Seek no longer in America the skillfully constructed political constitutions of which Charlevoix has written the history: the monarchy of the Hurons, the republic of the Iroquois. A somewhat similar destruction has been accomplished and is still being accomplished in Europe under our very eyes; a Prussian poet, at a banquet of the Teutonic Order, held about the year 1400, sang in old Prussian the heroic deeds of the ancient warriors of his country: no one present understood him, and he received one hundred empty walnuts by way of recompense. Today, the language of Lower Brittany, the Basque and Gaelic languages, are dying out from cottage to cottage, keeping pace with the deaths of the goatherds and husbandmen.
In the English County of Cornwall, the language of the natives became extinct about the year 1676. A fisherman said to some travellers:
"I know hardly more than four or five persons who speak Cornish, and they are old folk like myself, between sixty and eighty years of age; none of the young people know a word of it."
Whole tribes of the Orinoco have ceased to exist; of their dialect there remain but a dozen words articulated in the tree-tops by parrots that have regained their freedom, like Agrippina's thrush, which warbled Greek words upon the balustrades of the Roman palaces. This, sooner or later, will be the fate of our modern jargons, the remains of Latin and Greek. Some raven escaped from the cage of the last Franco-Gallic curate will say, from the top of a ruined steeple, to peoples that shall be foreign to our successors:
"Accept these last strains of a voice once known to you; you will put an end to all this talk."
It is well worth while to be Bossuet, so that, in the ultimate event, your masterpiece may survive, in the recollection of a bird, your language and your memory among men!
*
When speaking of Canada and Louisiana, when considering on the old maps the extent of the former French colonies in America, I asked myself how the government of my country could have suffered the loss of those colonies, which would be an inexhaustible source of prosperity for us at this day.
From Arcadia[503] and Canada to Louisiana, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, the territory of "New France" surrounded what formed the confederation of the first thirteen United States: the eleven others[504], together with the District of Columbia, the North-Western Territory, the Territories of Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, and Arkansas either belonged to us or would now belong to us, as they belong to the United States by the cessions of the English and Spaniards, our successors in Canada and Louisiana[505]. The country enclosed by the Atlantic on the north-east, the Arctic Ocean on the north, the Pacific Ocean and the Russian possessions on the north-west, and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, in other words more than two-thirds of North America, would now be recognizing the laws of France.
Former French possessions.