* The principal emigration of families seems to have been in 1669 when, at the urgency of Talon, then in France, a considerable number were sent out. In the earlier period the emigration of families was, relatively, much greater. Thus, in 1634, the physician Giffard brought over seven to people his seigniory of Beauport. Before 1663, when the king took the colony in hand, the emigrants were for the most part apprenticed laborers. The zeal with which the king entered into the work of stocking his colony is shown by numberless passages in his letters, and those of his minister. “The end and the rule of all your conduct,” says Colbert to the intendant Bouteroue, “should be the increase of the colony; and on this point you should never be satisfied, but labor without ceasing to find every imaginable expedient for preserving the inhabitants, attracting new ones, and multiplying them by marriage.” Instruction pour M. Bouteroue, 1668. by the king; sent over by the king; and supplied by the king with a wife, a farm, and sometimes with a house. Well did Louis XIV. earn the title of Father of New France. But the royal zeal was spasmodic. The king was diverted to other cares, and soon after the outbreak of the Dutch war in 1672 the regular despatch of emigrants to Canada wellnigh ceased; though the practice of disbanding soldiers in the colony, giving them lands, and turning them into settlers, was continued in some degree, even to the last. CHAPTER XIV. 1665-1672. THE NEW HOME. _Military Frontier.--The Canadian Settler.--Seignior and Vassal.--Example of Talon.--Plan of Settlement.--Aspect of Canada.--Quebec.--The River Settlements.--Montreal.--The Pioneers._ |We have seen the settler landed and married; let us follow him to his new home. At the end of Talon’s administration, the head of the colony, that is to say the island of Montreal and the borders of the Richelieu, was the seat of a peculiar colonization, the chief object of which was to protect the rest of Canada against Iroquois incursions. The lands along the Richelieu, from its mouth to a point above Chambly, were divided in large seigniorial grants among several officers of the regiment of Carignan, who in their turn granted out the land to the soldiers, reserving a sufficient portion as their own. The officer thus became a kind of feudal chief, and the whole settlement a permanent military cantonment admirably suited to the object in view. The disbanded soldier was practically a soldier still, but he was also a farmer and a landholder.