COLONIZATION BY FRANCE AND BY ENGLAND.
A century and a half had elapsed since Champlain laid the foundations
of French empire among the forests of the St. Lawrence valley. During
those years the nations of Western Europe were possessed by an eager
desire to extend their authority over the territories which recent
discovery had opened. On the shores of the Northern Atlantic there
were a New France, a New Scotland, a New England, a New Netherlands,
a New Sweden. Southwards stretched the vast domain for whose future
the occupation by Spain had already prepared deadly and enduring
blight. France and England contended for possession of the great Indian
peninsula. Holland and Portugal, with a vigour which their later years
do not exhibit, founded settlements alike in Eastern and in Western
seas, gaining thus expanded trade and vast increase of wealth.
France had shared the prevailing impulse, and put forth her strength
to establish in Canada a dominion worthy to bear her name. The wise
minister Colbert perceived the greatness of the opportunity, and spared
neither labour nor outlay to foster the growth of colonies which would
secure to France a firm hold of this magnificent territory. Successive
Kings lent aid in every form. Well-chosen Governors brought to the
colony every advantage which honest and able guidance could afford.
Soldiers were furnished for defence; food was supplied in seasons
of scarcity. A fertile soil and trading opportunities which were not
surpassed in any part of the continent, offered inducements fitted
to attract crowds of the enterprising and the needy. But under every
encouragement New France remained feeble and unprogressive. When she
passed under British rule, her population was scarcely over sixty
thousand, and had been for several years actually diminishing. Quebec,
her chief city, had barely seven thousand inhabitants; Montreal had
only four thousand. The rest of the people cultivated, thriftlessly,
patches of land along the shores of the great river and its affluents;
or found, like the savages around them, a rude and precarious
subsistence by the chase. The revenue of the colony was no more than
£14,000--a sum insufficient to meet the expenditure. Its exports were
only £115,000.
While France was striving thus vainly to plant in Canada colonies which
should bear her name and reinforce her greatness, some Englishmen who
were dissatisfied with the conditions of their life at home, began
to settle a few hundred miles away on the shores of the same great
continent. They had no encouragement from Kings or statesmen; the only
boon they gained, and even that with difficulty, was permission to
be gone. When famine came upon them, they suffered its pains without
relief; their own brave hearts and strong arms were their sufficient
defence. But their rise to strength and greatness was rapid. Within a
period of ten years twenty thousand Englishmen had found homes in the
American settlements. Before the seventeenth century closed, Virginia
alone contained a population larger than that of all Canada. When
the final struggle opened, the thirteen English colonies contained a
population of between two and three million to contrast with the poor
sixty thousand Frenchmen who were their neighbours on the north. The
greatness of the colonies can be best measured by a comparison with the
mother country. England was then a country of less than six million;
Scotland of one million; Ireland of two million.
The explanation of this vast difference of result between the efforts
of the English and those of the French to colonize the American
continent is to be found mainly in the widely different quality of the
two nations. England, in the words of Adam Smith, “bred and formed men
capable of achieving such great actions and laying the foundation of
so great an empire.” France bred no such men; or if she did so, they
remained at home unconcerned with the founding of empires abroad. The
Englishman who took up the work of colonizing, came of his own free
choice to make for himself a home; he brought with him a free and bold
spirit; a purpose and capacity to direct his own public affairs. The
Frenchman came reluctantly, thrust forth from the home he preferred,
and to which he hoped to return. He came, submissive to the tyranny
which he had not learned to hate. He was part of the following of a
great lord, to whom he owed absolute obedience. He did not care to till
the ground: he would hunt or traffic with the Indians in furs till the
happy day when he was permitted to go back to France. Great empires are
not founded with materials such as these.
But France was unfortunate in her system no less than in her men.
Feudalism was still in its unbroken strength. The soil of France was
still parcelled out among great lords, who rendered military service
to the King; and was still cultivated by peasants, who rendered
military service to the great lord. Feudalism was now carried into
the Canadian wilderness. Vast tracts of land were bestowed upon
persons of influence, who undertook to provide settlers. The seigneur
established his own abode in a strong, defensible position, and settled
his peasantry around him. They paid a small rent and were bound to
follow him to such wars as he thought good to wage, whether against
the Indians or the English. He reserved for his own benefit, or sold
to any who would purchase, the right to fish and to trade in furs;
he ground the corn of his tenantry at rates which he himself fixed.
