The French idea, had it prevailed in the strife, would not have been capable of building up a pacific union of partially independent states, covering this vast continent from ocean to ocean. Within that rigid and rigorous bureaucratic system there was no room for spontaneous individuality, no room for local self-government, and no chance for a flexible federalism to grow up. A well-known phrase of Louis XIV. was, "The state is myself." That phrase represented his ideal. It was approximately true in Old France, realized as far as sundry adverse conditions would allow. The Grand Monarch intended that in New France it should be absolutely true. Upon that fresh soil was to be built up a pure monarchy without concession to human weaknesses and limitations. It was a pet scheme of Louis XIV., and never did a philanthropic world-mender contemplate his grotesque phalanstery or pantarchy with greater pleasure than this master of kingcraft looked forward to the construction of a perfect Christian state in America.
The pages of our great historian are full of examples which prove that if the French idea failed of realization, and the state it founded was overwhelmed, it was not from any lack of lofty qualities in individual Frenchmen. In all the history of the American continent no names stand higher than some of the French names. For courage, for fortitude and high resolve, for sagacious leadership, statesmanlike wisdom, unswerving integrity, devoted loyalty, for all the qualities which make life heroic, we may learn lessons innumerable from the noble Frenchmen who throng in Parkman's pages. The difficulty was not in the individuals, but in the system; not in the units, but in the way they were put together. For while it is true—though many people do not know it—that by no imaginable artifice can you make a society that is better than the human units you put into it, it is also true that nothing is easier than to make a society that is worse than its units. So it was with the colony of New France.
Nowhere can we find a description of despotic government more careful and thoughtful, or more graphic and lifelike, than Parkman has given us in his volume on "The Old Régime in Canada." Seldom, too, will one find a book fuller of political wisdom. The author never preaches like Carlyle, nor does he hurl huge generalizations at our heads like Buckle; he simply describes a state of society that has been. But I hardly need say that his description is not—like the Dryasdust descriptions we are sometimes asked to accept as history—a mere mass of pigments flung at random upon a canvas. It is a picture painted with consummate art; and in this instance the art consists in so handling the relations of cause and effect as to make them speak for themselves. These pages are alive with political philosophy, and teem with object lessons of extraordinary value. It would be hard to point to any book where History more fully discharges her high function of gathering friendly lessons of caution from the errors of the past.
Of all the societies that have been composed of European men, probably none was ever so despotically organized as New France, unless it may have been the later Byzantine Empire, which it resembled in the minuteness of elaborate supervision over all the pettiest details of life. In Canada the protective, paternal, socialistic, or nationalistic theory of government—it is the same old cloven hoof, under whatever specious name you introduce it—was more fully carried into operation than in any other community known to history except ancient Peru. No room was left for individual initiative or enterprise. All undertakings were nationalized. Government looked after every man's interests in this world and the next: baptized and schooled him; married him and paid the bride's dowry; gave him a bounty with every child that was born to him; stocked his cupboard with garden seeds and compelled him to plant them; prescribed the size of his house and the number of horses and cattle he might keep, and the exact percentages of profit he might be allowed to make, and how his chimneys should be swept, and how many servants he might employ, and what theological doctrine he might believe, and what sort of bread the bakers might bake, and where goods might be bought and how much might be paid for them; and if in a society so well cared for it were possible to find indigent persons, such paupers were duly relieved, from a fund established by government. Unmitigated benevolence was the theory of Louis XIV.'s Canadian colony, and heartless political economy had no place there. Nor was there any room for free thinkers; when the King after 1685 sent out word that no mercy must be shown to heretics, the governor, Denonville, with a pious ejaculation, replied that not so much as a single heretic could be found in all Canada.
Such was the community whose career our historian has delineated with perfect soundness of judgment and wealth of knowledge. The fate of this nationalistic experiment, set on foot by one of the most absolute of monarchs and fostered by one of the most devoted and powerful of religious organizations, is traced to the operation of causes inherent in its very nature. The hopeless paralysis, the woeful corruption, the moral torpor, resulting from the suppression of individualism, are vividly portrayed; yet there is no discursive generalizing, and from moment to moment the development of the story proceeds from within itself. It is the whole national life of New France that is displayed before us. Historians of ordinary calibre exhibit their subject in fragments, or they show us some phases of life and neglect others. Some have no eyes save for events that are startling, such as battles and sieges; or decorative, such as coronations and court balls. Others give abundant details of manners and customs; others have their attention absorbed by economics; others again feel such interest in the history of ideas as to lose sight of mere material incidents. Parkman, on the other hand, conceives and presents his subject as a whole. He forgets nothing, overlooks nothing; but whether it is a bloody battle, or a theological pamphlet, or an exploring journey though the forest, or a code for the discipline of nunneries, each event grows out of its context as a feature in the total development that is going on before our eyes. It is only the historian who is also philosopher and artist that can thus deal in block with the great and complex life of a whole society. The requisite combination is realized only in certain rare and high types of mind, and there has been no more brilliant illustration of it than Parkman's volumes afford.
