For two reasons: because of England's sea power; because of the unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool behind her fan. But be this remembered,--and here was the hand of overruling Destiny or Providence,--the fall of New France, like the fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation. Henceforth it is not New France, the appendage of an Old World nation. It is Canada,--a New Dominion. To-day wander round Quebec. Tablets and monuments consecrate many of the old hero days. Though the British government rebuilt a line of walls in the early eighteen hundreds, you will find it hard to trace even a vestige of the old French walls. Mounds tell you where there were bastions. A magnificent boulevard tops the most of the old ramparts. An imposing hotel stands where Castle St. Louis once frowned over the St. Lawrence. Of the palace where the Intendant held his revels there are not even ruins. If you drive out past Beauport, you will find at the end of a nine-mile forest path the crumbling brick walls of Château Bigot, the Hermitage, half buried, in the days when I visited it, with rose vines and orchard trees gone wild. That is all you will find of the court clique whose folly brought Canada's doom; but as you drive back from Beauport there towers the city from the rocky heights above the St. Lawrence,--chapel spire and cross and domed cathedral roofs aglint in the sunlight like a city of gold. The church, baptized by the blood of its martyrs, is there in pristine power; and the fruitful meadows bear witness to the prosperity of the habitant on whom the burden fell in the days of the ancient régime. Who shall say that habitant and church do not deserve the place of power they hold in the government of the Dominion? {276} CHAPTER XIII FROM 1763 TO 1812 English law and Quebec--French rights guarded--Pontiac's war--Siege of Detroit--Fight at Bloody Run--Michilimackinac falls--How Bouquet wins victory--Return of captives--The peddlers--Methods of Nor'westers--Traders invade the Up Country--Disaffection in Canada--Canada invaded--Quebec invested--Montgomery's fight--"Rats in a trap"--Relief at last--Tricks of ringsters--Coming of Loyalists--Life in the backwoods