786 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



them, when emancipated from the thralldom of the Church, abreast of 

 the most enlightened and progressive nations of the world. When 

 that time comes, they will cease to be regarded as a burden upon the 

 Dominion and a barrier to its j^rogress. They will be recognized as 

 equals, in every sense of the word, of their brethren of British origin, 

 and their rapid increase will be viewed as a benefit rather than a dis- 

 aster to the Dominion. 



It is difficult to understand why the growth of the French-Cana- 

 dian people should excite misgivings in the minds of the statesmen of 

 Canada. The French race outside of Quebec has increased but slow- 

 ly. It has never been successful in colonizing. In France itself the 

 growth of the population is exceptionally slow ; in the colonies of the 

 republic the progress is even less. While Canada was a colony of 

 France, owing to frequent wars and the exactions of the seigniors and 

 the Church, the population in a century and a half had reached only 

 65,000 ; it is only since they have been emancipated from feudal 

 serfdom and enjoyed the blessings of free institutions that they 

 have developed any marked power of reproduction. In one hun- 

 dred and twenty years under British rule they have increased to nearly 

 2,000,000, and this rapid increase has been aided little if any by im- 

 migration from France. It is due almost entirely to natural increase, 

 and to natural increase it must be restricted in the future. 



The growth of the French population on this continent has been 

 rapid, but not phenomenal. It bears no comparison with the extraor- 

 dinary expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race, even in the Dominion of 

 Canada. Quebec had a population of 100,000, and there was a French 

 colony on the east side of the Detroit River before there were any 

 English-speaking inhabitants in Ontario, where they now number 

 nearly 2,000,000. With all the advantages of a start of a century 

 and a half, the French in Ontario do not exceed 120,000, and in the 

 entire Dominion not over 1,500,000, out of a total of 4,500,000. Until 

 the western movement of the Ontario farmers, some eight years ago, 

 the spread of the French race in Ontario was almost unnoticed. It 

 was confined almost exclusively to laborers employed by lumbering 

 firms in their mills and in the woods, a fluctuating population as little 

 disposed to remain permanently away from their native land as the 

 Chinese on the Pacific coast. While Ontario is rapidly colonizing 

 Manitoba and the vast Northwest Territories, and filling up her waste 

 lands at home, Quebec is making but slow progress in comparison in 

 its work of gallicizing Ontario, and her people prefer expatriation to 

 facing the hardships incidental to pioneer life in the inhospitable wil- 

 derness north of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa. Of the seven prov- 

 inces of the Dominion, Quebec is the only one in which they possess a 

 controlling influence ; in the others, and in the United States, they are 

 merely hewers of wood and drawers of water for the more energetic 

 and intelligent Anglo-Saxon. 



