At Ville-Marie the Sulpicians, with never-failing abnegation, not content with the toil of their ministry, lent themselves to the arduous task of teaching; the venerable superior himself, M. Souart, took the modest title of headmaster.  From a healthy bud issues a fine fruit:  just as the smaller seminary of Quebec gave birth to the Laval University, so from the school of M. Souart sprang in 1733 the College of Montreal, transferred forty years later to the Chateau Vaudreuil, on Jacques Cartier Square; then to College Street, now St. Paul Street.  The college rises to-day on an admirable site on the slope of the mountain; the main seminary, which adjoins it, seems to dominate the city stretched at its feet, as the two sister sciences taught there, theology and philosophy, dominate by their importance the other branches of human knowledge.

M. de Fenelon, who was already devoted to the conversion of the savages in the famous mission of Montreal mountain, gave the rest of his time to the training of the young Iroquois; he gathered them in a school erected by his efforts near Pointe Claire, on the Dorval Islands, which he had received from M. de Frontenac.  Later on the Brothers Charron established a house at Montreal with a double purpose of charity:  to care for the poor and the sick, and to train men in order to send them to open schools in the country district.  This institution, in spite of the enthusiasm of its founders, did not succeed, and became extinct about the middle of the eighteenth century.  Finally, in 1838, Canada greeted with joy the arrival of the sons of the blessed Jean Baptiste de la Salle, the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, so well known throughout the world for their modesty and success in teaching.

The girls of the colony were no less well looked after than the boys; at Quebec, the Ursuline nuns, established in that city by Madame de la Peltrie, trained them for the future irreproachable mothers of families.  The attempts made to Gallicize the young savages met with no success in the case of the boys, but were better rewarded by the young Indian girls.  “We have Gallicized,” writes Mother Mary of the Incarnation, “a number of Indian girls, both Hurons and Algonquins, whom we subsequently married to Frenchmen, who get along with them very well.  There is one among them who reads and writes to perfection, both in her native Huron tongue and in French; no one can discern or believe that she was born a savage.  The commissioner was so delighted at this that he induced her to write for him something in the two languages, in order to take it to France and show it as an extraordinary production.”  Further on she adds, “It is a very difficult thing, not to say impossible, to Gallicize or civilize them.  We have more experience in this than any one else, and we have observed that of a hundred who have passed through our hands we have hardly civilized one.  We find in them docility and intelligence, but when we least expect it, they climb over our fence and go off to run the woods with their parents, where they find more pleasure than in all the comforts of our French houses.”