Norman blood; partly, perhaps, from the idleness of the long and tedious winter, which gave full leisure for gossip and quarrel; and partly from the very imperfect manner in which titles had been drawn and the boundaries of grants marked out, whence ensued disputes without end between neighbor and neighbor.

"I will not say," writes the satirical La Hontan, "that Justice is more chaste and disinterested here than in France; but, at least, if she is sold, she is sold cheaper.  We do not pass through the clutches of advocates, the talons of attorneys, and the claws of clerks.  These vermin do not infest Canada yet.  Everybody pleads his own cause.  Our Themis is prompt, and she does not bristle with fees, costs, and charges.  The judges have only four hundred francs a year,  a great temptation to look for law in the bottom of the suitor's purse.  Four hundred francs! Not enough to buy a cap and gown; so these gentry never wear them."

Thus far La Hontan.     Now let us hear the King himself.  " The greatest disorder which has hitherto existed in Canada," writes Louis XIV.  to the intendant Meules, "has come from the small degree of liberty which the officers of justice have had in the discharge of their duties, by reason of the violence to which they have been subjected, and the part they have been obliged to take in the continual quarrels between the governor and the intendant; insomuch that justice having been administered by cabal and animosity, the inhabitants have hitherto been far from the tranquillity and repose which cannot be found in a place where everybody is compelled to take side with one party or another."

Nevertheless, on ordinary local questions between the habitants, justice seems to have been administered on the whole fairly; and judges of all grades often interposed in their personal capacity to bring parties to an agreement without a trial.  From head to foot, the government kept its attitude of paternity.

Beyond and above all the regular tribunals, beyond and above the council itself, was the independent jurisdiction lodged in the person of the King's man, the intendant.  His commission empowered him, if he saw fit, to call any cause whatever before himself for judgment; and he judged exclusively the cases which concerned the King, and those involving the relations of seignior and vassal.  He appointed subordinate judges, from whom there was appeal to him; but from his decisions, as well as from those of the superior council, there was no appeal but to the King in his council of state.

On any Monday morning one would have found the superior council in session in the antechamber of the governor's apartment, at the Chateau Saint Louis.  The members sat at a round table.  At the head was the governor, with the bishop on his right, and the intendant on his left.  The councillors sat in the order of their appointment, and the attorney-general also had his place at the board.  As La Hontan says, they were not in judicial robes, but in their ordinary dress, and all but the bishop wore swords.  The want of the cap and gown greatly disturbed the intendant Meules; and he begs the minister to consider how important it is that the councillors, in order to inspire respect, should appear in public in long black robes, which on occasions of ceremony they should exchange for robes of red.  He thinks that the principal persons of the colony would thus be induced to train up their children to so enviable a dignity; "and," he concludes, "as none of the councillors can afford to buy red robes, I hope that the King will vouchsafe to send out nine such.  As for the black robes, they can furnish those themselves." The King did not respond, and the nine robes never arrived.  

The official dignity of the council was sometimes exposed to trials against which even red gowns might have proved an insufficient protection.  The same intendant urges that the tribunal ought to be provided immediately with a house of its own.  " It is not decent," he says, "that it should sit in the governor's antechamber any longer.  His guards and valets make such a noise that we cannot hear one another speak.  I have continually to tell them to keep quiet, which causes them to make a thousand jokes at the councillors as they pass in and out." As the governor and the council were often on ill terms, the official head of the colony could not always be trusted to keep his attendants on their good behavior.  The minister listened to the complaint of Meules, and adopted his suggestion that the government should buy the old brewery of Talon, a large structure of mingled timber and masonry on the banks of the Saint Charles.  It was at an easy distance from the chateau; passing the Hotel Dieu and descending the rock, one reached it by a walk of a few minutes.  It was accordingly repaired, partly rebuilt, and fitted up to serve the double purpose of a lodging for the intendant and a court house.  Henceforth the transformed brewery was known as the Palace of the Intendant, or the Palace of Justice; and here the council and inferior courts long continued to hold their sessions.

