THE EAELY HISTORY OF THE MILITIA

When the first settlens left France for Québec, in 1633, they were promised the protection of an armed force to repel attacks of the Indians, but it soon became évident that this part of the arrangements was to be a dead letter, because the King had delivered over the whole country into the hands of a syndicate of fur traders absolutely adverse to any plan of colonization. The direct resuit of this want of protection paralysed the immigrants at the outset, so much so that in 1641 only sixty-four familles could be found in Canada. In the meantime the Iroquois had started their system of raids, •and no one was safe in his own house ex<îept those living within the palisades of a fort. For twenty years this state of things continued, with a slow increase of the population until it reached two thousand soûls, in 1660 — men, women, children, traders, their servants and coureurs de bois, missionaries, nuns, the governor and his staff, ail told. By that time some three hundred white men had been massacred by the Iroquois, and it was of daily occurrence to hear people talking of going back to France to escape the same fate.

Montréal was in its earliest days poor, misérable, worse even than Three Rivers and Québec. The Fur Company kept a few soldiers to protect their stores, their number never exceeding sixty men in the best years, and half of them were paid and equipped by Queen Anne d'Autriche and other charitable persons of the Court.

It has been said that the Iroquois were irrésistible : true, if we €onsider that there was not a single musket to oppose