§ 15]

THE FAILURE OF FRANCE

11

Everywhere else the wilderness between Canada and the English settlements was impassable except by prowling bands; and this one route was guarded by the Iroquois.

They changed the whole course of French exploration, turning it to the north. The home of the confederacy was in Western New York,-"the military key to the eastern half of the continent." (So Winfield Scott called it, and Ulysses S. Grant afterward.) It commanded the headwaters of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and Mohawk-Hudson system, and the portage

CHAMPLAIN'S FIGHT WITH THE IROQUOIS, on the shores of Lake Champlain. From Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain (Paris, 1613), the volume in which this lake is first given Champlain's name.

at Niagara from Erie to Ontario, as well as part of the headwaters of the Ohio.

The French leaders had keen eyes for military geography and would certainly have seized this position at any cost, if they had been able to learn its character. They would then have fortified the Ohio by a chain of posts, as they did their other waterways; and this would have buttressed their position on the Mississippi and the Lakes so as to defy attack. But they did not learn the importance of the Ohio valley until

too late. Montreal was founded in 1611; but, instead of reaching the interior from there by the upper St. Lawrence and Lake Erie, French traders turned up the Ottawa, so as to avoid the Iroquois, and reached Lake Huron by portage from Nipissing. Lake Erie was the last, instead of the first, of the Lakes to be explored. It was practically unused until after 1700, and the country to the south remained unknown even longer. Navigation was by fleets of canoes, which had to land frequently. Thus, because of the Iroquois, the French could not follow the southern shore, nor use the portage at Niagara. When they awakened to the value of the Ohio valley, English traders had begun to push into it, with cheaper goods;1 and the opportunity for France was already lost.

16. Inherent weaknesses in French colonization, however, were the fundamental cause of French failure. Three essentials were lacking homes, individual enterprise, and political life.

New France was not a country of homes or of agriculture. Except for a few leaders and the missionaries, the settlers were either unprogressive peasants or reckless adventurers. For the most part they did not bring families; and they remained unmarried or chose Indian wives. Agriculture was the only basis for a permanent colony; but these colonists did not take to any regular labor. Instead, they turned to trapping and the fur trade, and tended to adopt Indian habits. The French government in Europe sought in vain to remedy this by sending over cargoes of "king's girls," and by offering bonuses for early marriages and large families. But even with this fostering, French colonization did not produce numbers. In 1754 when the final struggle for the American continent began, France had three times as many people as England had, but in America she had only a twentieth as many colonists.

Paternalism smothered private enterprise. In all industries, New France was taught to depend upon the aid and direction

1 England's industrial superiority over France was one factor in winning America. After 1725 that superiority was marked.

§ 16]

THE FAILURE OF FRANCE

13

of a government three thousand miles away. Aid was constantly asked from the King. "Send us money to build storehouses," ran the begging letters of Canadian officials; "Send us a teacher to make sailors"; "We want a surgeon"; and so, at various times, requests for brickmakers, ironworkers, pilots, and other skilled workers. Such requests were usually granted; but New France did not learn to walk alone. The rulers did much; but the people did little.

Political life was lacking. In the seventeenth century France itself was a centralized despotism;1 and in New France (to use the phrase of Tocqueville) "this deformity was seen magnified as through a microscope." No public meetings were permitted without a special license; and such meetings, when held, could do nothing worth while. All sorts of matters, even the regulation of inns and of pew rent, the order in which people should sit in church, the keeping of dogs and of cattle, the pay of chimney sweeps, were dealt with not by local legislatures or village councils, but by ordinances of the governors at Quebec, who were sent over by the French King. "It is of the greatest importance," wrote one official, "that the people should not be at liberty to speak their minds."

Worse even than that- the people had no minds to speak. In 1672, Frontenac, the greatest governor of New France, tried to introduce the elements of self-government. He provided a system of "estates " to advise with him,—a gathering of clergy, nobles, and commons (citizens and merchants); and he ordered that Quebec should have a sort of town meeting twice a year to elect aldermen and to discuss public business. But the home government sternly disapproved all this, directing Frontenac to remember that it was "proper that each should speak for himself, and no one for the whole." The plan fell to pieces; the people cared so little for it that they made no effort to save it.

FOR FURTHER READING.—The plan of this volume forbids extended class work upon the topics touched in chapters i and ii; but the books named below may be explored by the student who desires to read further. 1 Modern Progress, pp. 19, 258, or Modern World, §§ 25, 516.

ON THE DISCOVERY AND ITS PERIOD. - Payne, "Age of Discovery in Cambridge Modern History, I (an admirable treatment in thirty pages); Fiske, Discovery of America; Cheyney, European Background of American History; Becker, Beginnings of the American People, 1-36.

ON ENGLAND'S RIVALS.-Moses, Spanish Rule in America; Bourne, Spain in America; Thwaites, France in America; Parkman's Histories, especially, Montcalm and Wolfe, Half Century of Conflict, and The Old Régime in Canada. Gilbert Parker's earlier stories, particularly The Trail of the Sword and parts of Pierre and His People, picture vividly the Canadian colonial type.

EXERCISE.

Brief, rapid answers (oral or written) on the following the answers to be given concisely and, as a rule, in single words or phrases, rather than in sentences.

topics,

1. Two contrasts between the Atlantic coast of Europe and that of North America which affected colonization materially? 2. How did each of these factors work? 3. Two advantages from physical geography to English colonization, as compared with French or Spanish colonization? (Two words suffice for this answer.) 4. Three distinct advantages possessed by the French in their attempt to occupy America? 5. Three causes of French failure? 6. Three distinct ways in which the Iroquois hindered French success?

(Let each student present four or five more questions.)

CHAPTER III

THE MOTIVES OF EARLY ENGLISH COLONIZATION

Virginia was founded by a great liberal movement aiming at the spread of English freedom and of English empire. - HENRY ADAMS.

17. The first impulse to English colonization came from English patriotism. When Elizabeth's reign was half completed, little England entered upon a daring rivalry with the overshadowing might of Spain.

Out of that rivalry, English America was born. Reckless and picturesque freebooters, like Drake and Hawkins, sought profit and honor for themselves, and injury to the foe, by raiding rich provinces of Spanish America. More far-sighted statesmen, like Raleigh, saw that English colonies in America would be "a great bridle to the Indies of the Kinge of Spaine," and began to try so to "put a byt in the anchent enymys mouth."

SIR WALTER RALEIGH AT THIRTY-FOUR. From a portrait ascribed to Zuccaro, now in the National Gallery, London.

1 This phrase heads a chapter in a pamphlet on Western Planting written in 1584, at Raleigh's request, by Richard Hakluyt, a clergyman of the Church of England. The text urges: -"If you touch him [Spain] in the Indies, you touch him in the apple of his eye. For, take away his treasure,- which he has almost wholly out of his West Indies, - his olde bandes of souldiers will soon be dissolved, his purposes defeated, his power diminished, his pride abated, and his tyranie utterly suppressed" (Source Book, No. 3).