LX VIII ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
part and parcel, fragments of ones country, dispersed far from home 
sometimes, les lambeaux de la patrie dispersée, as a French writer styles 
them. 
One experiences a legitimate pride, when on wading through these old 
parchments or ponderous folios, one lights on brave, patriotic or warlike 
deeds, accounts of wise, great or good men, though seen in the obscure 
distance, showing that one’s people is of honourable, ancient lineage, not 
an irresponsible mushroom community without a past, heedless of a future. 
Often these crabbed, uninviting documents are scanned, appealed to, 
in preference to the highly wrought, tinted version of the modern 
historian wedded to new-fangled theories, peculiar schools of thought, 
bent on perverting, omitting or colouring facts, so as to make them 
dovetail into systems of belief, ancient or modern. 
Canada, like other countries, has her archives, private and public, 
though the patriotic duty of collecting them, at home and abroad, has of 
late years only seriously commended itself to public attention. 
Where were our archives in the past? Where are they at present ? 
I hear some one ask. 
Until measures were taken, in 1872, to collect them, portions more 
or less considerable existed in London, Paris, Rouen, Madrid, Venice, 
Amsterdam, St. Petersburgh, Washington, Boston, Quebec, Three Rivers, 
Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto. 
Quebec, the citadel of French power in the new world nearly three 
centuries ago, as such was supplied by the French king with a complete 
set of public officials, from a magnificent viceroy down to a humble water 
bailiff, without omitting a hangman. 
She necessarily became the depository of the innumerable official 
documents, despatches, commissions, maps, plans and correspondence, 
affecting the relations of the mother-country with her pet colony. 
It was necessary to provide for the civil and military administration of 
the new dependency in every branch of the public service. 
The litigious character of her Norman and Breton peasantry very 
soon called forth a large outfit of judicial officials, whilst her peculiar 
position as the key, the bulwark of French dominion in North America, 
required defensive works and the appointment of a military staff 
adequate to its defence. 
For more than two hundred years, an object of jealousy to the 
surrounding Indian tribes, as well as a menace to the sturdy, progressive, 
but unwarlike British colonies beyond the border, her’s became a martial 
record of respectable proportions. The history of her five sieges alone 
fills many volumes. 
The art of the printer being nearly unknown at Quebec under the 
early régime, her chronicles had to be noted down in manuscript form 
for preservation or for transmission to France. 
