LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN CANADA. A5 
from the earliest days of their history. The system of government that was established 
on the banks of the St. Lawrence was the very opposite of that to which the people of 
New Engiand always clung as their most valued heritage. While the townsfolk of 
Massachusetts were discussing affairs in town-meetings, the French inhabitants of Canada 
were never allowed to take part in publie assemblies, but were taught to depend in the 
most trivial matters on a paternal government. Canada was governed as far as possible 
like a province of France. In the early days of the colony, when it was under the rule 
of mere trading companies chartered by the king, the governors practically exercised 
arbitrary power, with the assistance of a council chosen by themselves. Eventually, 
however, the King, by the advice of the great Colbert, took the government of the 
colony into hisown hands, and appointed a governor, an intendant, and a supreme or 
sovereign council to administer under his own direction the affairs of the country. The 
governor, who was generally a soldier, was nominally at the head of affairs, and had the 
direction of the defences of the colony ; but to all intents and purposes, the intendant, 
who was a man of legal attainments, had the greatest influence in many ways. He had 
the power of issuing ordinances which had the effect of law, and in the words of his 
commission “to order everything as he shall see just and proper.” An examination of 
these ordinances proves conclusively the arbitrary and despotic nature of the government 
to which the people were subject, and the care that was taken by the authorities to give 
them as little liberty as possible in the management of those local matters over which 
the inhabitants of the British Colonies exercised the fullest vontrol. These ordinances 
regulated inns and markets, the building and repairs of churches and presbyteries, the 
construction of bridges, the maintenance of roads, and all those matters which could 
affect the comfort, the convenience, and the security of the community. 
It is interesting to notice how every effort that was made during the continuance 
of the French rule, to assemble the people for public purposes, and give them an oppor- 
tunity of taking an interest in public questions, was systematically crushed by the orders 
of the government in accordance with the autocratic spirit of French monarchy. The 
first meeting of the inhabitants was called on the 18th of August, 1621, by Champlain, in 
Quebec, for the purpose of getting up a petition to the king on the affairs of Canada.! 
But this was a very exceptional event in the history of the colony. A public meeting of 
the parishioners to consider the cost of a new church could not be held without 
the special permission of the intendant. It was the custom in the early days of the 
colony to hold public meetings in Quebec under the chairmanship of members of the 
sovereign council for the purpose of discussing the price and quality of bread and the 
supply of firewood, ‘Such assemblies, so controlled,” says Parkman, “ could scarcely, 
one would think, wound the tenderest susceptibilities of authority; yet there was an 
evident distrust of them, and after a few years this modest shred of self-government is 
seen no more.” ? 
We have a striking illustration of the arbitrary policy pursued towards the colony by 
the king and his ministers in the action they took with reference to an attempt made by 
Count de Frontenac in 1672 to assemble the different orders of the colony, the clergy, the 
noblesse or seigneurs, the judiciary, and the third estate, in imitation of the old institutions 


! Doutre et Lareau, Histoire Genérale du Droit Canadien, i. 13, 14. 
* Parkman’s Old Régime in Canada, pp. 280, 281. 
