French colony

“ Of colonists, properly so called, there are very few. About fifty white men are scattered throughout the isles. Of these, some trade; others cultivate the soil; while a few wander aimlessly from bay to bay, island to island, living upon whatever the natives like to give them: they are either too lazy to work, or too dishonest to find employment. These men include waifs from all nationalities, including Scotch, English, Irish, American, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Although a French colony, there are only three or four French subjects who can be classed as colonists ”

“ The island colony proved valuable as a supply and repair station for traders and explorers, and thus served as a nucleus of both French and English settlement in America.
It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that, at any time in the world's history, enlightened folk should have thought good colonists could be made out of the sweepings of the jails and gutters of the Old World. ”

“ As each colony becomes rich enough to suffice unto itself, and strong enough to defend itself, England says to the colonists: "You are now big enough to manage for yourselves, it is time you learnt to do without my help." This is what the Englishman says to his sons, as they come to man's estate. The colony forms its government, chooses its ministers, and its parliament; sends representatives to England to watch over its interests there, and becomes, as it were, a branch house of that [Pg 162] immense firm, known in every latitude, under the name of "John Bull and Company." ”

“ For the next few years, therefore, the French had only a few trading posts along the St. Lawrence River, where the Indians came at certain times to exchange the furs of the animals they had killed for the beads and trinkets they loved so well.
XIX. FRENCH AND SPANISH QUARRELS.
Twenty years passed by before the French again attempted to plant a colony in America—twenty very eventful years for France and for all western Europe. The people, who, as you have heard, had all been Roman Catholics for centuries, now began to divide. ”

“ Till the end of the seventeenth century the safety of trade and commerce, the means of defence against Spanish or French invasion, the encouragement of immigration, government, and legislation, formed the subjects of discussion with the home government, and the comparatively newly formed colony was too unsettled to think of imparting knowledge to the rising generation. ”

“ During the first year or two, a number of other French came from France and joined the colony, but the object which they had in view, failing, that of raising grapes and olives, the colony gradually dissipated, the emigrants going in different directions, and in Mobile and New Orleans, as elsewhere, may be found the descendants of some of these original colonists, still bearing the names of their ancestors of almost a century ago. ”

“ To a regulated civil government was added increased military protection against the Iroquois Indians; the emigration of French settlers to New France was promoted by every possible means, and a martial spirit was imparted to the population, by the location in the colony of the disbanded soldiers of the Carignan regiment ... and other troops, whose officers became the principal Seigneurs of the colony, on condition of making cessions of land under the feudal tenure, as it still exists, to the soldiers and other inhabitants. ”

“ In 1629, an English colony was planted on New Providence, in the then deserted archipelago. But the French and Spanish persisted in harrying the settlement, which was frequently the scene of stormy conflicts. At last, in 1718, the English government drove out the pirates who had come to resort there in great numbers, resettled the islands, and an era of progress opened.
Americans capture the colony.
[Pg 240] During the Revolutionary war many wealthy Tories went from the continental colonies to the Bahamas and opened up large plantations, with slave labor. ”

“ On the eve of the great Revolution, France possessed, as I have said, the finest colony in the world. Her historians are never weary of enumerating the amount of its products, the great trade, the warehouses full of sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo, and cocoa; its plains covered with splendid estates, its hill-sides dotted with noble houses; a white population, rich, refined, enjoying life as only a luxurious colonial society can enjoy it ”

“ Crown Colonies.There is another group of British possessions which are peculiarly under the government of the Colonial Office, and which have often reason to be dissatisfied with that Government—I mean the Crown Colonies, the most important of which are the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, the West Indian Islands, and Mauritius. In nearly every Crown Colony, the white population bears a very small proportion to the natives, and is composed mainly of merchants, bankers, a few officials, and, in the West Indies, of planters. ”

“ In the Colonies, as everywhere else in this world, the vital point is not who decides, but what is decided on! That measures tending really to the best advantage temporal and spiritual of the Colony be adopted, and strenuously put in execution; there lies the grand interest of every good citizen British and Colonial. Such measures, whosoever have originated and prescribed them, will gradually be sanctioned by all men and gods; and clamors of every kind in reference to them may safely to a great extent be neglected, as clamorous merely, and sure to be transient. ”

“ After this there was peace for a time in Fort Caroline. But it soon became peace with misery, for the colony began to starve. The long-expected ship from France did not come. Rich and fertile land spread all round them, but the colonists had neither ploughed nor sown it. They trusted to France for all their food. Now for months no ships had come, and their supplies were utterly at an end.
So in ever increasing misery the days passed. Some crawled about the meadows and forest, digging for roots and gathering herbs. ”

“ Even colonizing England has planted military colonies in Ireland, Nova Scotia, and Ohio, besides having temporary camps on her frontiers where towns grow up, as at Raglan and Otahuhu, in New Zealand; and the pensioner settlement of Onehunga may be taken as an image of an ancient Roman colony of veterans.
3. We seem to rise considerably in the scale as we leave behind us colonies founded on the lust of conquest, and arrive at colonies whose formation was governed by political motives. They are always more or less collective; they sometimes take place en masse ”

