Frontenac
BY HENRY LOOMIS NELSON, L.H.D.
THE French were the first to look toward our own great country of the West, and Frontenac was their leader. Led on by the tempting beckoning of the Great Lakes, undeterred by the mighty Niagara, they continued in the direction in which they had embarked at St.-Malo or at La Bochelle. Once in the Far West, the waters still called to them, and they sailed down the Mississippi to the sea. Losing most of their magnificent territory to England in 1763, ceding the southern and most western parts to Spain in 1762, they regained the latter in 1800, and in 1803 sold it to the United States.
The westward-looking Frenchmen were inspired by the great colonial minister of Louis XIV. Colbert's prophetic genius filled the minds of French adventurers with enthusiasm, and sent them joyously into untrodden forests for the glory to be gained from contending with savage natives, and for the wealth that might be acquired without defiling trade or demeaning labor. In this era of French effort, and on the North-American continent, there also went on other contests than those with tribes of savages,—rivalries between systems of government and between different kinds of immigrants. Between the French and the English colonies, in the seventeenth century, there was a contrast which, in a small way, we are seeing revived in the early years of the twentieth century. There is no reason to doubt that the result of the experiment of 250 years ago will be repeated, although no such disaster can follow now as followed then. Briefly, the contrast then was between a colonial system the control of which was in the government at Paris and one which, practically at least, permitted the colonies to govern themselves. Here was a rivalry between a hampered company of adventurers, unpossessed of either religious or political liberty, comprising a community whose every footstep was guarded by a power which distance made ignorant of local conditions, and, on the other side, companies of industrious Englishmen and Dutchmen, strengthening their sense of independence and of their self-sufficiency by resisting control from abroad. It was, in essence, a rivalry between a governed and a governing people, and the result proved the value of individual liberty and of independence in colonial as it has been always proved in other political affairs.
The poetry of French colonization is the poetry of a romantic time, the seeming truths of which are mainly fictions of dim woods. The French came to this country to spread the glory of God and of their King. They hoped to overcome the wilds in the hearts of men, as they hoped to push the borders of France far westward, but they placed upon both men and land the iron hands of absolute monarch and of absolute Church. The Jesuit priests dominated all, the civil power as well as the pagan Indian and the wandering coureurs des bois. The French King and his great minister clung to the notion that colonies are to be treated as if they were territorial divisions of the mother land, as if Governors-General and Intendants were to be jumped about by the pulling of strings in hands at Versailles, like the puppets who danced to the will of the central government in the departments of France,—as if a colony could possibly flourish when all its conduct, and the conduct of all its people, were governed and directed by those most ignorant of its conditions.
South of New France were New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. There life was stirring, and men, loving either liberty or trade, had come to build homes, to seize upon all the riches of the new land, and to make a
