profitable and to it the peasant must bring his wheat.  There might be a good mill near his house, while the seigneur’s mill might be a dozen miles away and even then might give poor service; yet to the seigneur’s mill he must go.  If it was a wind-mill, nature, by denying wind, might cause a long delay before the flour should be ready.  As time went on, some seigneurs claimed or reserved a monopoly in regard to all mills; grist mills, saw mills, carding mills, factories of every kind.  Canada in time exported flour, but the seigneur’s rights stood in the way of the free grinding of the wheat for this trade.  The habitant might have on his land an excellent mill site with water power convenient, but he could not use it without the seigneur’s consent.  More than this the seigneur often reserved the right to take such a site to the extent of six arpents for his own use without any compensation to the habitant.

In many cases the seigneur might freely cut timber on the habitant’s land to erect buildings for public use,—­church, presbytery, mill, and even a manor house.  The rights to base metals on the property he also retained.  The eleventh fish caught in the rivers was his.  He might change the course of streams or rivers for manufacturing purposes; he alone could establish a ferry; his will determined where roads should be opened.  Some seigneurs were even able to force villages and towns to pay a bonus for the right to carry on the ordinary business of buying and selling.  So it turned out that if the habitant’s crop failed he had little chance to do anything else without the seigneur’s consent; he is, says the report of a Commission of Enquiry in 1843, “kept in a perpetual state of feebleness and dependence.  He can never escape from the tie that forever binds to the soil him and his progeny; a cultivator he is born, a mere cultivator he is doomed to die.”  No doubt this plaint is pitched in a rather high key.  But in time the burden of grievances was generally felt and then the seigniorial system was doomed.

In the days of the last John Nairne political agitation became an old story at Malbaie.  We get echoes of meetings held in the village to support the cause of the idol of habitant radicalism, Louis Joseph Papineau; in 1836 ninety-two resolutions drawn up by him and attacking the whole system of government in Canada appear to have met with clamorous approval from the assembled villagers.  Papineau was himself a seigneur and did not assail the system.  But after his unsuccessful rebellion in 1837-38 the attack on the seigneurs intensified.  We know little of what happened at Malbaie but the end came suddenly.  In 1854, after an election fought largely on this issue, the Parliament of Canada swept away the seigniorial system.  The habitants then became tenants paying as rent the old cens et rentes.  They could not be disturbed as long as this trifling rent was paid.  Moreover at any time they might become simple freeholders by