the rich furs of the country, were by no means inconsiderable, the Missions established would answer the double purpose of revenue and revenge; since uniformly cultivating in the hearts of their converts the most implacable enmity againt Protestantism, the Order were enabled at any time, to harass and devastate the hated settlements. And, again, having as an Order been several times banished from France, as well as from every other government of Europe as enemies to internal peace, they felt it necessary to purchase toleration by the splendor of their discoveries in pushing exploration so far ahead of settlement. Nor did all these combined, constitute the yet most important consideration to the ambitious Jesuit.

They early perceived, with that sure intelligence of foresight which has uniformly marked their operations, the future glory and grandeur of this New World, and they determined to establish for themselves here, a Theocratic empire, which would be to the Order-amidst the convulsions which their intrigues continued to cause in Europe-as a House of Refuge to which they might, as a last resort, fly for safety, and hold as a point d'appui, from which they might renew the contest.

See how clearly they have apprehended the importance of the New Hemisphere in this light. Paraguay, indeed the whole of South America, and Mexico on the south, California on the west, New France, or Canada on the north, all occupied by the proposed Theocracy-thus hemming in the beleaguered Protestants on three sides. What South America, Mexico and California have been-and the two first. yet remaining so-virtual Theocracies-that is, governments in which the priesthood standing as the representatives of God, are alone accountable to Him for both the spiritual and temporal of their subject-or in other words, constitute the supreme governing power in the State-no one will at this day pretend to deny. That New France or Canada, was also ruled into a strict Theocracy by the Jesuits, is clearly susceptible of proof, throughout the entire cotemporary history of that period. La Hontan, an intelligent traveler, naturalist and cosmopolite-twenty years after New France had been established a bishopric through the enterprise of the

Jesuits-complains grievously of this priestly despotism, and after the remark, "that at Montreal it was a perpetual Lent," continues:

We have here a misanthropical bigot of a curé, under whose spiritual despotism, play and visiting the ladies are reckoned among the mortal sins. If you have the misfortune to be on his black list, he launches at you publicly, from the pulpit, a bloody censure. As Messieurs, the priests of St. Sulpice, are our temporal lords, they take the greater liberty to tyrannize over us. To keep well with them, it is necessary to communicate once a month. These Arguses have their eyes constantly on the conduct of the women and the girls. Fathers and husbands may sleep in all assurance, unless they have some suspicions as to these vigilant sentinels themselves. Of all the vexation of these disturbers, I found none so intolerable as their war upon books. None are to be found here but books of devotion. All others are prohibited and condemned to the flames. Our author winds up with a ludicrous account how his Petronius, left by accident on his table, was mutilated by a devout priest, who took it upon himself to tear out all the best leaves, under pretense that they were scandalous. "No one dare to be absent from great masses and sermons without special excuse. These are the times, however, at which the women take a little liberty, being sure that their husbands and mothers are at church."

Such is the concurrent testimony of all cotemporary writers amply sustained as it is by the invariable usage and determination of Catholic-but more especially Jesuit institutions. But were such cotemporary evidence wanting at a time when the learning of the world was principally in the keeping of the catholic priesthood, there yet remains the broad and well-established historical fact, that the intercolonial wars between the English and other Protestant colonies on the north, and the Indians and Canadian French, were instigated personally by these saintly Jesuit missionaries themselves, and that the murderous forays of the Indians upon these settlements, were even led by these meek missionaries of peace. Indeed, all that saved these northern colonies from absolute extermination, was the success of that sagacious policy of the early Dutch governors of New Amsterdam, in securing the friendship and allegiance of the

powerful and warlike Iroquois or Five Nations, established in the north of New York. This alliance also, politically courted and nourished by the New England colonies, was for a long period successfully maintained; opposing this formidable Indian confederacy as a barrier between their weak but growing settlements and the exterminating hate of the Jesuits. It was during the desperate efforts of these priests to gain a foothold among the Iroquois for their Missions, with a view to breaking up this-for them-unlucky league, by their intrigues, that all those bloody scenes occurred, which we have seen so elaborately celebrated in the Elegiac prose of the sympathizing historian, Bancroft. A choice subject for the lugubrious monodies of an American historian surely! Had the Jesuits, whose fate is thus deplored, succeeded earlieras they did finally to some extent-in their scheme of disrupturing this alliance, and turned loose upon the weak settlements of the Protestant colonies, the fierce warrior hordes of the Five Nations, in addition to those formidable tribes which already yielded to their supremacy, no doubt our tender-hearted historian would have had ample inspiration for the change of his Elegiacs into Idyls, or found full employment in sounding the Te Deum to Loyola! Terribly as the colonies suffered as it was-with the Iroquois sometimes allies but most frequently neutral-there can be no question of the entire subjugation, if not annihilation of the Protestant colonies of the north, had such an event as this disruption taken place. Hildreth says:

