heart. They
and others, like-minded, won New France for the Catholic Church and to
that Church the conquered habitant has since clung with a tenacity
really heroic. He accepts its creed, he believes in its clergy. Whatever
license of conduct marked the clergy of France in the bad days before
the Revolution, the clergy in Canada during the 300 years of its history
have been notable for a severity in morals so austere that hardly once
in that long period has there been a whisper of scandal. In consequence,
they have always retained the respect of the people and to-day, in every
village, the cure commands extraordinary influence.

It may be that to the Church chiefly does the habitant owe the
preservation of his identity. Inferior to the heretic conqueror in
social status, the habitant yet retained in religion the sense of his
own superiority. Was he not a member of an ancient body, in the presence
of which Protestantism represented a mushroom growth of yesterday? The
Church taught him that wealth, honour, and worldly power were not always
given to the faithful; they had the truer riches of spiritual
privileges and spiritual hopes. What mattered the pride of life in the
face of these eternal treasures? So the habitant went his way. Led by
his teachers he showed striking tenacity of character. He would not
follow the customs of the English. He looked with suspicion upon their
methods. Even in agriculture, where he had everything to learn, he would
not imitate him. Their language he would not learn, their religion he
abhorred; so he remained, and he remains still, true to his own
traditions, a Gallic island in the vast Anglo-Saxon sea of North
America.

The habitant has not proved a pliable person. The very name shows his
sense of his own dignity. Though he held his land under feudal tenure he
would not accept a designation that carried with it some sense of the
servile status of the feudal vassal in old France. So the Canadian
peasant, a feudal tenant _en censive_ or _en roture_, yet wished not to
be called _censitaire_ or _roturier_, names which he thought degrading;
he preferred to be called a habitant, an inhabitant of the country, a
free man, not a vassal. The designation obtained official recognition in
New France and has come to be the characteristic word for the French
Canadian farmer among English-speaking people.

In other respects too the Canadian has been hardly less assertive.
Earlier writers, while they cal