He administered justice and punished all crimes excepting treason
and murder. When the feudal system was about to enter on its period
of decay in Europe, France began to lay upon that unstable basis the
foundation of her colonial empire.
The infant commerce of the colony was strangled by monopolies.
Great trading companies purchased at court, or favourites obtained
gratuitously, exclusive right to buy furs from the Indians and to
import all foreign goods used in the colonies--fixing at their
own discretion the prices which they were to pay and to receive.
Occasionally in a hard season they bought up the crops and sold them
at famine prices. The violation of these monopolies by unlicensed
persons was punishable by death. The colonists had no thought of
self-government; they were a light-hearted, submissive race, who were
contented with what the King was pleased to send them. Their officials
plundered them, and with base avarice wasted their scanty stores.
The people had no power for their own protection, and their cry of
suffering was slow to gain from the distant King that justice which
they were not able to enforce.
The priest came with his people to guard their orthodoxy in this new
land--to preserve that profound ignorance in which lay the roots of
their devotion. Government discouraged the printing-press; scarcely
any of the peasantry could so much as read. At a time when Connecticut
expended one-fourth of its revenues upon the common school, the
Canadian peasant was wholly uninstructed. In Quebec there had been,
almost from the days of Champlain, a college for the training of
priests. There and at Montreal were Jesuit seminaries, in which
children of the well-to-do classes received a little instruction. A
feeble attempt had been made to educate the children of the Indians;
but for the children of the ordinary working Frenchmen settled in
Canada no provision whatever had been made.
The influences which surrounded the infancy of the English colonies
were eminently favourable to robust growth. Coming of their own
free choice, the colonists brought with them none of the injurious
restraints which in the Old World still impeded human progress. The
burdensome observances of feudalism were not admitted within the new
empire. Every colonist was a landowner. In some States the settlers
divided among themselves the lands which they found unoccupied, waiting
no consent of King or of noble. In others, they received, for prices
which were almost nominal, grants of land from persons--as William
Penn, who had received large territorial rights from the sovereign. In
all cases, whether by purchase or by appropriation, they became the
independent owners of the lands which they tilled. At the beginning,
they were too insignificant to be regarded by the Government at home:
favoured by this beneficent neglect, they were allowed to conduct
in peace their own public affairs. As their importance increased,
the Crown asserted its right of control; but their exercise of the
privilege of self-government was scarcely ever interfered with. The
men who founded the New England States carried with them into the
wilderness a deep conviction that universal education was indispensable
to the success of their enterprise. While the French Canadian,
despising agriculture, roamed the forest in pursuit of game, ignorant
himself, and the father of ignorant children, the thoughtful New
England farmer was helping with all his might to build up a system of
common schools by which every child born on that free soil should be
effectively taught. Thus widely dissimilar were the methods according
to which France and England sought to colonize the lately-discovered
continent. An equally wide dissimilarity of result was inevitable.
It was in the closing years of the great experiment that France devised
the bold conception of establishing a line of military settlements on
the Mississippi as well as on the St. Lawrence,[16] and thus confining
the English between the Alleghany Mountains and the sea. In view of the
extreme inferiority of her strength, the project seems extravagant. It
was utterly impossible to restrain, by any forces which France could
command, the expansive energy of the English colonies. There were sixty
thousand Frenchmen proposing to imprison on the sea-coast two million
Englishmen. But the constitution of the French settlements, while it
enfeebled them and unfitted them to cope with their rivals in peaceful
growth, made them formidable beyond their real strength for purposes
of aggression. Canada was a military settlement; every Canadian was
a soldier, bound to follow to the field his feudal lord. The English
colonists were peaceful farmers or traders; they were widely scattered,
and living as they did under many independent governments, their
combination for any common warlike purpose was almost impossible. That
they should ultimately overthrow the dominion of their rivals was
inevitable; but if the French King had been able to reinforce more
liberally the arms of his Canadian subjects, the contest must have been
prolonged and bloody. Happily, his resources were taxed to the utmost
by the complications which surrounded him at home. The question as to
which race should be supreme on the American continent was helped to a
speedy solution on the battle-fields of the Seven Years’ War.