The education of girls was in the hands of the Ursulines and the nuns of the Congregation, of whom the former, besides careful instruction in religious duties, taught their pupils “all that a girl ought to know.” * This meant exceedingly little besides the manual arts suited to their sex; and, in the case of the nuns of the Congregation, who taught girls of the poorer class, it meant still less. It was on nuns as well as on priests that the charge fell, not only of spiritual and mental, but also of industrial, training. Thus we find the king giving to a sisterhood of Montreal a thousand francs to buy wool, and a thousand more for teaching girls to knit. ** The king also maintained a teacher of navigation and surveying at Quebec on the modest salary of four hundred francs. During the eighteenth century, some improvement is perceptible in the mental status of the population. As it became more numerous and more stable, it also became less ignorant; and the Canadian _habitant_, towards the end of the French rule, was probably better taught, so far as concerned religion, than the mass of French peasants. Yet secular instruction was still extremely meagre, even in the _noblesse_. “In spite of this defective education,” says the famous navigator, Bougainville, who knew the colony well in its last years, “the * A lire, à écrire, les prières, les mœurs chrétiennes, et tout ce qu'une fille doit savoir. Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre du 9 Août, 1668. ** Denonville au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1686. Canadians are naturally intelligent. They do not know how to write, but they speak with ease and with an accent as good as the Parisian.” * He means, of course, the better class. “Even the children of officers and gentlemen,” says another writer, “scarcely know how to read and write; they are ignorant of the first elements of geography and history.” ** And evidence like this might be extended. When France was heaving with the throes that prepared the Revolution; when new hopes, new dreams, new thoughts,--good and evil, false and true,--tossed the troubled waters of French society, Canada caught something of its social corruption, but not the faintest impulsion of its roused mental life. The torrent surged on its way; while, in the deep nook beside it, the sticks and dry leaves floated their usual round, and the unruffled pool slept in the placidity of intellectual torpor. *** * Bougainville, Mémoire de 1757 (see Margry, Relations inédites). ** Mémoire de 1736; Detail de toute la Colonie (published by Hist. Soc. of Quebec).