Some of these inferior courts appear to have needed a lodging quite as much as the council.  The watchful Meules informs the minister that the royal judge for the district of Quebec was accustomed in winter, with a view to saving fuel, to hear causes and pronounce judgment by his own fireside, in the midst of his children, whose gambols disturbed the even distribution of justice.

The superior council was not a very harmonious body.  As its three chiefs  the man of the sword, the man of the church, and the man of the law  were often at variance, the councillors attached themselves to one party or the other, and hot disputes sometimes ensued.  The intendant, though but third in rank, presided at the sessions, took votes, pronounced judgment, signed papers, and called special meetings.  This matter of the presidency was for some time a source of contention between him and the governor, till the question was set at rest by a decree of the King.

The intendants in their reports to the minister do not paint the council in nattering colors.  One of them complains that the councillors, being busy with their farms, neglect their official duties.  Another says that they are all more or less in trade.  A third calls them uneducated persons of slight account, allied to the chief families and chief merchants in Canada, in whose interest they make laws; and he adds, that, as a year and a half or even two years usually elapse before the answer to a complaint is received from France, they take advantage of this long interval to the injury of the King's service.  These and other similar charges betray the continual friction between the several branches of the government.

The councillors were rarely changed, and they usually held office for life.  In a few cases the King granted to the son of a councillor yet living the right of succeeding his father when the charge should become vacant.  It was a post of honor and not of profit, at least of direct profit.  The salaries were very small, and coupled with a prohibition to receive fees.

Judging solely by the terms of his commission, the intendant was the ruling power in the colony.  He controlled all expenditure of public money, and not only presided at the council, but was clothed in his own person with independent legislative as well as judicial power.  He was authorized to issue ordinances having the force of law whenever he thought necessary, and, in the words of his commission, "to order everything as he shall see just and proper." He was directed to be present at councils of war, though war was the special province of his colleague, and to protect soldiers and all others from official extortion and abuse; that is, to protect them from the governor.  Yet there were practical difficulties in the way of his apparent power.  The King, his master, was far away; but official jealousy was busy around him, and his patience was sometimes put to the proof.  Thus the royal judge of Quebec had fallen into irregularities.  "I can do nothing with him," writes the intendant; "he keeps on good terms with the governor and council, and sets me at naught." The governor had, as he thought, treated him amiss.  "You have told me," he writes to the minister, " to bear everything from him and report to you;" and he proceeds to recount his grievances.  Again, "the attorney-general is bold to insolence, and needs to be repressed.  The King's interposition is necessary." He modestly adds that the intendant is the only man in Canada whom his Majesty can trust, and that he ought to have more power.

These were far from being his only troubles.  The enormous powers with which his commission clothed him were sometimes retrenched by contradictory instructions from the King; for this government, not of laws but of arbitrary will, is marked by frequent inconsistencies.  When he quarrelled with the governor, and the governor chanced to have strong friends at court, his position became truly pitiable.  He was berated as an imperious master berates an offending servant.  " Your last letter is full of nothing but complaints." "You have exceeded your authority." "Study to know yourself, and to understand clearly the difference there is between a governor and an intendant." "Since you failed to comprehend the difference between you and the officer who represents the King's person, you are in danger of being often condemned, or rather of being recalled; for his Majesty cannot endure so many petty complaints, founded on nothing but a certain quasi equality between the governor and you, which you assume, but which does not exist." "Meddle with nothing beyond your functions." "Take good care to tell me nothing but the truth." "You ask too many favors for your adherents." "You must not spend more than you have authority to spend, or it will be taken out of your pay." In short, there are several letters from the minister Colbert to his colonial man-of-all-work, which, from beginning to end, are one continued scold.

