Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 61 



Next to the commandant in power came the priest. 

 He bore unquestioned rule over his congregation, 

 but only within certain limits; for the French of 

 the backwoods, leavened by the presence among 

 them of so many wild and bold spirits, could not 

 be treated quite in the same way as the more peace- 

 ful habitants of Lower Canada. The duty of the 

 priest was to look after the souls of his sovereign's 

 subjects, to baptize, marry, and bury them, to con- 

 fess and absolve them, and keep them from back- 

 sliding, to say mass, and to receive the salary due 

 him for celebrating divine service; but, though his 

 personal influence was of course very great, he had 

 no temporal authority, and could not order his people 

 either to fight or to work. Still less could he dis- 

 pose of their land, a privilege inhering only in the 

 commandant and in the commissaries of the villages, 

 where they were expressly authorized so to do by 

 the sovereign. 28 



The average inhabitant, though often loose in his 

 morals, was very religious. He was superstitious 

 also, for he firmly believed in omens, charms, and 

 witchcraft, and when worked upon by his dread of 

 the unseen and the unknown he sometimes did ter- 

 rible deeds, as will be related further on. 



Under ordinary circumstances he was a good- 

 humored, kindly man, always polite his manners 



built up a great fur business, and drove a flourishing trade 

 with Europe, as well as the towns of the American seaboard. 

 28 State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 25. A petition con- 

 cerning a case in point, affecting the Priest Gibault. 



