CHAPTER XIV

THE VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY

France evoked from the unknown the valley that may, in more than one sense, be called the heart of America. Her coureurs de bois opened its paths made by the buffalo and the red men to the shod feet of Europe. Her explorers planted the watershed with slender, silent portage traces that have multiplied into thousands of noisy streets and tied indissolubly the lakes of the north to the rivers of the south from which they were long ago severed by nature. Her one white sail above Niagara marked the way of a mighty commerce. Her soldiers sowed the molten seeds of tumultuous cities on the sites of their forts, and her priests and friars consecrated with their faith and prayers forest trail, portage path, ship's sail, and leaden plate.

But that is not all--a valley of new cities like the old, of new paths for greater commerce, of more altars to the same God! The chief significance and import of the addition of this valley to the maps of the world, all indeed that makes it significant, is that here was given (though not of deliberate intent) a rich, wide, untouched field, distant, accessible only to the hardiest, without a shadowing tradition or a restraining fence, in which men of all races were to make attempt to live together under rules of their own devising and enforcing. And as here the government of the people by the people was to have even more literal interpretation than in that Atlantic strip which had traditions of property suffrage and church privilege and class distinctions, I have called it the "Valley of the New Democracy."

When the French explorers entered it, it was a valley of aboriginal, anarchic individualism, with little movable spots of barbaric communistic timocracy, as Plato would doubtless have classified those migratory, predatory kingdoms of the hundreds of red kings, contemporary with King Donnacona, whom Cartier found on the St. Lawrence--communities governed by the warlike, restless spirit.

The French communities that grew in the midst of those naked timocrats, whose savagery they soothed by beads and crucifixes and weapons, were the plantings of absolutism paternalistic to the last degree. One cannot easily imagine a socialism that would go further in its prescriptions than did this affectionate, capricious, generous, if unwise, as it now seems, government of a village along the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi, from a palace by the Seine where a hard-working monarch issued edicts "in the fulness of our power and of our certain knowledge."

The ordinances preserved in the colonial records furnish abundant proof of that parental concern and restraint. They relate to the regulation of inns and markets, poaching, preservation of game, sale of brandy, rent of pews, stray hogs, mad dogs, matrimonial quarrels, fast driving, wards and guardians, weights and measures, nuisances, observance of Sunday, preservation of timber, and many other matters.

Parkman cites these interesting ordinances, which illustrate to what absurd lengths this jealous, paternalistic care extended:

"Chimney-sweeping having been neglected at Quebec, the intendant commands all householders promptly to do their duty in this respect, and at the same time fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney. Another order forbids quarrelling in church. Another assigns pews in due order of precedence." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 341.]

One intendant issued a "mandate to the effect that, whereas the people of Montreal raise too many horses, which prevents them from raising cattle and sheep, 'being therein ignorant of their true interest, ... now, therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the cotes o