The luckless intendant was liable to be held to account for the action of natural laws.  "If the population does not increase in proportion to the pains I take," writes the King to Duchesneau, "you are to lay the blame on yourself for not having executed my principal order (to promote marriages), and for having failed in the principal object for which I sent you to Canada."l

A great number of ordinances of intendants are preserved.  They were usually read to the people at the doors of churches after mass, or sometimes by the cur£ from his pulpit.  They relate to a great variety of subjects,  regulation of inns and markets, poaching, preservation of game, sale of brandy, rent of pews, stray hogs, mad dogs, tithes, matrimonial quarrels, fast driving, wards and guardians, weights and measures, nuisances, value of coinage, trespass on lands, building churches, observance of Sunday, preservation of timber, seignior and vassal, settlement of boundaries, and many other matters.  If a cur£ with some of his parishioners reported that his church or his house needed repair or rebuilding, the intendant issued an ordinance requiring all the inhabitants of the parish, "both those who have consented and those who have not consented," to contribute materials and labor, on pain of fine or other penalty.  The militia captain of the co’te was to direct the work and see that each parishioner did his due part, which was determined by the extent of his farm; so, too, if the grand voyer, an officer charged with the superintendence of highways, reported that a new road was wanted or that an old one needed mending, an ordinance of the intendant set the whole neighborhood at work upon it, directed, as in the other case, by the captain of militia.  If children were left fatherless, the intendant ordered the cure" of the parish to assemble their relations or friends for the choice of a guardian.  If a censitaire did not clear his land and live on it, the intendant took it from him and gave it back to the seignior.

Chimney sweeping having been neglected at Quebec, the intendant commands all householders promptly to do their duty in this respect, and at the same time fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney.  Another order forbids quarrelling in church.  Another assigns pews in due order of precedence to the seignior, the captain of militia, and the wardens.  The intendant Raudot, who seems to have been inspired even more than the others with the spirit of paternal intervention, issued a mandate to the effect, that, whereas the people of Montreal raise too many horses, which prevents them from raising cattle and sheep, " being therein ignorant of their true interest.  .  .  .  Now, therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the cotes of this government shall hereafter own no more than two horses, or mares, and one foal,  the same to take effect after the sowing season of the ensuing year, 1710, giving them time to rid themselves of their horses in excess of said number, after which they will be required to kill any of such excess that may remain in their possession." Many other ordinances, if not equally preposterous, are equally stringent; such, for example, as that of the intendant Bigot, in which, with a view of promoting agriculture, and protecting the morals of the farmers by saving them from the temptations of cities, he proclaims to them: "We prohibit and forbid you to remove to this town (Quebec) under any pretext whatever, without our permission in writing, on pain of being expelled and sent back to your farms, your furniture and goods confiscated, and a fine of fifty livres laid on you for the benefit of the hospitals.  And, furthermore, we forbid all inhabitants of the city to let houses or rooms to persons coming from the country, on pain of a fine of a hundred livres, also applicable to the hospitals." At about the same time a royal edict, designed to prevent the undue subdivision of farms, forbade the country people, except such as were authorized to live in villages, to build a house or barn on any piece of land less than one and a half arpents wide and thirty arpents long; while a subsequent ordinance of the intendant commands the immediate demolition of certain houses built in contravention of the edict.

The spirit of absolutism is everywhere apparent.  "It is of very great consequence," writes the intendant Meules, "that the people should not be left at liberty to speak their minds." Hence public meetings were jealously restricted.  Even those held by parishioners under the eye of the cure to estimate the cost of a new church seem to have required a special license from the intendant.  During a number of years a meeting of the principal inhabitants of Quebec was called in spring and autumn by the council to discuss the price and quality of bread, the supply of firewood, and other similar matters.  The council commissioned two of its members to preside at these meetings, and on hearing their report took what action it thought best.  Thus, after the meeting held in February, 1686, it issued a decree, in which, after a long and formal preamble, it solemnly ordained " that besides white bread and light brown bread, all bakers shall hereafter make dark brown bread whenever the same shall be required." Such assemblies, so controlled, could scarcely, one would think, wound the tenderest susceptibilities of authority; yet there was evident distrust of them, and after a few years this modest shred of self government is seen no more.  The syndic, too, that functionary whom the people of the towns were at first allowed to choose, under the eye of the authorities, was conjured out of existence by a.  word from the King.  Seignior, censitaire, and citizen were prostrate alike in flat subjection to the royal will.  They were not free even to go home to France.  No inhabitant of Canada, man or woman, could do so without leave; and several intendants express their belief that without this precaution there would soon be a falling off in the population.

