The King of France created the government of Canada. He created also the people. In less than ten years from the date when he took the colony in hand the population was more than doubled. Shiploads of male emigrants were sent out from France, and cargoes of future wives and mothers. Wedlock was prescribed, celibacy was proscribed, bounties were, in Roman fashion, given to early marriages and to large families. The privilege of remaining single was reserved for priests and nuns; the lay members of the community were bidden to be fruitful and multiply, and they obeyed the King's commands with much success. They were honest folk, the Canadian settlers, not convicted felons sent out from French prisons. No doubt there were among the emigrants men and women who were glad to leave France, and of whom France was glad to be rid; but there was no convict strain in the population, and the _coureurs de bois_, unlicensed though they were, were not mere outlaws, like the Australian bushrangers. [Sidenote: _the Feudal System._] [Sidenote: _Canadian feudalism was purely artificial._] When an emigrant came to Canada, he could not return to France without a passport, but he might possibly drift into the backwoods or to the Dutch or English colonies. Efforts were therefore made to attach him to the soil. For this purpose a kind of Feudal System was introduced, somewhat diluted to suit the place and the time. The essence of feudalism in bygone days had been military tenure and oligarchy. Time had been in France when the nobles were stronger than the King, but in the reign of Louis XIV they were little more than courtiers. They had become ornamental rather than useful; yet even under a Bourbon despotism, tradition, long descent, ownership of wide and well-cultivated lands, and rights over a considerable number of serfs or peasants, gave the French noblesse considerable social influence. In Canada feudalism had no military {100} aspect. There was, it is true, a Canadian militia, but it had no connexion with the feudal tenure of land. Very few of the Canadian Seigniors were of noble birth, all were poor, their honours were brand new, their domains were backwoods with occasional clearings, their vassals were nearly as good men as themselves. The Feudal System in Canada was not born of the soil, it was simply a device of a benevolent despot for allotting and settling land, for artificially grading and classifying an artificially-formed people, and for giving to a new country some element of old-world respectability. [Sidenote: _The Seigniors._] [Sidenote: _The Habitans and their tenure._]