Io8 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



patriotism. Dr. Larue and Ernest Gagnon have distinguished 

 themselves as ballad writers, Garneau and Abbe Ferland are no 

 mean historians, and T might give you the names of many other 

 French Canadians who are aiding in building up a national litera- 

 ture ; for the writings of our French-speaking fellow-citizens are 

 Canadian in every sense of the word. We must no longer labor 

 unxier the delusion that the French Canadians speak a mere patois 

 or jargon of archaic and Anglicised French. The language spoken 

 in Quebec is little else than the French of Racine and Voltaire, en- 

 riched by many words and expressions created and employed to 

 express things peculiar to the country and its climate. 



United by the triple bond of faith, speech and customs, the 

 people of Quebec are not likely to fall an easy prey to our own 

 aggressive mother-tongue. When it is taken into consideration that 

 they are ministered to by priests who speak the purest of French, it 

 is easy to understand how it is that they manage to withstand so 

 successfully the influence of intercourse with ourselves. In fact, in 

 many instances. Lower Canadians of Anglo-Saxon origin have be- 

 come as French as their neighbors. Prof. Elliott, of Johns Hopkins 

 University, says in the course of an interesting article on the French 

 in Canada : — " As a natural effect of this rapid increase in population 

 we find a gradual uprooting of the weaker race in pomt of numbers, 

 that is to say the English. The wonderfully absorbing power of the 

 French element in Lower Canada has here produced the curious 

 phenomenon of a people, in certain parts of the country, who bear 

 all the racial characteristics of the English or Scotch, such as blue eyes, 

 light hair, florid faces, and who have the names of AVarren, Eraser, 

 McDonald, McPherson, etc., but also are still unable to speak a 

 word of the mother tongue. The English names of roads, of towns, 

 of counties, give abundant proof as to who were the occupants of 

 the soil a few years ago. To-day it is the offspring of the Gallic 

 stock that possesses the land. Their unswerving purpose, encoura- 

 ged by the clergy, is to take back their old domains by the peaceful 

 process of repopulating them with descendants of their own blood, 

 and, at the present rate of increase, we may safely predict that it will 

 not be many generations before they shall have accomplished this 

 unique feat." 



It is hardly the place in a paper like this to touch upon the 

 political side of the subject. It is a significant fact, however, that 