“ In the old Thirteen lands of America we hear of the colonial period as meaning the time of imperfect freedom; when full freedom is won, the name of colony is cast away. And yet surely a colony of England was not meant to be a mere Roman colonia, a mere Athenian κληρουχία, a garrison to hold down a subject province; it was surely meant to be, like a Greek ἀποικία, a new home of English life and English speech. In that nobler sense of the word, a colony which is not independent has not risen to the full rank of a colony; it is hardly a home for the new folk of the mother-land ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the fact that such things took place, affords a very simple explanation of the difficulties which had already arisen and which subsequently arose in the history of European colonization between a mother country and her colonies. Men could put two and two together in those days as in ours. If colonists saw the rulers of the ruling land treating high offices in the colony as a matter of individual profit and public indifference, they could only come to the conclusion that they had better take care of themselves ”

“ But it is just this which has made us successful colonists, and it is the absence of this which makes French colonies dead failures. Whereas we and the Germans pour forth tens of thousands of emigrants, France sends to her North African Settlements just over six hundred persons per annum—and they are nearly all officials. ”

“ So what some have imagined up to the present is also unreasonable, that no other outlay is necessary for this colony which we are establishing in new France, except enough in the beginning to transport and locate our people yonder ”

“ To give the greater weight to what I say, I may take the liberty to tell you, I have as little personal interest, as little to lose in the colony, as most of you. If I consulted either my safety or my temporal interest, I should soon remove with my family to Great Britain, or the Northern colonies, where I have had very inviting offers. Nature has not formed me for a military life, nor furnished me with any great degree of fortitude and courage ”

“ In the northerly portion, suitable for agriculture, this was carried on by natives; but their land was confiscated by the Germans, and, as Dr Bönn stated in a reading upon the Colony, "the framework of society is European; very little land is in the hands of natives." ”

“ Continuity of English colonization meant little more than that the lands claimed by one colony were coterminous with those claimed by the next, and that no other European nation could plant a settlement between the Alleghanies and the sea without committing a trespass and fighting for its place. There was no continuity of what would now be called effective occupation. Colony was divided from colony by many miles of forest and backwood. ”

“ The new problems were how to administer and to develop not a small island or peninsula but a very large continental area, and how to rule a rival white race which from the [70] beginnings of colonization in North America had made that area, or part of it, its own. To these two most difficult problems was added a third, how to administer the new territory and to rule the French colonists, so as to work in harmony with the adjacent British colonies. Conquest and settlement, so to speak, overlapped. ”

“ Within a few hours steaming from Marseilles, you set foot in France's oldest African colony, upon which, owing to its proximity to the homeland, a great nation has been able to bring to bear a continuous and irresistible influence for nearly a century. ”

“ The danger from the north and the west had undoubtedly had a repressive influence upon the colonists, and had kept them subservient to the English colonial system, which they hated and which was in reality at the root of their disaffection. The Peace of Paris removed all danger from Spain in the south, while the French danger was removed by the victory of Wolfe; and the rising colonies felt themselves as a new race about to start some great venture. ”

“ In 1701 it was pointed out by the Colonial Office of that day, that "by several letters, memorials, and other papers, as well from the inhabitants as Proprietors of both these provinces, that they are at present in confusion and anarchy; and that it is much to be apprehended lest [Pg 150] by the heats of the parties that are amongst them, they should fall into such violences as may endanger the lives of many persons and destroy the colony." ”

“ The preamble set forth in forcible terms the lamentable failure of all the previous trading associations to redeem their pledges in the matter of colonization; and the new associates were, by the terms of their charter, bound in the most formal and positive manner, to convey annually to the colony, beginning in the following year, 1628, from two to three hundred bona fide settlers, and in the fifteen following years to transport thither a total of not less than four thousand persons male and female. ”

“ The first colonists sent out, being chiefly of the Society of Friends, with the predominating characteristics of their people, temperance, industry, and economy, and conducting themselves in the difficulties and hardships of their new situation with much prudence and circumspection, avoided most of the dangers to which a new colony is usually subject, and received with demonstrations of satisfaction the new settlers who arrived at New Castle October 24, 1682. ”

“ And to accomplish this, it requires people, and these peoplings must be made by degrees, so that it will not appear in such a kingdom as France.'1 The great weakness of Canada was the paucity of the white population. Had mines been discovered, the colony would no doubt have been much stronger, for a far greater number of colonists would have come out from France; and, while the character of the people would have been, in a sense, at least as restless as it actually was, the restlessness would have been localized in the mining areas, which would have become large centres of population. ”

“ Every colonist had a right to inhabit, if he pleased, in any other colony, and as a British subject he was capable of inheriting lands by descent in every other colony. The commercial intercourse of the colonies too was regulated by the general laws of the British empire, and could not be restrained or obstructed by colonial legislation. ”

“ Happily for them, they possessed within their number almost every description of artificer requisite for such an undertaking, their original intention being to found a settlement in Canada, and thus carpenters, shoe-makers, weavers, tailors, mill-wrights, being all ready to contribute their aid and assistance to each other, the colony made rapid progress, and soon assumed the appearance of a thriving and prosperous place. ”