Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/129

-1763] French relations with natives. 97 the picture of society in English and French islands alike is dismal enough. " Every man hurries to grow rich in order to escape for ever from a place where men live without distinction, without honour, and without any form of excitement other than that of commercial interest." The numerous religious Orders introduced into the French islands an element that was lacking in the English. Although they engaged as actively in commercial pursuits as the most worldly adventurers, they did so with larger views. The work of a du Tertre or a Labat found no parallel in the British islands. But it was West Indian commerce that led the Jesuits to their fall, involving with it the bankruptcy of Martinique for 2,400,000 limes. The failure of Choiseul's great scheme in Guiana, which was to have cancelled the loss of Canada a fiasco by which 12,000 people perished and nearly thirty million limes were wasted (1763) showed that it was still possible to make immense mistakes. But the able administration of Malouet (about 1767-79) came opportunely to wipe out the new disgrace. It has been necessary to devote space to some brief review of the historical epochs into which the western colonisation of France divides itself, in order to show that considerations of time and place must not be neglected, when generalisations on the character of French colonisation as a whole come under discussion. What is true of Canada may not be true of St Domingo ; what is true of the missionary epoch may not be true of the mercantile. Yet certain broad features distinguish French colonisation, which are notably absent from the schemes of the English on the one hand and of the Spanish on the other. In nothing is this more apparent than in the relations of the French to the native tribes occupying the North American continent. It is generally agreed that in relation to the natives the French showed themselves at their best. The Baconian view, that there is a supreme and indissoluble consanguinity and society between men, was to the French American a natural law, so far as it described his feeling towards the Red Indians with whom he was constantly associated. It does not seem too much to say that where the average British colonist felt an instinctive abhorrence, the average French colonist felt an instinctive sympathy. The suggestion was made by the Swiss Bouquet and accepted by Sir Jeffery Amherst, that the Indians should be inoculated with smallpox by means of the blankets which they bought from the English, to hasten the extermi- nation of that detestable race. We may well believe that such a suggestion would have shocked Frenchmen then as much as it shocks Englishmen now. The idea of anglicising the Indians was not entertained by the English; the French inclination was either to gallicise their neighbours, or be themselves indianised. Of no British governor could the story have been told that was related of Frontenac, how he went to meet the Indians, painted and attired as an Indian. The English C. M. H. VII. CH. III. 7