In 1671 the council issued a curious decree.  One Paul Dupuy had been heard to say that there is nothing like righting one's self, and that when the English cut off the head of Charles I.  they did a good thing, with other discourse to the like effect.  The council declared him guilty of speaking ill of royalty in the person of the King of England, and uttering words tending to sedition.  He was condemned to be dragged from prison by the public executioner, and led in his shirt, with a rope about his neck and a torch in his hand, to the gate of the Chateau Saint Louis, there to beg pardon of the King; thence to the pillory of the Lower Town to be branded with a fleur-de-lis on the cheek, and set in the stocks for half an hour; then to be led back to prison, and put in irons " till the information against him shall be completed."

If irreverence to royalty was thus rigorously chastised, irreverence to God was threatened with still sharper penalties.  Louis XIV., ever haunted with the fear of the Devil, sought protection against him by his famous edict against swearing, duly registered on the books of the council at Quebec.  "It is our will and pleasure," says this pious mandate, " that all persons convicted of profane swearing or blaspheming the name of God, the most Holy Virgin his mother, or the saints, be condemned for the first offence to a pecuniary fine according to their possessions and the greatness and enormity of the oath and blasphemy; and if those thus punished repeat the said oaths, then for the second, third, and fourth time they shall be condemned to a double, triple, and quadruple fine; and for the fifth time, they shall be set in the pillory on Sunday or other festival days, there to remain from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon, exposed to all sorts of opprobrium and abuse, and be condemned besides to a heavy fine; and for the sixth time, they shall be led to the pillory, and there have the upper lip cut with a hot iron; and for the seventh time, they shall be led to the pillory and have the lower lip cut; and if, by reason of obstinacy and inveterate bad habit, they continue after all these punishments to utter the said oaths and blasphemies, it is our will and command that they have the tongue completely cut out, so that thereafter they cannot utter them again." All those who should hear anybody swear were further required to report the fact to the nearest judge within twenty-four hours, on pain of fine.

This is far from being the only instance in which the  temporal  power   lends   aid   to   the   spiritual.   Among other cases, the following is worth mentioning: Louis Gaboury, an inhabitant of the island of Orleans, charged with eating meat in Lent without asking leave of the priest, was condemned by the local judge to be tied three hours to a stake in public, and then led to the door of the chapel, there on his knees, with head bare and hands clasped, to ask pardon of God and the King.  The culprit appealed to the council, which revoked the sentence and imposed only a fine.

The due subordination of households had its share of attention.  Servants who deserted their masters were to be set in the pillory for the first offence, and whipped and branded for the second; while any person harboring them was to pay a fine of twenty francs.  On the other hand, nobody was allowed to employ a servant without a license.

In case of heinous charges, torture of the accused was permitted under the French law; and it was sometimes practised in Canada.  Condemned murderers and felons were occasionally tortured before being strangled; and the dead body, enclosed in a kind of iron cage, was left hanging for months at the top of Cape Diamond, a terror to children and a warning to evil doers.  Yet, on the whole, Canadian justice, tried by the standard of the time, was neither vindictive nor cruel.  

In reading the voluminous correspondence of governors and intendants, the minister and the King, nothing is more apparent than the interest with which, in the early part of his reign, Louis XIV.  regarded his colony.  One of the faults of his rule is the excess of his benevolence; for not only did ha give money to support parish priests, build churches, and aid the seminary, the Ursulines, the missions, and the hospitals; but he established a fund destined, among other objects, to relieve indigent persons, subsidized nearly every branch of trade and industry, and in other instances did for the colonists what they would far better have learned to do for themselves.

