Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

“ Sea-girt and sea-beaten was and is Acadia, with broken shores and many bays, where fishermen and freebooters came and went: a land to nurse a hardy race in small and scattered settlements, nestling in nooks and corners by inlets of the sea. Its importance did not lie in natural riches, but in its geographical position. It was the borderland of French and English colonization. Whoever held in strength Acadia and Cape Breton on the one side, and Newfoundland on the other, could command the river of Canada. ”

“ Nothing but common danger gave them any common life; and, though Pitt's advent to power partially corrected the evil, Pitt was in England not in America. To the end the uniting force came from without rather than from within: the colonies followed the lead of Pitt and his generals, but to the mother country not to the colonies was due the conquest of Canada.
That Canada must be conquered, when England made her effort, was inevitable. The French appeared triumphant; they had moved forward; they had struck heavy blows; but behind the fighting line, even on the surface, they were in straits. ”

“ The Jesuits, on the other hand, imported religious despotism. The Jesuit emissaries were brave men, none more so; they were self-sacrificing to an extreme, venturesome and tenacious, indifferent to danger, and fearless of death. They were tactful in their dealings with the Indians, and were trained in a school of diplomacy which has never been excelled. But they were the champions of exclusiveness, and the enemies of freedom. Their coming meant that one form of religion was to supplant all others—that the spiritual power was, as far as in them lay, to dominate all things and all men ”

“ The reason was that the French relations to the Indians were more human than those of the English. No doubt, among the English colonists were Quakers and Moravians, whose tenets bade them deal gently with the people of the soil; and on the New York frontier, from Dutch times, there had been friendship, sometimes warmer sometimes cooler, between the Dutch and the English colonists on the one hand, and the Iroquois on the other. But the ordinary English colonist's view of the red man was the Old Testament view—hard, exclusive, and often cruel. ”

“ Montreal was left far behind, and many miles of a toilsome, dangerous route were traversed, until by the shores of the great freshwater sea were found the homes of a savage but a settled people. To men inspired by religion and by Imperial views of religion, who looked to be the ministers of a world-wide power, including and dominating all the kingdoms of the earth, the greatness of the distances, the remoteness of the land, the unbounded area of unknown waters stretching far off to the west, were but calls to the imagination and incentives to redoubled effort. ”

“ No colonists were ever more carefully drilled and organized than the Canadian agriculturists; none ever lived a life of more unbounded freedom than the Canadian coureurs de bois. The drilling and organization of the one element, and the roving enterprise of the other, combined to produce a good fighting population; but the extremes in either case were too great to result in forming a community, which should be at once stable and progressive. What was natural in Canada was not colonization. What was colonization, that is to say permanent European settlement in the land, was purely artificial. ”

“ In new fields of colonization, on the other hand, wars are not artificial; they are natural, and not only natural but sometimes absolutely necessary to future happiness and welfare. Just as Europe was herself once in the melting-pot, so the lands which Europeans have settled and are settling, if they are to be the homes of strong peoples in days to come, must, when rival races are planted there, be the scenes of armed strife.
Colonial wars which end where they began, with indecisive treaties tending to further bloodshed, may well be the subject of national sorrow and regret ”

“ Was the contest between France and Great Britain in North America, and the victory of one of the two powers, inevitable, and was it beneficial? From the English point of view, the answer to part of this question is a foregone conclusion. If there was to be a contest, it seems evident, if we look back on the past, that the English must have in the end prevailed. It is impossible to imagine that the French colony of Canada, with a population at the time of the conquest of considerably under 100,000, could dominate the English colonies with a million and a quarter inhabitants. ”

“ Longheaded governors of New York and Massachusetts took a still wider view; but the widest of all was held by the French Governors of Canada, and by the roving Canadians, who, with restless spirit and undaunted enterprise, claimed seas and rivers before they were reached or known, magnifying tales of far-off lands and peoples, building in the air and bringing down to earth a fabric of continental dominion. As a rule, the English view was too circumscribed, the French view was too diffuse. The strength of the English lay in effective occupation within narrow limits ”

“ The truth was that Chartered Companies were alien to the genius of France, or at any rate of Roman Catholic France—the France of the Bourbons. Her greatest ministers, Richelieu and Colbert, were, it is true, loth to discard the system. They wished to give French merchants a direct interest in building up a colonial empire. They saw the English working by means of companies. They saw the Dutch giving to the state the outward semblance of private enterprise. Companies, they argued, would promote French trade and colonization, as they had promoted the trade and colonization of rival nations. ”

“ North America and its peoples were to be in perpetual leading strings, prepared for freedom in the world to come by unquestioning obedience on this side the grave. The Protestant, however narrow and prejudiced in his dealings and mode of life, in theory held and preached a religion which set free, a gospel of glorious liberty. The Roman Catholic missionary preached and acted self-sacrifice so complete, that all freedom of action was eliminated. There was a second and a very practical defect in the system. What Canada wanted was a white population, married settlers, men with wives and children. ”

“ Most readers of the story of the Huron missions will study it mainly as an episode in religious enterprise. They will note the heroism of the Jesuit priests—their faithfulness unto death, their constancy under torture and suffering not surpassed by the stoicism of the North American Indians themselves. They will mourn the failure of their efforts, the butchery, the martyrdom, but will record that all was not absolutely thrown away; for even in the lodges of the Five Nations we read that some of the nameless Hurons held to the faith which their French teachers loved and served so well. ”

“ Thus, where Central America gave gold and silver, there adventurers from Europe hurried in and stayed. The fisheries of Newfoundland saw men come and go; the sea was there the attraction, not the land. The agricultural resources of Virginia and New England were left undeveloped by Europeans, until the time came when business-like companies were formed by men who could afford to wait, and when enthusiasts went over the Atlantic not so much to make money as to live patiently and in the fear of God. ”

“ It is true that the English North American colonies were also agricultural colonies; but they had a great advantage over New France, in that their coasts were open all the year round, resulting in a maritime trade, which could never be enjoyed by Canada. Moreover New England, at any rate, was peopled by colonists who went out, not to make their fortunes, and not to build up a dominion for their King, but to make their homes, and their children's homes, on the agricultural pattern, in as kindly a soil as, and in a kindlier climate than, that of Canada. ”

“ Had the French been loyal to the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, had they ceased to instil the spirit of disaffection into the minds of men who were no longer their subjects, had they discountenanced instead of encouraging acts of barbarity, had they not made religion a cloak for maliciousness, and used the ministers of religion as political agitators of the worst and most unscrupulous type, Acadia and the Acadians would have prospered under the British Government as Canada and the Canadians prospered in after years. ”

“ But what was deemed a fault in France would, in colonizing America, have been a virtue; inasmuch as in the field of adventure, trade, and settlement in new lands, the men who are least bound by old-world systems and traditional views are of most value. If fair play had been given to the French Protestants, Canada would have been far stronger than it ever was while it belonged to France, and probably it would have continued to belong to France down to the present day. ”

“ Only, as colonization spread in the long course of years, the dwellers in one province came into contact with the dwellers in another, and both the one and the other came face to face with the French advance. Then the pressure of common danger made for union, and the race instinct gathered strength. The mother country sent out soldiers; colonists were enlisted in royal regiments to supplement the provincial militias; and in clumsy, most imperfect fashion, the English in North America began to shape themselves into a nation. ”