generally felt and then the seigniorial system was doomed.

In the days of the last John Nairne political agitation became an old
story at Malbaie. We get echoes of meetings held in the village to
support the cause of the idol of habitant radicalism, Louis Joseph
Papineau; in 1836 ninety-two resolutions drawn up by him and attacking
the whole system of government in Canada appear to have met with
clamorous approval from the assembled villagers. Papineau was himself a
seigneur and did not assail the system. But after his unsuccessful
rebellion in 1837-38 the attack on the seigneurs intensified. We know
little of what happened at Malbaie but the end came suddenly. In 1854,
after an election fought largely on this issue, the Parliament of Canada
swept away the seigniorial system. The habitants then became tenants
paying as rent the old _cens et rentes_. They could not be disturbed as
long as this trifling rent was paid. Moreover at any time they might
become simple freeholders by paying to the seigneur a sum of money
representing their annual rent capitalized on a six per cent, basis. The
term seigneur is still used but is now a mere honorary title. No longer
does his position give him the authority of a magistrate; no longer must
the habitants grind their corn at his mill; no longer can he claim _lods
et ventes_ when land is sold. For the loss of these rights he was paid
compensation out of the public treasury.[34]

With the abolition of the seigniorial system ends too the story of the
Nairne family. In 1861, exactly one hundred years after Colonel Nairne
first visited Malbaie, died his grandson and the last of his
descendants, John McNicol Nairne, son of Colonel Nairne's eldest
daughter Magdalen. This last Nairne left the property absolutely to his
widow, tied only by the condition that it was to go to her male issue if
she had such, even by a second marriage. In 1884, she too died
childless, and bequeathed the property to an old friend, both of herself
and of her husband, Mr. W.E. Duggan. Had Mr. Duggan not survived Mrs.
Nairne the property was to go to St. Matthew's Church, Quebec. Mr.
Duggan occupied it, until his death in 1898, when it passed by will to
his half-brother, Mr. E.J. Duggan, the present seigneur.[35]

It is a sad story this of the extinction of a family. Both Thomas Nairne
and his father were buried at first in the Protestant cemetery at
Quebec. But not there permanently were they to lie, and many yea