people were not quarrelsome in the ordinary sense, but they were
very jealous each one of his private rights, and the opportunities for
litigation over such matters seemed to provide themselves without end.
Lands were given to settlers without accurate description of their
boundaries; farms were unfenced and cattle wandered into neighboring
fields; the notaries themselves were almost illiterate, and as a
result scarcely a legal document in the colony was properly drawn.
Nobody lacked pretexts for controversy. Idleness during the winter was
also a contributing factor. But the Church and the civil authorities
frowned upon this habit of rushing to court with every trivial
complaint. _Cures_ and seigneurs did what they could to have such
difficulties settled amicably at home, and in a considerable measure
they succeeded.

New France was born and nurtured in an atmosphere of religious
devotion. To the habitant the Church was everything--his school, his
counselor, his almsgiver, his newspaper, his philosopher of things
present and of things to come. To him it was the source of all
knowledge, experience, and inspiration, and to it he never faltered in
ungrudging loyalty. The Church made the colony a spiritual unit and
kept it so; undefiled by any taint of heresy. It furnished the one
strong, well-disciplined organization that New France possessed, and
its missionaries blazed the way for both yeoman and trader wherever
they went.

Many traits of the race have been carried on to the present day
without substantial change. The habitant of the old dominion was a
voluble talker, a teller of great stories about his own feats of skill
and endurance, his hair-raising escapes, or his astounding prowess
with musket and fishing-line. 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 pe