Whatever the success of the French missionaries among the more northern and western tribes, they encountered in the Iroquois, or Five Nations, firm and formidable opponents. That celebrated confederacy, beside subject tribes, included five allied communities: the Senecas, the Cayugas, the Onondagas, the Oneidas, and the Mohawks; which last, as being nearest to their settlements, often gave, among the English, a name to the whole. Each of these five nations was divided into three clans, distinguished as the Bear, the Tortoise, and the Wolf. Their castles, rude forts, places of protection for the women, children, and old men, surrounded by fields of corn, beans, and squashes, the head-quarters of the several tribes, were situated on those waters of central New York, of which the names serve as memorials, and now almost the

only ones, of their ancient possessors. Some slender remnants of this once-powerful confederacy still linger, however, on small reservations of their ancient territory. It was in courage, ferocity, and warlike enterprise, far more than in social institutions or the arts of peace, that the Iroquois surpassed the tribes of Algonquin descent on their eastern, southern, and western borders. It was not against those tribes as Algonquin, that the Five Nations carried on war, for their hostility was directed with even greater fury against the Hurons and Wyandots, who dwelt along the St. Lawrence and north of Lake Ontario, and who spoke dialects of the same language with themselves. The early alliance of French with those tribes, had rendered the French colonists objects of implacable hate to the Five Nations.

In vain, during a short interval of peace, strenuous efforts were made to establish a spiritual influence over these fierce warriors. Father Jogues, whose captivity had made him acquainted with the chiefs, having returned again to Canada, was sent among them as embassador and missionary-a dangerous service, in which he met the death he had formerly escaped.

Supplied with fire-arms by the Dutch, and rendered thus more formidable than ever, the Iroquois renewed a war by which the missionaries and their converts were equally endangered. Daniel, the venerable father of the Huron mission, perished in the midst of his flock, surprised and massacred by a Mohawk war-party. Brebeuf and Lallemand, taken prisoners, were burned at the stake; Gardier perished by the hatchets of the Iroquois; Chabanel was lost in the woods. The Huron missions, by these renewed onslaughts, were completely broken up. The Hurons, Wyandots, and Ottawas, greatly reduced in numbers, were driven from their country, which became a hunting-ground for the Iroquois. Subsequently the Hurons and Ottawas established themselves in the neighborhood of Mackinaw. Mohawk war-parties harassed the banks of the St. Lawrence. The unhappy colonists lived in daily dread of massacre. Quebec itself was not safe. This emergency caused a message to ask aid of New Eng land, as mentioned in a former chapter, or, at least, a free passage for war-parties of the Eastern tribes under French influence in their march against the Mohawks-a message

borne by John Godefroy, one of the council of New France, and Dreuillettes, former explorer of the passage from Quebec to the eastern coast, described in his commission as preacher of the Gospel to savage nations.' But the Commissioners for the United Colonies of New England listened with but a cold ear to the story of the martyrdom of the French missionaries and the sufferings of their Indian-converts. No aid could be obtained in that quarter; but, after two or three years of perpetual alarm, the Iroquois consented at last to a peace.

From the earliest foothold obtained by the Jesuits among the French colonies on the north, they had been known as the instigators and fermenters of jealousies between their converts and the Puritan settlements of New England and New York. With the exception of their unvarying system of 'Reductions' -as they are best termed in all countries, and meaning nothing more than absolute slavery, spiritually and financially, by which the rich proceeds of the free-trade were, in this case, to be monopolized into the treasury of the Order-there were no purposes in which these missionaries proved themselves so indefatigably consistent, as this of mortal enmity to the Protestants wherever they appeared. Not only was this perpetual cause of irritation felt in the savage carnage of the earlier partisan or guerrilla struggles of the weak colonies with the more northern Indian tribes, and recognized as the incessant source of mortal peril beside their hard-earned firesides-although their own agency had been denied by the Jesuits yet when the first intercolonial war (known as King William's war,) broke out, the colonists were at no loss to know who had been, and would continue to be, their most arch and deadly foes. They not only knew these crafty missionaries to be such enemies, but struck at them now as such, in spite of the pretended sanctities of their calling and garb; and that too, with the merciless and exterminating violence of a spirit of retribution fired by the memory of the thousand sneaking and incendiary wrongs which had been accumulating to their account, through so many years. Hildreth's straightforward account of the progress of this war, best illustrates the development so far.

So soon as the declaration of war between France and England became known in America, the Baron Castin easily