waited for the spring fleet. If France had come to Canada's aid, even
yet the country might have been won, for sickness had reduced Murray's
army to less than three thousand able men; but the flag that flaunted
from the ship that sailed into the harbor of Quebec on the 9th of May
was British. That decided Canada's fate. De Levis retreated swiftly
for Montreal, but by September the slow-moving General Amherst has
closed in on Montreal from the west, and up the St. Lawrence from the
east proceeds General Murray. De Levis and Vaudreuil had less than two
thousand fighting men at Montreal. September 8th they capitulated, and
three years later, by the Treaty of Paris, Canada passed under the
dominion of England. Officers, many of the nobility, Bigot and his
crew, sailed for France, where the Intendant's ring were put on trial
and punished for their corruption and misrule. Bigot suffered
banishment and the confiscation of property. The other members of his
clique received like sentences.

Spite of the hopes of her devoted founders,--like Champlain and
Maisonneuve,--spite of the blood of her martyrs and the prayers of her
missionaries, spite of all the pathfinding of her {275} explorers,
spite of the dauntless warfare of her soldier knights,--like Frontenac
and Iberville and Montcalm,--New France had fallen.

Why?

For two reasons: because of England's sea power; because of the
unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which
cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool
behind her fan. But be this remembered,--and here was the hand of
overruling Destiny or Providence,--the fall of New France, like the
fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation.
Henceforth it is not New France, the appendage of an Old World nation.
It is Canada,--a New Dominion.

To-day wander round Quebec. Tablets and monuments consecrate many of
the old hero days. Though the British government rebuilt a line of
walls in the early eighteen hundreds, you will find it hard to trace
even a vestige of the old French walls. Mounds tell you where there
were bastions. A magnificent boulevard tops the most of the old
ramparts. An imposing hotel stands where Castle St. Louis once frowned
over the St. Lawrence. Of the palace where the Intendant held his
revels there are not even ruins. If you drive out past Beauport, you
will find at the end of a nine-mile forest path the crumbling b