Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/141

-1763] Colonies as strategic posts. 109 British were dependent on the influx of "indented servants." There was " seducing " and " spiriting away," kidnapping and crimping for the colonies in England, but on no such scale as the legalised despatch of three engages for every 60 tons of shipping, six for 100, and so on in proportion. The absolute government of France does not show itself in all respects at its worst in the colonies. Absolute power lodged in the wise hands of a Colbert, even of a Seignelay or a Pontchartrain, gave scope for ideas undreamed of in England. In Burke's opinion "obedience to a wise government serves the French colonists for personal wisdom"; and the dangers involved in such exchange were not at first obvious. Absolute power had faith in the future, passed over questions of profit and loss, silenced or ignored the old grumble that the colonies did not enrich France. Policy, not commerce, dictated the retention of the St Lawrence, the Lakes and the Mississippi ; they were strategic posts in the defence of a military empire. While Spain cared for her colonies as an all- important source of wealth, and her colonies depended upon her as their protection ; while England hindered hers where she feared commercial rivalry, and at the same time secured an oceanic power surpassing that of France and Spain combined; France grasped the idea that colonies are an expansion of the empire, at least in its military sense. The seventeenth century hope of a possible colonial neutrality was very soon finally laid aside. French colonial history is so coloured by the artistic and dramatic sense of its creators that the facts seem to lose their true relative importance. In the minds of the French, distance, severance such as we now can hardly realise, poverty, the scantiness of the population, the internal dissensions, all counted for nothing. There were elements of disunion in the jealousies of Montreal and Quebec, of Church and State, of the small and the large planters, of the dependent islands and Martinique, of French officials and the Creole population, of French and colonial soldiers, of the trappers and the settled colonists ; but these prosy realities seemed trifles that would fade away and be forgotten in the beautiful vision of a world-wide and united empire. New France, while it gave promise of gigantic empire, was to the government a part of France, and could therefore risk its fate in the international contest, regardless of the fear of pressing the divided British colonies into union, regardless of European diversions, of the want of oceanic defence. But that this sense of unity was rather senti- mental than substantial, became manifest when the moment of loss arrived. The loss of Acadia, Canada, Louisiana, was no dismemberment of the French empire ; such losses merely marked certain stages in a wider contest. Yet it is the clear, if premature, perception of one aspect of the modern colonial idea that serves to glorify for all time the story of the French in America.