Meanwhile, the officers of government were far from suffering from an excess of royal beneficence.  La Hontan says that the local governor of Three Rivers would die of hunger if, besides his pay, he did not gain something by trade with the Indians; and that Perrot, local governor of Montreal, with one thousand crowns of salary, traded to such purpose that in a few years he made fifty thousand crowns.  This trade, it 'may be observed, was in violation of the royal edicts.  The pay of the governor-general varied from time to time.  When La Potherie wrote, it was twelve thousand francs a year, besides three thousand which he received in his capacity of local governor of Quebec.  This would hardly tempt a Frenchman of rank to expatriate himself; and yet some at least of the governors came out to the colony for the express purpose of mending their fortunes.  Indeed, the higher nobility could scarcely, in time of peace, have other motives for going there; the court and the army were their element, and to be elsewhere was banishment.  We shall see hereafter by what means they sought compensation for their exile in Canadian forests.

Loud complaints sometimes found their way to Versailles.  A memorial addressed to the regent duke of Orleans, immediately after the King's death, declares that the ministers of state, who have been the real managers of the colony, have made their creatures and relations governors and intendants, and set them free from all responsibility.  High colonial officers, pursues the writer, come home rich, while the colony languishes almost to perishing.  As for lesser offices, they were multiplied to satisfy needy retainers, till lean and starving Canada was covered with official leeches, sucking, in famished desperation, at her bloodless veins.

The whole system of administration centred in the King, who, to borrow the formula of his edicts, " in the fulness of our power and our certain knowledge," was supposed to direct the whole machine, from its highest functions to its pettiest intervention in private affairs.  That this theory, like all extreme theories of government, was an illusion, is no fault of Louis XIV.  Hard working monarch as he was, he spared no pains to guide his distant colony in the paths of prosperity.  The prolix letters of governors and intendants were carefully studied; and many of the replies, signed by the royal hand, enter into details of surprising minuteness.  That the King himself wrote these letters is incredible; but in the early part of his reign he certainly directed and controlled them.  At a later time, when more absorbing interests engrossed him, he could no longer study in person the long winded despatches of his Canadian officers.  They were usually addressed to the minister of state, who caused abstracts to be made from them for the King's use, and perhaps for his own.  The minister, or the minister's secretary, could suppress or color as he or those who influenced him saw fit.

In the latter half of his too long reign, when cares, calamities, and humiliations were thickening around the King, another influence was added to make the theoretical supremacy of his royal will more than ever a mockery.  That prince of annalists, Saint-Simon, has painted Louis XIV.  ruling his realm from the bedchamber of Madame de Maintenon,  seated with his minister at a small table beside the fire, the King in an arm chair, the minister on a stool, with his bag of papers on a second stool near him.  In another arm chair, at another table on the other side of the fire, sat the sedate favorite, busy to all appearance with a book or a piece of tapestry, but listening to' everything that passed.  "She rarely spoke," says Saint-Simon, "except when the King asked her opinion, which he often did; and then she answered with great deliberation and gravity.  She never, or very rarely, showed a partiality for any measure, still less for any person; but she had an understanding with the minister, who never dared do otherwise than she wished.  Whenever any favor or appointment was in question, the business was settled between them beforehand.  She would send to the minister that she wanted to speak to him, and he did not dare bring the matter on the carpet till he had received her orders." Saint-Simon next recounts the subtle methods by which Maintenon and the minister, her tool, beguiled the King to do their will, while never doubting that he was doing his own.  "He thought," concludes the annalist, "that it was he alone who disposed of all appointments; while in reality he disposed of very few indeed, except on the rare occasions when he had taken a fancy to somebody, or when somebody whom he wanted to favor had spoken to him in behalf of somebody else." 

Add to all this the rarity of communication with the distant colony.  The ships from France arrived at Quebec in July, August, or September, and returned in November.  The machine of Canadian government, wound up once a year, was expected to run unaided at least a twelvemonth.  Indeed, it was often left to itself for two years, such was sometimes the tardiness of the overburdened government in answering the despatches of its colonial agents.  It is no matter of surprise that a writer well versed in its affairs calls Canada the "country of abuses."