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France had lost an Empire. It was nearly three years still before peace was signed at Paris in
1763. To Britain France yielded everything east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, and to
Spain she ceded New Orleans and everything else to which she had any claim. The fleurs-de-lis
floated still over only two tiny fishing islands off the Newfoundland shore. All the glowing plans
of France's leaders--of Richelieu, of Louis XIV, of Colbert, of Frontenac, of the heroic
missionaries of the Jesuit Order--seemed to have come to nothing.

The fall of France did much to drag down her rival. Already was America restless under control
from Europe. There was now no danger to the English in America from the French peril which
had made insecure the borders of Massachusetts, of New York, of Pennsylvania, and Virginia,
and had brought widespread desolation and sorrow. With the removal of the menace went the
need of help and defenses for the colonies from the motherland. The French belief that there was
a natural antipathy between the English of the Old World and the English of the New was, in
reality, based on the fact of a likeness so great that neither would accept control or patronage
from the other. Towards the Englishman who assumed airs of superiority the antagonism of the
colonists was always certain to be acute. Open strife came when the assumption of superiority
took the form of levying taxes on the colonies without asking their leave. In no remote way the
fall of French Canada, by removing a near menace to the English colonies, led to this new
conflict and to the collapse of that older British Empire which had sprung from the England of
the Stuarts.

When Montreal fell there were in the St. Lawrence many British ships which had been used for
troops and supplies. Before the end of September the French soldiers and also the officials from
France who desired to go home were on board these ships bound for Europe. By the end of
November most of the exiles had reached home. Varying receptions awaited them. Levis, who
took back the army, was soon again, by consent of the British government, in active service.
Fortune smiled on him to the end. He died a great noble and Marshal of France just before the
Revolution of 1789; but in that awful upheaval his widow and his two daughters perished on the
scaffold. Vaudreuil's shallow and vain incompetence did not go unpunished. He was put on trial,
accused of a share in the black frauds which had helped to ruin Canada. The trial was his
punishment. He was acquitted of taking any share of the plunder and so drops out of history.
Bigot and his gang, on the other hand, were found guilty of vast depredations. The former
Intendant was for a time in the Bastille and in the end was banished from France, after being
forced to repay great sums. We find echoes of the luxury of Quebec in the sale in France of the
rich plate which the rascal had acquired. There were, however, other and even worse plunderers.
They were tried and condemned chiefly to return what they had stolen. We rather wonder that no
expiatory sacrifice on the scaffold was required of any of these knaves. Lally Tollendal, who, as
the French leader in India, had only failed and not plundered, was sent to a cruel execution.

Under the terms of the surrender and of the final Treaty of Peace in 1763, civilians in Canada
were given leave to return to France. Nearly the whole of the official class and many of the large
landowners, the seigneurs, left the country. In Canada there remained a priesthood, largely
native, but soon to be recruited from France by the upheaval of the Revolution, a few seigneurial
families, natural leaders of their race, a peasantry, exhausted by the long war but clinging
tenaciously to the soil, and a good many hardy pioneers of the forest, men skilled in hunting and
in the use of the axe. Out of these elements, amounting in 1763 to little more than sixty thousand
people, has come that French-Canadian race in America now numbering perhaps three millions.
The race has scattered far. It is found in the mills of Massachusetts, in the canebrakes of
Louisiana, on the wide stretches of the prairie of the Canadian West, but it has always kept intact
its strong citadel on the banks of the St. Lawrence. New France was, in reality, widely separated
in spirit from old France, before the new master in Canada made the division permanent. The
imagination of the Canadian peasant did not wander across the ocean to France. He knew only
the scenes about his own hearth and in them alone were his thought and affections centered.

The one wider interest which the habitant treasured was love for the Catholic Church of his
fathers and of his own spiritual hopes. It thus happened that when France in revolution assailed
and for a time overthrew the Church within her borders, the heart of French Canada was not with
France but with the persecuted Church; she hated the spirit of revolutionary France. Te Deums
were sung at Quebec in thanksgiving for the defeats of Napoleon. In language and what literary
culture they possessed, in traditions and tastes, the conquered people remained French, but they
had no allegiance divided between Canada and France. To this day they are proud to be simply
Canadians, rooted in the soil of Canada, with no debt of patriotic gratitude to the France from
which they sprang or to the Britain which obtained political dominance over their ancestors after
a long agony of war. To the British Crown many of them feel a certain attachment because of the
liberty guaranteed to them to pursue their own ideals of happiness. In preserving their type of
social life, their faith and language, they have shown a resolute tenacity. To this day they are as
different in these things from their fellow-citizens of British origin in the rest of Canada as were
their ancestors from the English colonies which lay on their borders.

The French in Canada are still a separate people. From time to time a nervous fear seizes them
lest too many of their race may be lost to their old ideals in the Anglo-Saxon world surging about
them. Then they listen readily to appeals to their racial unity and draw more sharply than ever the
lines of division between themselves and the rest of North America. They remain a fragment of
an older France, remote and isolated, still dreaming dreams like those of Frontenac of old of the
dominance of their race in North America and asserting passionately their rights in the soil of
Canada to which, first of Europeans, they came. At the mouth of the Mississippi in the Louisiana
founded by Louis XIV, along the St. Lawrence in the Canada of Champlain and Frontenac, with
a resolution more than half pathetic, and in a world that gives little heed, men of French race are
still on guard to preserve in America the lineaments of that older France, long since decayed in
Europe, which was above all the eldest daughter of the Church.