Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/132

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100 French missionary work in Canada. [isos- of justice by obtaining Indian signatures to English charters, which ceded Indian territory with all the English conveyancing formulae, and gave the Englishman a record which, meaningless as it was to the Indian, adequately protected the new possessor against rival British claims. The conciliating work of the Quakers had at last considerable influence on English feeling, and in the eighteenth century it was less rare to find the French view prevailing among Englishmen, although up to the last it would appear that the French were more skilful than the English in obtaining Indian alliances. Both parties, it would appear, were equally unscrupulous in allowing the barbarities of Indian warfare to have free play. Neither French nor British governors scrupled to put a price on the scalps of the enemy. On the whole however the Indian warfare of the eighteenth century was less barbarous than that of the seventeenth, and Parkman ascribes the change in the main to French influence on the Indians. The missionary work of the French is equally dissimilar from that of the English. The English have no such records as the Jesuit Relations, for they undertook their work in a wholly different fashion. The strength of the French missions lay in the enormous range that they covered, the strength of the English in the more careful working of the ground that was broken. The French missionaries were geographical explorers, the English were teachers. The English translated the Bible into a single Indian dialect, a work which could appeal only to the Indians who knew that dialect and had been taught to read English print, but the French collected the grammars and vocabularies of a number of tribes; they preached to the natives in their own tongue, whereas the English em- ployed interpreters, and insisted that the teaching of English must precede the teaching of Christianity. The Spaniards on the other hand, by their governmental supremacy, succeeded in displacing the dialects, and made one native language understood in South America. While many of the Jesuits lived wholly with the Indians, and slept and fed in their tents, even such a man as Eliot could not bring himself to accept their habits; and when he went to preach, his wife sent his food with him. The Jesuits were satisfied with what the English deemed slight tokens of success, for they counted baptism as tantamount to conversion; the English, and particularly the Puritan preachers, confounded the minds of their converts with an excess of doctrine, seeking vainly for Indian words to represent the ideas embodied in the words adoption, election, and justification. Both French and English followed the Spanish example in domiciling the converted families in mission villages. The Recollet Le Clercq writing in 1691 complains that, though the Indians attend the services regularly, they are without the spirit of religion. We can only, he says, withdraw a few picked families from the woods and group them in villages, and even after years of such domicile they will run back to the forest. Such