New France was all head. Under king, noble, and Jesuit, the lank, lean
body would not thrive. Even commerce wore the sword, decked itself
with badges of nobility, aspired to forest seigniories and hordes of
savage retainers. Along the borders of the sea an adverse power was
strengthening and widening, with slow but stedfast growth, full of
blood and muscle--a body without a head. Each had its strength, each
its weakness, each its own modes of vigorous life: but the one was
fruitful, the other barren; the one instinct with hope, the other
darkening with shadows of despair.
[Footnote 53: From the introduction to "The Pioneers of France in the
New World." Copyright, 1865, 1885, by Francis Parkman. Published by
Little, Brown & Company.]
By name, local position, and character one of these communities of
freemen stands forth as the most conspicuous representative of this
antagonism--liberty and absolutism, New England and New France. The
one was the offspring of a triumphant government; the other, of an
opprest and fugitive people: the one, an unflinching champion of the
Roman Catholic reaction; the other, a vanguard of the Reform. Each
followed its natural laws of growth, and each came to its natural
results. Vitalized by the principles of its foundation, the Puritan
commonwealth grew apace. New England was preeminently the land of
material progress. Here the prize was within every man's reach;
patient industry need never doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the
four gospels, assiduity in pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of
a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock.
Politically she was free; socially she suffered from that subtile and
searching oppression which the dominant opinion of a free community
may exercise over the members who compose it. As a whole, she grew
upon the gaze of the world, a signal example of expansive energy; but
she has not been fruitful in those salient and striking forms of
character which often give a dramatic life to the annals of nations
far less prosperous.
We turn to New France, and all is reversed. Here was a bold attempt to
crush under the exactions of a grasping hierarchy, to stifle under the
curbs and trappings of a feudal monarchy a people compassed by
influences of the wildest freedom--whose schools were the forest and
the sea, whose trade was an armed barter with savages, and whose daily
life a lesson of lawless independence. But this fierce spirit had its
vent. The story of New France is from the first a story of war: of
war--for so her founders believed--with the adversary of mankind
himself; war with savage tribes and potent forest commonwealths; war
with the encroaching powers of heresy and of England. Her brave,
unthinking people were stamped with the soldier's virtues and the
soldier's faults; and in their leaders were displayed, on a grand and
novel stage, the energies, aspirations, and passions which belong to
hopes vast and vague, ill-restricted powers, and stations of command.
The growth of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a
busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to
gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the
achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It
was a vain attempt. Long and valiantly her chiefs upheld their cause,
leading to battle a vassal population, warlike as themselves. Borne
down by numbers from without, wasted by corruption from within, New
France fell at last; and out of her fall grew revolutions whose
influence to this hour is felt through every nation of the civilized
world.
The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its
departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange,
romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the
fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest,
mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship
on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed
continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval
sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling
with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for
civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests,
priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism.
Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the
cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage
hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst
shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a
far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to
shame the boldest sons of toil.