New France

“ So while the Old-World feudalism and despotism underlaid the colonization enterprise of New France, and sought to reproduce and reconstruct itself among these forests on our North and West, a pure and rejuvenated democracy was rooting itself and rearing its popular institutions and sway among the hard-working farmers of New England when their settlements were still on the seaboard. Possibly if France had allowed and encouraged, instead of expressly prohibiting, her heretic Huguenots to represent her in her New-World colonization, she might still have had provinces and dominion here. ”

“ The New France was a reproduction of the Old France, with all, and more than all, the restrictions which hampered the growth and hindered the prosperity of the parent State. The New England had inherited all the elements of prosperity with which the Old England was blessed, and had even more of that individuality and freedom of action on the part of its citizens which seems to form so important an element of success. ”

“ The struggle between the machine-like socialistic despotism of New France and the free and spontaneous political vitality of New England is one of the most instructive object lessons with which the experience of mankind has furnished us. The depth of its significance is equalled by the vastness of its consequences. ”

“ And here we have an ordinance from the Court of Versailles, with the Bourbon’s own signature affixed, as if New England were already a French province. Everything is French,—French soldiers, French sailors, French surgeons, and French diseases too, I trow; besides French dancing-masters and French milliners, to debauch our daughters with French fashions! Everything in America is French, except the Canadas, the loyal Canadas, which we helped to wrest, from France. And to that old French province the Englishman of the colonies must go to find his country! ”

“ New France was not only as much a part of the empire as any portion of the realm, but it was to be, so far as circumstances would allow, administered as a home province, with a transfer of feudal institutions, seigniories, bishoprics, proprietary rights, noble and privileged orders, and stingy allotments for common people. As the event proved, these distinctive and primary characteristics of French dominion in America, so widely contrasted with the course and principles of the English colonists, could not be transferred from the Old World so that they would take root here. ”

“ The people of New France had lost none of the natural politeness and ease of their ancestors, and, as every gentleman of the Governor's suite was at once recognized, a conversation, friendly even to familiarity, ensued between them and the citizens and habitans, who worked as if they were building their very souls into the walls of the old city. ”

“ England in conscious superiority smiles at a nation which has had seven political revolutions in a hundred years. Republic, then Empire, then a return to the Bourbons, then Constitutional Monarchy under Louis Philippe, then Republic, followed by Empire again, and now for the third time a Republic!
But France, complex, mobile, changeful as the sea, in riotous enjoyment of her new-found liberties, casts off a form of government as she would an ill-fitting garment. She knows the value of tranquillity—she had it for one thousand years! ”

“ But practically viewed, the relative place of interest which the religious prompting proved to have, in comparison with mundane schemes of thrift, trade, and commerce, will depend upon the severity or the leniency of the judgment which we visit upon the New England colonists. No candid student of our history, however, can fail to allow and affirm that the founders of New France in America, in their zeal and heroic toil and endurance for the conversion of the savages, present us on the records examples of nobleness and devotion which Puritan history cannot parallel. ”

“ They traded with the Indians and acquired wealth, and for their greater convenience they made purchases in the Old World. Thus, from the first days almost, the New England Colonies were self-contained, while New France depended on Europe to a degree amazing and pathetic. This fact strikes the keynote of the French régime, explaining, as it does, most of the trials and tribulations of New France in its perennial warfare with the Iroquois, and in the later friction with New England. ”

“ Up to this time the war was purely an American one. France and Britain were at peace, and neither country sent soldiers to help their colonies. It was the settlers, the farmers, fishermen and fur traders of New England and New France who fought each other.
And in this the French had one great advantage over the British. The French were united, the British were not. New France was like one great colony in which every man was ready to answer the call to battle. ”

“ The desire which I have always had of making new discoveries in New France, for the good, profit and glory of the French name, and at the same time to lead the poor natives to the knowledge of God, has led me to seek more and more for the greater facility of this undertaking, which can only be secured by means of good regulations. ”

“ A complete answer to this query would lead us far afield, but the whole history of New France bears witness to the fact that the cause of failure is not to be found in the individual French emigrant. There have never been more valiant or tenacious colonists than the peasants of Normandy who cleared away the Laurentian wilderness and explored the recesses of North America. ”

“ For France there may be in store new sf revolutions, and fresh overturnings. Not anchored as is England, in an historic past which she reverences, and with a singularly gifted and emotional people who are the sport of the current of the hour, who can predict her future! But whatever that future may be, no American can be indifferent to the fate of a nation to whom we owe so much. ”

“ Disguise it as you may, the New England States, with their schools and universities, have dictated laws to this continent. They have sent New England ideas all over the West, and they dominate there. Look at Prussia, that little Empire over which Napoleon rushed and almost obliterated. Hardly a generation passed before it had in turn humbled France and taken the power from its Empire. The bright-eyed boys in your mountains and wire-grass may represent you nobly before the world if you educate them. ”

“ France in 1815, like France in 1789, remained a nation divided against itself,—a nation which had perpetuated during a democratic revolution a part of its national tradition most opposed to the logic of its new political and social ideas. ”

“ In the prospective downfall of Royalty in France they beheld glorious visions of another France, a new American Republic, a republic void of aristocratical distinctions, where merit and not rank should demand and receive homage. ”

