with England had begun. When Queen Elizabeth gave a charter to a first not very successful English EastIndia Company, France, under Richelieu, struggled also, though vainly, to share the great commerce with Asia. The same year in which England took possession of Barbadoes, Frenchmen occupied the half of St. Christopher's. Did England add half St. Christopher's, Nevis, and at last, Jamaica, France gained Martinique and_Guadaloupe, with smaller islets, founded a colony at Cayenne, and, by the aid of buccaneers, took possession of the west of Hayti. England, by its devices of tariffs and prohibitions, and by the royal assent to the Act of Naviga1664- tion, sought to call into action every power of pro1667. duction, hardly a year before Colbert hoped, in like manner, by artificial legislation, to foster the manufactures and finances of France, and to insure to that kingdom spacious seaports, canals, colonies, and a navy. English East-India Company had but just revived, under

The

Charles II., when France also gave privileges to an 1664. East-India commercial corporation; and, if the folly of that corporation in planting on the island of Madagascar, where there was nothing to sell or to buy, effected its decline, still the banner of the Bourbons reached Malabar and Coromandel. The fourth African Company, with the Stuarts for stockholders, and the slave1674- trade for its object, soon found a rival in the Senegal 1679. Company; and, just at the time when the French king was most zealous for the conversion of the Hugue

1675.

nots, he established a Guinea Company to trade from 1685. Sierra Leone to the Cape of Good Hope. France was, through Colbert and Seignelay, become a great naval power, and had given her colonial system an extent even vaster than that of the British. So eager was she in her rivalry on the ocean, so menacing was the competition of her workshops in every article of ingenious manufacture, that the spirit of monopoly set its brand upon language, and men's consciences became so far debauched as to call England and France natural enemies.

Memory fostered the national antipathy: France had not forgotten English invasions of her soil, English victories over her sons.

France adhered to the old religion, and the revocation of the edict of Nantz made it a Catholic empire; England succeeded in a Protestant revolution, which made political

power a monopoly of the Anglican Church, disfranchised all Catholics, and even subjected them, in Ireland, to a legal despotism.

In England, freedom of mind made its way through a series of aristocratic and plebeian sects, each of which found its support in the Bible; and the progress was so gradual, and under such variety of forms, both among the people and among philosophers, that the civil institutions were not endangered, even when freedom degenerated into scepticism or infidelity. In France, freedom of mind was introduced by philosophy, and, making its way, at one bound, to the absolute scepticism of pure reason, rejected every prejudice, and menaced the institutions of church and of state with an overthrow.

In England, philosophy existed as an empirical science ; men measured and weighed the outward world, and constructed the prevailing systems of morals and metaphysics on observation and the senses. In France, the philosophic mind, under the guidance of Descartes, of Fenelon, of Leibnitz,-who belongs to the French world, -of Malebranche, assumed a character alike spiritual and universal.

Still more opposite were the governments. In France, feudal monarchy had been quelled by a military monarchy; in England, it had yielded to a parliamentary monarchy, in which government rested on property. France sustained the principle of legitimacy; England had selected its own sovereign, and to dispute his claims involved not only a question of national law, but of English independence.

To these causes of animosity, springing from the rivalry in manufactures and in commercial stations, from contrasts in religion, philosophy, opinion, and government, there was added a struggle for territory in North America. Not only in the West Indies, in the East Indies, in Africa, were France and England neighbours,over far the largest part of our country Louis XIV. claimed to be the sovereign; and the prelude to the overthrow of the European colonial system, which was sure to be also the overthrow of the mercantile system, was destined to be the mighty struggle for the central regions of our republic.

The first permanent efforts of French enterprise, in colonizing America, preceded any permanent English

settlement north of the Potomac. Years before the Pilgrims anchored within Cape Cod, the Roman church had been planted, by missionaries from France, in the 1615, eastern moiety of Maine; and Le Caron, an unam1616. bitious Franciscan, the companion of Champlain, had penetrated the land of the Mohawks, had passed to the north into the hunting-grounds of the Wyandots, and, bound by his vows to the life of a beggar, had, on foot, or paddling a bark canoe, gone onward and still onward, taking alms of the savages, till he reached the rivers of Lake Huron.

1623, While Quebec contained scarce fifty inhabitants, 1625. priests of the Franciscan order-Le Caron, Viel, 1626. Sagard-had laboured for years as missionaries in Upper Canada, or made their way to the neutral Huron tribe that dwelt on the waters of the Niagara.

1632.

