CHAPTER VI.
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.