at first they spoke English to each other but when the children went to school they used only French. So the parents yielded "_C'etait les enfants, M'sieu!_" A modern critic of France[27] has announced, as a sounding paradox, that the French, even of present-day anti-clerical France, are a profoundly religious people. Certainly this appears in France's efforts in Canada. When the Roman Catholic faith was first planted there the ground was watered with the blood of martyrs, done to death by brutal savages. At the very time when in France Pascal's satire and scorn were making the spiritual sincerity of the Jesuits more than doubtful, in Canada these same Jesuits were dying for their faith almost with a light 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.