“Hear me, like a different messenger from the same battle.  The motto, ‘God has made Law to Every Man to Labour,’ means that the slaves of priestcraft are to be contented with their servitude.  ’To Make the People Better,’ means to blind the second eye of their obedience.”

“To—?”

“Stop my dear friend,” Chamilly interrupted with emotion, “that motto’s words are sacred to me and will ever justly be to all our people.  Do not disparage that motto?”

“I will never disparage making the people truly better.  It is to the tone of those who usurp the aim, you should apply my critique.  The men who lip these terms are none other than the evil geniuses of history.  It is the Jesuits who would make us poor and miserable,—­who have wrecked French America, past and future.  Without them we should have welcomed to our dominions from the first, an immigration twice larger than England’s:  we should have held the continent north, south and centre; our people would have been vitalized by education instead of so ignorant that no commoner but one ever wrote a book; they would have built and flourished and extended; and in place of a poor and helpless people they would have been rich, powerful, and self-reliant, like the Bostonians; Bigot and his nest of horse-leeches would never have sucked our blood and left us to ruin!”

He paused, but as if not yet quite finished.  His hearers listened.

“And since—­,” he suddenly and energetically added, with a stern look around and a bitter suggestiveness on the word as if it were enough to pronounce it; and in truth, it silenced both De La Lande and Chamilly, and appeared to make a completely effective ending.

In the evening, walking out on the road before retiring, Chamilly and Chrysler commented on the discussion, and Chrysler said, “I must say I was unprepared for this debate.  I was a poor helpless Briton, caught like Braddock in Mr. De La Lande’s ambush.  Tell me what you think yourself of these things.”

“It is a sad thing to belong to a disappearing order,” Haviland replied, “Sympathising with my people, I am grieved in a sense to believe their present aspirations dreams.  It is sad to behold any race, and deeply so if it is your own, blind in the presence of unalterable forces which will soon begin their removal of what it considers to be dearest.”

“I sympathize with them and you,” Chrysler said.

“Ecclesiasticism ruins us!” exclaimed Quinet the Radical, who was with them: 

   “Quiconque me resiste et me brave est impie
   Ce qu’ici-bas j’ecris, la-haut Dieu la copie.”

“You should moderate your animosity,” Chamilly said.  “These Jesuits are most certainly humble, self-devoted men?”

“I detest them as machines, not as men!” retorted the Radical.

CHAPTER XIX.

HUMAN NATURE.

   “Va ... 
   A monsieur le Cure
   Lui dire que sa paroisse
   Est tout bouleversee.”