politics for many generations.  The merchants insisted that if this traffic were extinguished it would involve the ruin of the French hold upon the Indian trade.  The bishop and the priests, on the other hand, were ready to fight the liquor traffic to the end and to exorcise it as the greatest blight upon the New World.  Quebec soon became a cockpit where the battle of these two factions raged.  Each had its ups and downs, until in the end the traffic remained, but under a makeshift system of regulation.

To portray Laval and his associates as always in bitter conflict with the civil power, nevertheless, would be to paint a false picture.  Church and state were not normally at variance in their views and aims.  They clashed fiercely on many occasions, it is true, but after their duels they shook hands and went to work with a will at the task of making the colony stand upon its own feet.  Historians have magnified these bickerings out of all proportion.  Squabbles over matters of precedence at ceremonies, over the rate of the tithes, and over the curbing of the coureurs-de-bois did not take the major share of the Church’s attention.  For the greater part of two whole centuries it loyally aided the civil power in all things wherein the two could work together for good.

And these ways of assistance were many.  For example the Church, through its various institutions and orders, rendered a great service to colonial agriculture.  As the greatest landowner in New France, it set before the seigneurs and the habitants an example of what intelligent methods of farming and hard labor could accomplish in making the land yield its increase.  The King was lavish in his grants of territory to the Church:  the Jesuits received nearly a million arpents as their share of the royal bounty; the bishop and the Quebec Seminary, the Sulpicians, and the Ursulines, about as much more.  Of the entire granted acreage of New France the Church controlled about one-quarter, so that its position as a great landowner was even stronger in the colony than at home.  Nor did it fold its talents in a napkin.  Colonists were brought from France, farms were prepared for them in the church seigneuries, and the new settlers were guided and encouraged through, the troublous years of pioneering.  With both money and brains at its command, the Church was able to keep its own lands in the front line of agricultural progress.

When in 1722 the whole colony was marked off into definite ecclesiastical divisions, seventy-two parishes were established, and nearly one hundred cures were assigned to them.  As time went on, both parishes and cures increased in number, so that every locality had its spiritual leader who was also a philosopher and guide in all secular matters.  The priest thus became a part of the community and never lost touch with his people.  The habitant of New France for his part never neglected his Church on week-days.  The priest and the Church were with him at work and at play, the spirit and the life of every community.  Though paid a meager stipend, the cure worked hard and always proved a laborer far more than worthy of his hire.  The clergy of New France never became a caste, a privileged order; they did not live on the fruits of other men’s labor, but gave to the colony far more than the colony ever gave to them.