the simple habitants.
Though the companies holding monopoly over trade yearly change,
monopoly is still all-powerful in New France,--so all pervasive that in
1741, in order to prevent smuggling to defraud the Company of the
Indies, it is enacted that "people using chintz-covered furniture" must
upholster their chairs so that the stamp "La Cie des Indes" will be
visible to the inspector. The matter of money is a great trouble to
New France. Beaver is coin of the realm on the St. Lawrence, and
though this beaver is paid for in French gold, the precious metal
almost at once finds its way back to France for goods; so that the
colony is without coin. Government cards are issued as coin, but as
Europe will not accept card money, the result is that gold still flows
from New France, and the colony is flooded with paper money worthless
away from Quebec.

As of old, the people may still plead their own cases in lawsuits
before the Sovereign Council, but now the privileges of caste and class
and feudalism begin to be felt, and it is enacted that gentlemen may
plead their own cases before the council only "when wearing their
swords." Young men are urged to qualify as notaries. In addition to
the title of "Sieur," baronies are created in Canada, foremost among
them that of the Le Moynes of Montreal. The feudal seignior now has
his coat of arms emblazoned on the church pew where he worships, on his
coach door, and on the stone entrance to his mansion. The habitants
are compelled to grind their wheat at his mill, to use his great bake
oven, to patronize his tannery. The seigniorial mansion itself is
taking on more of pomp. Cherry and mahogany furniture have replaced
homemade, and the rough-cast walls are now covered with imported
tapestries.

Not gently does the Sovereign Council deal with delinquents. In 1735
it is enacted of a man who suicided, "that the corpse be tied to a
cart, dragged on a hurdle, head down, face to ground, {191} through the
streets of the town, to be hung up by the feet, an object of derision,
then cast into the river in default of a cesspool." Criminals who
evade punishment by flight are to be hanged in effigy. Montreal
citizens are ordered to have their chimneys cleaned every month and
their houses provided with ladders. Also "the inhabitants of Montreal
must not allow their pigs to run in the street," and they "are
forbidden to throw snowballs at each other," and--a regulation which
people who