agriculture in order that the Governor-General, the Intendant, and their swarm of male and female satellites might strut as in a miniature Versailles, mimicking alike the manners and the morals of Versailles. The French Colonials fought well, in spite of all they suffered from the French Government, for the French dominion of Canada, but when, after the capitulation and the Treaty of Peace, the horde of ruffianly officials were sent back to France, they soon reconciled themselves to the British Government. They found that the alien Government was at least a Government and not a systematised official brigandage, and they settled down to their farming and to the enjoyment of their legal parochial self-government and of their complete liberty for their Roman Catholic worship. The French Canadians to-day number two millions, mostly concentrated in the Province of Quebec, though there is an increasing movement westward of the young French-speaking Canadians who have had their appetites whetted by the stories of fortunes to be made in the Prairie Provinces. The old folk at home and the Roman Catholic parochial clergy look askance at this movement of population, as they do at the increasing proportion of British and other non-French settlers in the Province. It is useless for them to fight against it. Quebec Province contrives to combine the most intense conservatism with regard to religion, language, methods of farming and manner of life with political Liberalism of a peculiar kind. The French claim that they are the real Canadians. “We were here before you,” they say to the English. They are proud of the fact that a French Canadian, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, was Prime Minister of the Dominion for fourteen years, and that during his term of office the country sprang forward by leaps and bounds. They are the backbone of the Liberal Party of the Dominion, they are Imperialists of the Imperialists, and yet at the same time they are Home Rulers of the Home Rulers. A saying of a French Canadian has been often quoted, that “The last rifle fired in defence of the British dominion in Canada will be fired by a French Canadian,” and yet it is the French Canadian Liberals who have made it an article of their political creed that the future Canadian Navy shall be a Canadian Navy and not an integral part of the British Navy; that is, that it shall be built, manned, and be under the control of Canada and not be regarded as merged in the ships of and directly controlled by the British Admiralty. By a curious reversion of position, Liberalism in Quebec Province means Provincial Home Rule carried to the extreme limit, while Liberalism in the Prairie Provinces means the maintenance of Dominion control of the Provincial land tax, and Prairie Province Conservatism means Provincial control of land tax raised in the Province. [Illustration: QUEBEC FROM THE RIVER.]