86 THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 
find wives to suit them; and each of these prospective 
brides brought with her a dowry paid by the benevo- 
lent king. The arrival of these women was generally 
preceded or accompanied by a royal order that all 
bachelors in the colony must get married within two 
weeks, under penalty of not being allowed to hunt, or 
catch fish, or trade with the Indians. Every father of 
a family who had unmarried sons over twenty years of 
age, or unmarried daughters over sixteen, was subject 
to a fine unless he could show good cause for his 
delinquency. The father of ten children received 
a pension of three hundred livres a year for the rest 
of his life, while he who had twelve received four hun- 
dred, and people in the upper ranks of society who 
had fifteen children were rewarded with twelve hun- 
dred livres. Yet, in spite of all these elaborate devices, 
the white population of Canada, at the end of the reign 
of Louis XIV., in 1715, and more than a century after 
the founding of the colony, did not reach a total of 
twenty-five thousand. 
However absurd such a system of administration 
may seem to us, it was, after all, only the unflinching 
application of a theory of protective government which 
has had very wide currency in the world, and has found 
too many defenders even in our own self-governing 
community. The contemporary administration of af- 
fairs in France was characterized by many similar 
errors, and was followed, indeed, in the course of 
another century, by a terrible spasm of financial ruin 
and social anarchy. Yet there is one important dif- 
ference between the results of paternal government 
administered by a centralized bureaucracy in the coun- 
try where it has grown up and in the country to which 
