Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/281

Rh and in its episodes the enterprise and aim of Frenchmen — by their own private resources, the help of noble and devout patrons, men and women, and the sanction of monarchs guided by prime ministers, through patents and vast territorial grants and vice-royal privileges — to lay in the New World the foundations of a colonial empire. Mr. Parkman grasps his whole theme with a comprehensive hold of its contents necessarily exceeding that of Mr. Irving as the biographer of Columbus and his successors in the service of Spain, and in their exploring and ravaging a section of the New World. The aim of the French was a loftier and in some sense a nobler one than that of the Spaniard. It did not, in its objects or its intended or absolutely necessary methods, involve oppression or any form of injury, still less of exterminating warfare, against the natives. It might have been pursued and accomplished in the interests of peace, of profitable commerce and of trade, with a more hopeful progress in that process of Christianizing the savages which satisfied the religious standard of those who undertook it. Mr. Parkman has to present to us, in portraiture and in conspicuous achievement, high-souled men with lofty aims, — ardent, heroic, patient in all buffetings with thwarting foes and overwhelming disasters, and sinking all self-ends to secure an enviable prize for their monarch and their country; though not all of his characters exhibit these high traits, free of meannesses. He brings before us on his animated and picturesque pages a succession of mariners whose prowess and self-reliance made them dauntless over unknown seas, through fog-banks, shoals, icebergs, and rocky barriers of granite harbors; explorers who learned to thread their way through forests, rivers, lakes, and cataracts, for thousands of miles, stripped of all their wonted resources as civilized men, and cast upon their quick skill to become adepts in those of the woods; viceroys, governors, magistrates, with conflicting commissions and bitter rivalries fomenting jealousies and discord; and