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Rh. They asked that religious interests should not rule trading operations, but that their traffic should be protected at sea by the royal navy and that trading factories should be allowed to manage their own affairs. It does not appear, in short, that Richelieu's colonial policy produced any notable results, beyond some remarkable voyages of discovery which gave a considerable impulse to all future colonization, and a great diffusion of missionary literature reporting the successful propagation of the faith in those countries that had been made over to the new companies.

We may thus register, even at this early stage, observations of a distinct and remarkable contrast in origin, character, and practical methods between the colonial systems of France and England. The first French colonies derived their initiative from the Crown; they were formed under strict official regulations; and the note of high orthodoxy was predominant in their constitution. The first English colonies owed their foundation either to men who had left their fatherland to escape the rule of kings and bishops, or to "gentleman adventurers" with a taste for the roving life and freedom of a new country, which they were quite willing to hold as national property so long as they were permitted to use their own ways and means of acquiring it. And at a time when the great commercial companies of England and Holland were already wresting from Spain and Portugal the invaluable prize of the sea-borne trade with Asia, the French merchants were deterred from entering into competition with them