st his vote. The Church, the greatest institution of the village has
its annual election--that for a churchwarden; of the three churchwardens
one retires every year. An annual election there is also for the
municipal council, two or three of whose members retire each year. This
body looks after the highways, the granting of licenses to sell
spirituous liquors and so on. Annually also are elected school
commissioners, who have charge of education. The municipal council and
the school commission are comparatively new institutions in the Province
of Quebec. They have been borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon world, but the
habitant takes kindly to the elector's privileges and struggles are
sometimes keen. The innovation of the ballot not having been adopted, as
yet, in municipal elections, the voting is open. Every voter must thus
show his preferences and when a moral question, such as the licensing of
drinking places, is before the electors this open voting aids the
Church's influence. Usually the cure is an ardent temperance man and to
vote for a license against his wishes, made known perhaps from the
pulpit, needs great strength of conviction. It thus happens that a very
large number of parishes in the Province of Quebec have no licensed
drinking places.

Of offices in the gift of the village voter those in the Church are the
most highly esteemed. To be a municipal councillor or a school
commissioner is indeed all very well. But the village council is not
really very important. It spends only a few hundred dollars a year and
to keep up the roads is not an exciting task. The village council rarely
has even the "town hall" usual in other communities; it meets in the
"salle publique," or the vestry, of the Church, or in the school house.
The school commissioners too have no very dazzling work to do. The cure
is sometimes their chairman and thus in some degree they come under the
control of the Church. The commissioners appoint the teachers in the
schools and keep up the school buildings, but their outlay is also very
small, for the salaries of teachers, usually women, are appallingly low.
The really important elective office in the parish is that of
churchwarden (_marguiller_). In the church the churchwardens have a
special seat of honour assigned to them. They control the temporalities
and may beard even the cure himself. Large sums of money pass through
their hands. They receive the pew rents,--and every habitant has a pew;
the