travellers had penetrated farthest into the fearful interior of unknown lands; its missionaries won most familiarly the confidence of the aboriginal hordes; its writers described with keener and wiser observation the forms of nature in her wildness, and the habits and languages of savage man; its soldiers, and every lay Frenchman in America owed military service, uniting beyond all others celerity with courage, knew best how to endure the hardships of forest life and to triumph in forest warfare. Its ocean chivalry had given a name to Carolina, and its merchants a people to Acadia. The French discovered the basin of the St. Lawrence, were the first to explore and possess the banks of the Mississippi, and planned an American empire that should unite the widest valleys and most copious inland waters of the world. But New France was governed exclusively by the monarchy of its metropolis; and was shut against the intellectual daring of its philosophy, the liberality of its political economists, the movements of its industrial genius, its legal skill, and its infusion of Protestant freedom. Nothing representing the new activity of thought in modern France went to America; nothing had leave to go there but what was old and worn out. The government thought only to transmit to its American empire the exhausted polity of the middle ages; the castes of feudal Europe; its monarchy, its hierarchy, its nobility, and its dependent peasantry; while commerce was enfeebled by protection, stifled under the weight of inconvenient regulations, and fettered by exclusive grants. The land was parcelled out in seigniories; and, though quit-rents were moderate, transfers and sales of leases were burdened with restrictions and heavy fines. The men who held the plough were tenants and vassals, of whom few could either write or read. No village school was open for their instruction; nor was there one printing-press in either Canada or Louisiana. The central will of the administration, though checked by concessions of monopolies, was neither guided by local legislatures nor restrained by parliaments or courts of law. But France was reserved for a nobler influence in the New World than that of propagating institutions which in the Old World were giving up the ghost; nor had Providence set apart America for the reconstruction of the decaying framework of feudal tyranny. The colonists from England brought over the forms of the government of the mother country, and the purpose of giving them a better development and a fairer career in the western world. The French emigrants took with them only what belonged to the past, and nothing that represented modern freedom. The English emigrants retained what they called English privileges, but left behind in the parent country English inequalities, the monarch and nobility and prelacy. French America was closed against even a gleam of intellectual independence, nor did it contain so much as one dissenter from the Roman church; English America had English liberties in greater purity and with far more of the power of the people than England. Its inhabitants were self-organized bodies of freeholders, pressing upon the receding forests, winning their way farther and farther every year, and never going back. They had schools, so that in several of the colonies there was no one to be found, beyond childhood, who could not read and write; they had the printing-press, scattering among them books and pamphlets and many newspapers; they had a ministry chiefly composed of men of their own election. In private life, they were accustomed to take care of themselves; in public affairs, they had local legislatures and municipal selfdirection. And now this continent, from the Gulf of Mexico to where civilized life is stayed by barriers of frost, was become their dwelling-place and their heritage. Reasoning men in New York, as early as 1748, foresaw and announced that the conquest of Canada, by relieving the northern colonies from danger, would hasten their emancipation. An attentive Swedish traveller in that year heard the opinion, and published it to Sweden and to Europe; the early dreams of John Adams made the removal of "the turbulent Gallics a prelude to the approaching greatness of his country. During the negotiations for peace, the kinsman and bosom friend of Edmund Burke employed the British press to unfold the danger to England from retaining Canada; and the French minister for foreign affairs frankly warned the British envoy that the cession of Canada would lead to the independence of North America. Unintimidated by the prophecy, and obeying a higher and wiser instinct, England happily persisted. "We have caught them at last," said Choiseul to those around him, on the definitive surrender of New France; and, at once giving up Louisiana to Spain, his eager hopes anticipated the speedy struggle of America for separate existence. So soon as the sagacious and experienced Vergennes, the French ambassador at Constantinople, a grave, laborious man, remarkable for a calm temper and moderation of character, heard the conditions of the peace, he also said to his friends, and even openly to a British traveller: "The consequences of the entire cession of Canada are obvious. I am persuaded," and afterwards he himself recalled his prediction to the notice of the British ministry, "England will ere long repent of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. They stand no longer in need of her protection; she will call on them to contribute towards supporting the burdens they have helped to bring on her; and they will answer by striking off all dependence." Lord Mansfield, also, used often to declare that he, too, "ever since the peace of Paris, always thought the northern colonies were meditating a state of independency on Great Britain." The colonial system, being founded on injustice, was at war with itself. The principle which confined the commerce of each colony to its own metropolis was not only introduced by England into its domestic legislation, but was accepted as the law of nations in its treaties with other powers; so that, while it wantonly restrained its colonists, it was jealously and on its own theory rightfully excluded from the rich possessions of France and Spain. Those regions could be thrown open to British traders only by the general abrogation of the mercantile monopoly, which would extend the benefit to universal commerce, or by British conquest, which would close them once more against all the world but the victors, even against the nations which had discovered and planted them. Leaving the nobler policy of liberty to find its defenders where it could, and wilfully, and as it were fatally, blind to what would follow, England chose the policy of conquest and exclusion; and had already acquired much of the empire of Spain in America, and nearly the whole of that of France in America and Asia. The balance of the colonial system was destroyed for ever; there existed no longer the community of interest for its support on the part of the great maritime powers of Europe. The seven years' war, which doubled the debt of England, increasing it to seven hundred millions of dollars, had been begun by her for the possession of the Ohio valley. She achieved that conquest, but not for herself. Driven out from its share in the great colonial system, France was swayed by its own commercial and political interests, by its wounded pride, and by that enthusiasm which the support of a good cause enkindles, to take up the defence of the freedom of the seas, and heartily to desire the enfranchisement of the English plantations. This policy was well devised; and we shall see that England became not so much the possessor of the valley of the west as the transient trustee, commissioned to transfer it from the France of the middle ages to the free people who were making for humanity a new existence in America. |