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. Never did Destiny preside over a more fateful contest; for it determined which kind of political seed should be sown all over the widest and richest political garden plot left untilled in the world. Free industrial England pitted against despotic militant France for the possession of an ancient continent reserved for this decisive struggle, and dragging into the conflict the belated barbarism of the Stone Age,—such is the wonderful theme which Parkman has treated. When the vividly contrasted modern ideas and personages are set off against the romantic though lurid background of Indian life, the artistic effect becomes simply magnificent. Never has historian grappled with another such epic theme, save when Herodotus told the story of Greece and Persia, or when Gibbon's pages resounded with the solemn tread of marshalled hosts through a thousand years of change.
The story of Mr. Parkman's life can be briefly told. He was born in Boston, in what is now known as Allston Street, September 16, 1823. His ancestors had for several generations been honourably known in Massachusetts. His great-grandfather, Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, a graduate of Harvard in 1741, was minister of the Congregational church in Westborough for nearly sixty years; he was a man of learning and eloquence, whose attention was not all given to Calvinistic theology, for he devoted much of it to the study of history. A son of this clergyman, at the age of seventeen, served as private in a Massachusetts regiment in that greatest of modern wars which was decided on the Heights of Abraham. How little did this gallant youth dream of the glory that was by and by to be shed on the scenes and characters passing before his eyes by the genius of one of his own race and name! Another son of Ebenezer Parkman returned to Boston and became a successful merchant, engaged in that foreign traffic which played so important and liberalizing a part in American life in the days before the Enemy of mankind had invented forty per cent tariffs. The home of this merchant, Samuel Parkman, on the corner of Green and Chardon streets, was long famous for its beautiful flower garden, indicating perhaps the kind of taste and skill so conspicuous afterwards in his grandson. In Samuel the clerical profession skipped one generation, to be taken up again by his son, Rev. Francis Parkman, a graduate of Harvard in 1807, and for many years after 1813 the eminent and beloved pastor of the New North Church. Dr. Parkman was noted for his public spirit and benevolence. Bishop Huntington, who knew him well, says of him: "Every aspect of suffering touched him tenderly. There was no hard spot in his breast. His house was the centre of countless mercies to various forms of want; and there were few solicitors of alms, local or itinerant, and whether for private necessity or public benefactions, that his doors did not welcome and send away satisfied.... For many years he was widely known and esteemed for his efficient interest in some of our most conspicuous and useful institutions of philanthropy. Among these may be especially mentioned the Massachusetts Bible Society, the Society for Propagating the Gospel, the Orphan Asylum, the Humane Society, the Medical Dispensary, the Society for the Relief of Aged and Destitute Clergymen, and the Congregational Charitable Society." He also took an active interest in Harvard University, of which he was an Overseer. In 1829 he founded there the professorship of "Pulpit Eloquence and the Pastoral Care," familiarly known as the Parkman Professorship. A pupil and friend of Channing, he was noted among Unitarians for a broadly tolerant disposition. His wealth of practical wisdom was enlivened by touches of mirth, so that it was said that you could not "meet Dr. Parkman in the street, and stop a minute to exchange words with him, without carrying away with you some phrase or turn of thought so exquisite in its mingled sagacity and humour that it touched the inmost sense of the ludicrous, and made the heart smile as well as the lips." Such was the father of our historian.
Mr. Parkman's mother was a descendant of Rev. John Cotton, one of the most eminent of the leaders in the great Puritan exodus of the seventeenth century. She was the daughter of Nathaniel Hall, of Medford, member of a family which was represented in the convention that framed the Constitution of Massachusetts in 1780. Caroline Hall was a lady of remarkable character, and many of her fine qualities were noticeable in her distinguished son. Of her the late Octavius Frothingham says: "Humility, charity, truthfulness, were her prime characteristics. Her conscience was firm and lofty, though never austere. She had a strong sense of right, coupled with perfect charity toward other people; inflexible in principle, she was gentle in practice. Intellectually she could hardly be called brilliant or accomplished, but she had a strong vein of common sense and practical wisdom, great penetration into character, and a good deal of quiet humour."
Of her six children, the historian, Francis Parkman, was the eldest. As a boy his health was delicate. In a fragment of autobiography, written in the third person, he tells us that "his childhood was neither healthful nor buoyant," and "his boyhood, though for a time active, was not robust." There was a nervous irritability and impulsiveness which kept driving him into activity more intense than his physical strength was well able to bear. At the same time an inborn instinct of self-control, accompanied, doubtless, by a refined unwillingness to intrude his personal feelings upon the notice of other people, led him into such habits of self-repression that his friends sometimes felicitated him on "having no nerves." There was something rudely stoical in his discipline. As he says: "It was impossible that conditions of the nervous system abnormal as his had been from infancy should be without their effects on the mind, and some of these were of a nature highly to exasperate him. Unconscious of their character and origin, and ignorant that with time and confirmed health they would have disappeared, he had no other thought than that of crushing them by force, and accordingly applied himself to the work. Hence resulted a state of mental tension, habitual for several years, and abundantly mischievous in its effects. With a mind overstrained and a body overtasked, he was burning his candle at both ends."