Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/130

 98 Contrast of British relations with natives. [leos- half-breeds appear to have been few as compared with the French, and those few were chiefly confined to the frontiers where children were kidnapped and indianised in their early years. Whereas the French priests encouraged intermarriage, the British colonists discouraged it. At an early date the coureurs, among whom most of the Indian alliances took place, found no parallel in the British settlements; and though subsequently the "frontiersmen" approached their type, they never rivalled the coureurs in numbers or importance. In records of French travel it is common to find mention of the unexpected discovery of Frenchmen, living among the Indians, having abandoned civilisation and become wholly Indian. Again, in readiness to cope with the difficulties of native dialects, the French, trained in the linguistic system of the Jesuits, far surpassed the English; and in appreciation for the Indian forms of self-expression, which required imagination and love of hyperbole, they showed a readiness which the English learned only by slow degrees. The instinctive courtesy of the French was deeply appreciated by the Indians, who dearly liked to have full respect paid to their dignity; and it is noticeable that the scientific interest in native history and civilisation, attested by the number of books written by Frenchmen, Jesuits and others, was late to enter the British mind. The very smallness of the French population, and the value placed upon the fur trade rather than on agriculture, helped to give the French an additional advantage. The English exterminated the Indians by sheer force of settlement, and by clearing their hunting-grounds deprived them of their livelihood. In 1754 the truth of the argument which Duquesne urged upon the Iroquois "the French make forts and let you hunt under the walls, but the English drive all game away, for the forest falls as they advance" was fully appreciated by the Indians. The French divided the country into " hunts " after the Indian pattern, and found it to their interest to pay some heed to the Indian hunting-rules which forbade the extermination of game at breeding-seasons. The English occupied and made ownership a reality. The Indians told Sir William Johnson that " they soon could not hunt a bear into the bole of a tree, but some Englishman would claim a right to it as being his tree." The French forts on the other hand, planted in the thick of the forest, depended for their very subsistence on the Indian friendship. Many of the garrisons, unrelieved for six years, found their isolation alleviated only by friendly relations with the natives. While the French secured a real ascendency in the Indian councils, by sharing their life and understanding their habits, the English hastened to assert an outward supremacy hateful to the independent ideas of native chiefs. Pownall comments on the skilful way in which the French chose out Indian sachems and gave them medals and emblems of authority which secured their support and the support of their sub- ordinates. The unity of the French scheme gave France a special strength