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The Lower Town, with its narrow streets, little shops, gray stone warehouses, dingy tenements, and old-fashioned markets, is quite a different place. It belongs to the slow rivers on whose banks it drowses and dreams. The once prosperous lumberyards are half empty now. The shipping along the wharfs has been dwindling for many years. The northern winter puts a quietus on the waterside. Troops, munitions, supplies, must go down by rail to an ice-free port. The white river-boats are all laid up. But a way is kept open across the river to Levis, and the sturdy, snub-nosed little ice-breaking ferry-boats buffet back and forth almost without interruption. There is a plenty of nothing to do, now, in the Lower Town; pipe-smoking and heated discussion of parish politics are incessant; an inconsiderate quantity of bad liquor is imbibed, pour faire passer le temps.

Suddenly–if anything can be said to happen suddenly in Quebec–bad news comes from the Lower Town. A riot has broken out, an insurrection of the French-Canadians against the new military service act, an armed resistance to the draft. Windows have been smashed, shops looted. A mob, not very large perhaps, but extremely noisy, has marched up the steep curve of Mountain Hill Street, into the Upper Town. Shots have been exchanged. People have been killed. The revolution in Quebec has begun.

That is the disquieting rumor which comes to us, carefully spread and magnified by those agencies which have an interest in preventing, or at least obstructing the righteous punishment of the German criminals in this war. Can it possibly be true? Have the French-Canadians gone crazy, as the Irish did in 1916, under the lunatic incantations of the Sinn-Feiners? Are they also people without a country, playing blindly into the hands of the Prussian gang who have set out to subjugate the world?

No! This riot in the old city is not an expression of the spirit of French Canada at all. It is only a shrewdly stupid trick in local politics, planned and staged by small-minded and loud-voiced politicians who are trying to keep their hold upon the province. The so-called revolutionists are either imported loafers and trouble-makers, or else they are drawn from that class of “hooligans” who have always made a noise around the Quebec hotels at night. They shout much: they swear abominably: but they have no real fight in them. They can be hired and used–up to a certain point–but beyond that they are worthless. It is a waste of money to employ them. The trouble below Cape Diamond froths up and goes down as quickly as the effervescence on a bottle of ginger beer. Before you can find out what it is all about, it is all over. It has not even touched the real French-Canadians, the men of the forests and the farms. They are loyal by nature, and slow by temperament. You
have got to give them time, and light.

What is happening in Quebec now? Just what ought to happen. The draft is going forward smoothly and steadily, without resistance. Sons of the best French-Canadian families are volunteering for the war. Recruits from Laval University are coming in, stirred perhaps by the knowledge that forty thousand Catholic priests in France have entered the army which fights against the Prussian paganism.

The petty politicians who have sought to serve their own ends by putting forward the mad notion of secession and an independent “Republic of Quebec” have gone to cover under a storm of ridicule and indignation. M. Bourassa’s iridescent dream of French-Canadian nationalism has disappeared like a soap-bubble. M. Francoeur’s motion in the Quebec legislature, carrying a vague hint that the province might withdraw from the Dominion if the other provinces were not particularly nice to it, was snowed under by an overwhelming vote. The patriotic and eloquent speech of the provincial Premier, M. Gouin, was received with every sign of approval. The political cinema has shown its latest film, and the title is evidently “Fidelite de Quebec.”