industrial pursuits with the ordinary branches of an elementary education. For instance, attached to the Seminary was a sort of farm-school, established in the parish of St. Joachim, below Quebec, the object of which was to train the humbler class of pupils in agricultural as well as certain mechanical pursuits. The manual arts were also taught in the institutions under the charge of the Ursulines and Congregation. We find, for example, a French King giving a thousand francs to a sisterhood of Montreal to buy wool, and the same sum to teach young girls to knit. We also read of the same Sovereign maintaining a teacher of navigation and surveying at Quebec on the modest salary of four hundred francs a-year. But all accounts of the days of the French regime go to show that, despite the zealous efforts of the religious bodies to improve the education of the colonists, secular instruction was at a very low ebb. One writer tells us that 'even the children of officers and gentlemen scarcely knew how to read and write; they were ignorant of the first elements of geography and history.' These were, in fact, days of darkness everywhere, so far as the masses were concerned. Neither England nor France had a system of popular education. Yet it is undoubted that on the whole the inhabitants of Canada had far superior moral and educational advantages than were enjoyed during those times by the mass of people in England and France. Even in the days of Walpole and Hannah More the ignorance of the English peasantry was only equalled by their poverty and moral depravity. [Footnote: Green in his 'History of the English People' says:--Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, instructed him in the art of seduction as part of a polite education. At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for the vast increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the development of manufactures had been met by no effort for religious or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a single new church had been built. Schools there were none save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were fast being reduced to pauperism by the poor-laws, were left without moral or religious training of any sort. 'We saw but one bible in the parish of Chedda,' said Hannah More, at a far later time, 'and that was used to prop a flower pot.' p. 707, Harpers' ed. 1870. Parkman also admits that 'towards the end of the French regime the Canadian habitant was probably better taught, so far as concerned religion, than the mass of French peasants.'--_The Old Regime in Canada_.]