After the Canada Company had been suppressed, 1622. and their immunities had, for five years, been enjoyed by the Calvinists William and Emeric Caen, the hundred associates,-Richelieu, Champlain, Razilly, and 1627. opulent merchants, being of the number,-by a charter from Louis XIII., obtained a grant of New France, and, after the restoration of Quebec by its English conquerors, entered upon the government of their province. Its limits embraced specifically the whole basin of the St. Lawrence, and of such other rivers in New France as flowed directly into the sea; they included, moreover, Florida, or the country south of Virginia, esteemed a French province in virtue of the unsuccessful efforts of Coligny.

Religious zeal, not less than commercial ambition, had influenced France to recover Canada; and Champlain, its

governor, whose imperishable name will rival with 1635. posterity the fame of Smith and of Hudson, ever disinterested and compassionate, full of honour and probity, of ardent devotion and burning zeal, esteemed "the salvation of a soul worth more than the conquest of an empire." The commercial monopoly of a privileged company could not foster a colony; the climate of the country round Quebec, "where summer hurries through the sky," did not invite to agriculture; no persecutions of Catholics swelled the stream of emigration; and, at first, there was little, except religious enthusiasm, to give vitality to the province. Touched by the simplicity of the order of

St. Francis, Champlain had selected its priests of the contemplative class for his companions; "for they were free from ambition." But the aspiring honour of the Gallican Church was interested; a prouder sympathy was awakened among the devotees at court; and, the Franciscans having, as a mendicant order, been excluded from the rocks and deserts of the New World, the office of converting the heathen of Canada, and thus enlarging the borders of French dominion, was intrusted solely to the Jesuits.

1632.

The establishment of "the Society of Jesus" by Loyola had been contemporary with the Reformation, of 1539, which it was designed to arrest the progress; and 1540. its complete organization belongs to the period when the first full edition of Calvin's Institutes saw the light. Its members were, by its rules, never to become prelates, and could gain power and distinction only by influence over mind. Their vows were, poverty, chastity, absolute obedience, and a constant readiness to go on missions against heresy or heathenism. Their cloisters became the best schools in the world. Emancipated, in a great degree, from the forms of piety, separated from domestic ties, constituting a community essentially intellectual as well as essentially plebeian, bound together by the most perfect organization, and having for their end a control over opinion among the scholars and courts of Europe and throughout the habitable globe, the order of the Jesuits held, as its ruling maxims, the widest diffusion of its influence, and the closest internal unity. Immediately on its institution, their missionaries, kindling with a heroism that defied every danger and endured every toil, made their way to the ends of the earth; they raised the emblem of man's salvation on the Moluccas, in Japan, in India, in Thibet, in Cochin China, and in China; they penetrated Ethiopia, and reached the Abyssinians; they planted missions among the Caffres: in California, on the banks of the Marañhon, in the plains of Paraguay, they invited the wildest of barbarians to the civilization of Christianity.

The genius of Champlain, whose comprehensive 1632. mind planned enduring establishments for French commerce, and a career of discovery that should carry the lilies of the Bourbons to the extremity of North America, could devise no method of building up the dominion of

France in Canada but by an alliance with the Hurons, or of confirming that alliance but by the establishment of missions. Such a policy was congenial to a church which cherishes every member of the human race without regard to lineage or skin. It was, moreover, favoured by the conditions of the charter itself, which recognized the neophyte among the savages as an enfranchised citizen of France.

Thus it was neither commercial enterprise nor royal ambition which carried the power of France into the heart of our continent: the motive was religion. Religious enthusiasm colonized New England; and religious enthusiasm founded Montreal, made a conquest of the wilderness on the upper lakes, and explored the Mississippi. Puritanism gave New England its worship and its schools; the Roman church created for Canada its altars, its hospitals, and its seminaries. The influence of Calvin can be traced in every New England village; in Canada the monuments of feudalism and the Catholic Church stand side by side; and the names of Montmorenci and Bourbon, of Levi and Condé, are mingled with memorials of St. Athanasius and Augustin, of St. Francis of Assisi, and Ignatius Loyola. 1633- Within three years after the second occupation of 1636. Canada, the number of Jesuit priests in the province reached fifteen; and every tradition bears testimony to their worth. They had the faults of ascetic superstition; but the horrors of a Canadian life in the wilderness were resisted by an invincible passive courage, and a deep internal tranquillity. Away from the amenities of life, away from the opportu nities of vain glory, they became dead to the world, and possessed their souls in unalterable peace. The few who lived to grow old, though bowed by the toils of a long mission, still kindled with the fervour of apostolic zeal. The history of their labours is connected with the origin of every celebrated town in the annals of French America: not a cape was turned, nor a river entered, but a Jesuit led the way.

Behold, then, the Jesuits Brebeuf and Daniel, soon to be followed by the gentler Lallemand, and many others of their order, bowing meekly in obedience to their vows,

and joining a party of barefoot Hurons, who were 1634. returning from Quebec to their country. The journey, by way of the Ottawa and the rivers that interlock with it, was one of more than three hundred leagues, through a