fleur-de-lis and signatures of officials, and gradually became
depreciated and worthless.

[Illustration: Card issue of 1729, for 12 livres.]

While the townsfolk of Massachusetts were discussing affairs in
town-meetings, the French inhabitants of Canada were never allowed to
take part in public assemblies but were taught to depend in the most
trivial matters on a paternal government. Canada was governed as far
as possible like a province of France. In the early days of the
colony, when it was under the rule of the Company of the Hundred
Associates, the governors practically exercised arbitrary power, with
the assistance of a nominal council chosen by themselves. When,
however, {163} the King took the government of the colony into his own
hands, he appointed a governor, an intendant, and a supreme or--as it
was subsequently called--a sovereign council, of which the bishop was a
member, to administer under his own direction the affairs of the
country. The governor, who was generally a soldier, was nominally at
the head of affairs, and had the direction of the defences of the
colony, but to all intents and purposes the intendant, who was a man of
legal attainments, had the greater influence. He was the finance
minister, and made special reports to the King on all Canadian matters.
He had the power of issuing ordinances which had the effect of law, and
showed the arbitrary nature of the government to which the people were
subject. Every effort to assemble the people for public purposes was
systematically crushed by the orders of the government. A public
meeting of the parishioners to consider the cost of a new church could
not be held without the special permission of the intendant. Count
Frontenac, immediately after his arrival, in 1672, attempted to
assemble the different orders of the colony, the clergy, the _noblesse_
{164} or _seigneurs_, the judiciary, and the third estate, in imitation
of the old institutions of France. The French king promptly rebuked
the haughty governor for this attempt to establish a semblance of
popular government.

[Illustration: Fifteen sol piece.]

From that moment we hear no more of the assembling of "Canadian
Estates," and an effort to elect a mayor and aldermen for Quebec also
failed through the opposition of the authorities. An attempt was then
made to elect a syndic--a representative of popular rights in
towns--but M. de Mesy, then governor, could not obtain the consent o