| The new patents of English colonization. Motives of English colonization in the seventeenth century. The English kept near to the sea. |
In theory the commercial companies were, like the individual patentees of the former generation, working under the authority of the Crown. Indeed that authority was far more strongly proclaimed than before, and for vague generalities were substituted very definite restrictions; but this was only a sign of a new time. It indicated that a stage had been reached when more was known, when practical business was being taken in hand, and when, therefore, the slipshod patents, which had hitherto sufficed, would no longer avail. Because private enterprise really meant more, therefore the Government said more, and the very defining of the work and circumscribing of its sphere made the results sounder, more lasting, and more substantial. It was not the lust of conquest, it was not the glamour of adventure, it was not a wish to proselytize in religion or to add new provinces to the domain of a European kingdom which made the English colonize North America. There were two main motives at work. One was the desire to find or to do something which would pay, the other was a longing to live under more independent conditions than existed in the mother country. The settlers went to lands where natives dwelt, and, therefore, dealings with the North American Indians in war and peace ensued; but the English did not go to the New World in the main to conquer or to convert the Indians, they went to live and to make their living pay. Instinct was at work in English colonization, the instinct of self-preservation, of extension, of always moving a little further and winning a little more; but there was no high scheme of universal dominion for the English King or the English creed. Against any such views the New England colonies were a living protest, and in Virginia, Maryland, or Carolina they found no place. All of these colonies were prosaic, unromantic communities: they were groups of Englishmen, living, grumbling, working and squabbling, with varieties of opinions and differences of outward forms, half protected, half worried by the home Government, building up unconsciously, illogically, amid much that was mean and small, what was to be in the end a mighty nation. Instinct, too, kept the colonists for the most part near to the sea. They fringed the Atlantic over which they had come, and ever renewed their strength as more emigrants came in; they strayed no doubt to some extent as years went on, taking up farms inland and clearing the backwoods; but, on the whole, there was continuity of colonization, a gradual widening of the belt of settlement, expansion on the part of the settlers themselves, as opposed to planting in the heart of the continent military outposts, or isolated mission stations.
| The French colonized inland. Comparison of French colonization in Canada and Dutch colonization in South Africa. |
With the French in Canada the case was different. Except in Acadia and Cape Breton Island, and to a limited extent in Newfoundland, they had no hold on the sea coast: and Acadia had for many years little connexion with the land of the St. Lawrence. Canada, as a sphere of colonization, began when the open sea had been left far behind. It was an inland territory with a great river and great lakes. No two parts of the world are more unlike than Canada and South Africa. Canada has a river highway into it, excellent water communication by lake and stream, and, until the Rocky mountains are reached, no mountain barriers are interposed to cut off the interior from the coast regions or one district from another. South Africa is almost devoid of natural harbours, its rivers are valueless for purposes of navigation. Its ranges of hills or mountains rise one behind the other, barring the way from the coast to the interior, severing one section of the territory from another. Yet, curiously enough, somewhat similar results followed from diametrically opposite geographical conditions. No two races in the world were and are more unlike each other than the Dutch and the French, unlike in character, in tradition, in political and religious training. But the Dutch in South Africa and the French in Canada resembled each other in this, that they were and remained very few in number, planted in an unlimited area, and that men lived in either case under a rigid system. The restrictive rule of the Netherlands East India Company in South Africa led to trekking, to wandering in the wilderness, and the difficulties of communication increased the wandering tendency, because the wanderers, who wished no longer to be controlled by the government at Cape Town, could not easily be followed up. The French rule in Canada was restrictive too, restrictive in matters of politics, of commerce, and of religion. It was a despotism which allowed no vestige of freedom or self-government; but it was a far stronger and more active despotism than that of the Netherlands Company. The Dutch sought a trade monopoly, the French a territorial dominion. The Dutch were at pains to minimize their responsibilities. The French policy was one of conquest and conversion; they looked to holding in subjection the lands and the peoples of the New World. They worked under a government which was absolute, but whose absolutism, in the main, encouraged perpetual moving forward, and they worked in a land where moving forward was comparatively easy. Thus dispersion ensued on a greater scale than in South Africa. The negative force which promoted trekking in the Cape Colony was present also in Canada—antipathy to a rigid system, to hard and fast rules; and the counterpart of the Dutch voortrekkers, though under very different conditions, was to be found in the Canadian fur-traders and coureurs de bois. But in South Africa the positive force was wanting which shaped Canadian history, the forward policy of an ambitious state. The agents of the French Government in Canada, military and religious, went far afield—adventurous and enterprising, intriguing with savage races, establishing outposts in the interior, strong to carry out a preconceived plan of a great French dominion. The malcontent Dutchmen in South Africa moved slowly and sleepily away in their wagons to be out of reach; the country aided their intent by being difficult of access. Along the rivers and the lakes of Canada the Frenchmen lightly passed, those who worked the will of the Government as well as those who were impatient of control.
| Contrast between English and French in North America. |
The rivalry then between the two European nations who colonized North America, the English and the French, was rivalry at every point. It was a conflict of race, of religion, of geographical conditions, of new and old, of European government and American colonists. On the one side were seaboard settlements, comparatively continuous, in which there was much instinct and little policy, much freedom and little system; where the population steadily grew by natural causes and by immigration, democratic communities in which the real work was done from below, the products of a wholly different era from that which preceded it, and in which picturesque adventurers had failed to colonize. On the other side were the beginnings of continental colonization along the natural lines of communication. The dispersion was great, the settlers were few, the settlements were weak. All was done from above, except where unlicensed adventurers roamed the woods. The elements of an older day were preserved and stereotyped, attractive but unprogressive. Old forms transplanted to a New World did not lose their life, but renewed it. Feudal customs took root in the soil. Despotism, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, did not survive merely, but grew stronger. The adventurer remained an adventurer, and did not turn into a businesslike colonist. There was much that was great, there was more that was uniform, but there was little or no growth.
| Elements of strength on the French side. |
The ultimate outcome of such a contest must necessarily have been, in the course of generations, the triumph of the side on which were the forces and the views of the coming time. But, while the struggle lasted, the French gained not a little from being less vulnerable than the English, as being more dispersed; from being better situated for purposes of attack; from being organized, so far as there was organization, under one government and one system instead of many; from the extraordinary energy and quickness of some of the French leaders in Canada; from the strong military element in the population; from the fanatical devotion of the French missionaries; and last, but not least, from the Frenchmen's better handling of the natives.
| The waterways of North America. |
The sources of the Mississippi are close to the western end of Lake Superior, and the eastern half of North America is therefore nearly an island, created by the Mississippi, the great lakes, the St. Lawrence, and the sea. An inner circle is formed by the Mississippi, the Ohio, Lakes Erie, Ontario, and the St. Lawrence, the head waters of the Ohio river being within easy distance of Lake Erie. The course of the Ohio is from north-east to north-west. It flows, very roughly, parallel to the Alleghany mountains, and drains their western sides. The Alleghanies in their turn are parallel to the Atlantic, and between them and the sea is a coast belt from north to south. Here was the scene of the English settlements. Here, cut off by mountain ranges from the Mississippi valley and from the inland plains, the Virginians and the New Englanders made their home. 'The New England man,' writes Parkman, 'had very little forest experience. His geographical position cut him off completely from the great wilderness of the interior. The sea was his field of action.'5