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CHAPTER II.

THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY OF CANADA.

THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY OF CANADA.

EIGHTY years ago Upper Canada was a wilderness from the Ottawa to the St. Clair. The first British settlements were made after the year of peace 1783, but previously to that date only a few insignificant and drooping French colonies lay scattered on the banks of the St. Lawrence, or grouped in remote isolation on the river Detroit. Lower Canada at that time contained 113,000 people, although in 1676, or more than a century before, its population amounted to nearly nine thousand souls. So languid and sluggish was the progress of Canada under French rule, that a century scarcely swelled the number of its inhabitants to that of its commercial capital, Montreal, at the present day. Eighty years ago the province, which now claims 2,506,755 inhabitants, was just emerging from the gloom of its forests. Over the whole of the most fertile and now most densely peopled western half, forest silence reigned, reigned undisturbed and supreme.

The agricultural history of Lower Canada-where the population is of French origin in the proportion of 76.29 per cent. to the whole number of inhabitants-is essentially distinct from that of Upper Canada, whose people are almost exclusively of British descent. The Lower Canadian French are natives of the country, sons of the soil, honest, light-hearted, and pre-eminently faithful to the religion, traditions and usages of their forefathers. They have grown to be almost a distinct people, under the old feudal system, and have always looked with characteristic reverence on their seigneurs, their pastors and the notary of their village. They have received no fresh blood by immigration for

generations, and have clung with remarkable tenacity to the customs of their ancestors, repelling innovation and discarding all change not especially sanctioned by their spiritual advisers. Hence their agriculture is still to a considerable extent in a primitive condition, and requires a brief historical notice separate from that of the people of Upper Canada, who have been continually supplied with an infusion of fresh blood from Europe, are eager to grasp at every improvement which may better their condition, and who live less with a careless indifference to the future, or a happy enjoyment of the present, than with continual efforts to secure independence, often merging into a feverish anxiety to become rich, and surround themselves with the luxuries which the well-to-do in the world are supposed to enjoy.

LOWER CANADA.

FRENCH CANADIAN FARMS.

There can be no doubt that the wretched mode of subdividing land and laying out farms which formerly prevailed in Lower Canada, has been instrumental in retarding the progress of husbandry in that part of the province. Very generally the farms in the old settled parts originally consisted of narrow strips whose lengths and breadths were in the ratio of ten to one; three arpents wide by thirty arpents in depth being the form of the long rectangle exhibited by a French Canadian farm when first surveyed. This is the same as if the farms were 200 yards broad by 2,000 yards long, a form inconvenient for practical agriculture, involving a yearly increasing expenditure of time and labor in its cultivation as the cleared portions become more remote from the homestead, for which no advantages of river or road frontage could compensate as the country became cleared. But when the seigneuries were surveyed,

steamboats, railroads, and even macadamized roads were not thought of, and people did not then indulge in the habit of looking far into the future, or those of later date care to contemplate the condition to which they were drifting by continuing the mode of subdividing the soil which their fathers had inaugurated. With the increase of population, and the love for the paternal roof, which distinguishes the habitans of Lower Canada, their farms have been again subdivided longitudinally, sometimes into three parts, or one arpent in breadth by thirty in depth, or in the proportion of 66 yards broad to 2,000 long; and in the older seigneuries the ratio of breadth to length is not unfrequently as one is to sixty or 33 yards broad to 2,000 yards long. These are some of the heirlooms of that old feudal system which sat like a huge incubus on Lower Canada, and whose depressing influence will long leave its mark on the energies and character of its people.

FARM PRACTICE.

We do not require to go far back into the history of that part of the province to find husbandry in all its branches in a very primitive condition. Thirty years ago, rotation of crops was wholly unknown, and no rules of art were practiced by the happy, light-hearted French Canadian, who with rigid steps pursued the systems handed down to him by his ancestors, and strictly adhered to usages which generations had sanctioned. In addition to the entire absence of rotation of crops, the practice of carting manure on to the ice of a neighboring river, in order that it might be washed away in the spring, was generally practiced, and even now prevails to a considerable extent. Barns were removed when the accumulations before the door impeded entrance or exit, and the old primitive forms of plows, harrows and all other farming implements and vehicles, were retained, with a wholesome horror of innovation in form or material

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