“ France, rushing ill-prepared, though with overweening confidence, on the great problems of the eighteenth century, shattered not her own hopes alone, but nearly at the same moment the Puritan Republic, breaking the last slight link that bound it to feudal Europe, and placing modern society firmly and tranquilly on its new foundation. ”

“ In a word, though France was peopled with the same individuals, it seemed inhabited by a new nation, entirely different from the old one in its government, its creed, its principles, its manners, and even its customs. ”

“ Les François seront-ils seuls entre toutes les Nations de la terre, priuez de l'honneur de se dilater, & de se respandre dans ce Nouueau Monde. La France beaucoup plus peuplée, que tous les autres Royaumes, n'aura des Habitans que pour soy? ou bien si ses enfans la quittent, s'en vont qui de-çà, qui de-là perdre le nom de François chez l'Estranger.
Shall the French, alone of all the Nations of the earth, be deprived of the honor of expanding and spreading over this New World? Shall France, much more populous than all the other Kingdoms, have Inhabitants only for itself? ”

“ The New World had shrugged its shoulders and wondered how long presumably enlightened nations would continue to tolerate ‘the King business.’ Sides were taken to a certain extent, but at first mainly for purposes of academic debate. America as a whole cherished a sentimental affection for France, her ancient ally in her War of Independence. ”

“ Travellers who only see the outside of things in foreign countries, indeed, may be compared to those who gaze upon a skeleton, instead of the living form, warm with life, sympathy, and beauty. Old France, as studied in her glorious monuments, whether Gallic, Merovingian, Mediaeval, or Renaissance, pales in interest before the New, that France which alone has taught the world the lesson of Equality, and is teaching us every day what misfortunes may be overcome by a noble people, inspired with true patriotism, allied to democratic feeling. In Republican France, now, who can doubt? ”

“ Now since France has three times in sixty years failed to obtain practical results from Political revolutions, all Europe is apt to press forward into new Social doctrine to regulate the future. ”

“ In continental Europe, of late years, the words patriotism and patriot have been used in a more enlarged sense than it is usual here to attribute to them, or than is attached to them in Great Britain. Since the political struggles of France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, the word patriotism has been employed, throughout continental Europe, to express a love of the public good; a preference for the interests of the many to those of the few; ”

“ When after a century of irritation and skirmishing the French in Canada came to a life-and-death struggle with the self-governing colonists of New England, New York, and Virginia, the result for the French power in America was instant and irretrievable annihilation. ”

“ We can see now, as we look back on the history of Europe, how fortunate it was that the colonization of North America by Europeans was deferred until after the period of the Reformation, and especially until after the Elizabethan period in England, the Luther period in Germany, and the splendid struggle of the Dutch for liberty in Holland. The founders of New England and New York were men who had imbibed the principles of resistance both to arbitrary civil power and to universal ecclesiastical authority. ”

“ The times that follow these are the most momentous, the most gigantic in their developments, and thrilling in their interest, which the history of the whole world has to present. In the very beginning of our next volume opens up the great North American Revolution, by which this country lost a colony, and the world gained a great and independent nation;—a vast field of new existence, to which the oppressed and destitute of all lands could flee, and amalgamate and grow into a new and most interesting world. ”

“ The colonial union was the crowning service of the founders of New England to humanity. Now they began, one by one, to descend into the grave, worn to early death by a toilsome grapple with the rough and grinding forces of nature. ”

“ In the preceding chapters, we have tried to show the comprehensive nature of that expansion of Europe which, with ever-accelerating swiftness, has been in operation since the age of discovery, and to indicate that, however great an importance any single colony, English or other, might attribute to itself, its contemporary significance could be measured relatively only to the interests of that empire of which it formed a part. For more or less obvious reasons, this great movement of expansion has usually been treated from the geographical standpoint. ”

“ In a speech at the Savoy, in London, in 1917, the Premier of Newfoundland, England’s oldest colony, gave notable expression to such a return to the policy of an earlier day. “This Empire,” he said, “cannot live as a political empire unless it is developed as an economic empire. All the raw material produced in the Empire should be manufactured in the Empire before it leaves the Empire, and nothing should be admitted into the Empire that could be produced in the Empire.” ”

“ The merchant marine was doubled in eighteen years, the Dutch and other competitors beaten off, and the Empire, and notably New England, greatly increased in power and wealth.
As we have already indicated, however, European imperial theory in the seventeenth century had one serious defect. It failed to take account of human nature in the colonist. Like so many modern theories which consider the state as all, and the individual as nothing, it made the blunder of treating the abstraction as human, and the human as an abstraction. ”

“ They were strong men, one and all, quiet and self-contained in years of peace, grim fighters in seasons of war, and prominent citizens at all times, a godly, gritty, and prosperous race. Of such is the greatness of New England. ”

“ It was usual, in an earlier and less critical day, to trace all of New England's greatness, and of her noble contributions to our common American life, to the same little group of leaders, who were supposed to have done all because they did much. Life is not so simple as that, and in the founding of New England, and the development of her liberties, we must find place for English kings and statesmen, for colonial liberals and martyrs, as well as for Pilgrim Father and Puritan Priest. ”

“ On the other hand, had the Pilgrims and Puritans, as both seriously thought of doing, settled in the tropics, where the nature of the climate and the soil would have turned the scale for slavery, where the conditions of life would have strongly combatted their notions of town and church, and where luxury and easy living would have been quickly attained by their inherent energy, what would then have become of what we call the New England element in our national life? ”