Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/282

262 priests whose lives and experiences were a lengthening ingenuity and variation of all the elements of martyrdom for soul-service and self-abnegation.

Mr. Parkman draws for us, in deep and radical terms of contrast, as entering into the very initiatory and controlling principles respectively of the French and the English aims and methods of colonization, the ruling spirit which guided them, resulting in absolute failure and disaster for the one, and in marvellous success and prosperity for the other. The French enterprise, as represented by him, was inspired and guided by and was wholly in the interest of feudalism, monarchism, and spiritual despotism. The English enterprise found its vigorous life and animating spirit in working towards democracy, civil liberty, and soul-freedom. The French came here as soldiers, priests, and free-traders, with the range of the woods for their goods, and the natives as hunters in their service. But they wholly lacked that sturdy class — the bone and sinew of a community planting itself for new empire on virgin soil — of patient toilers on a reclaimed farm, with rights of severalty for homesteads; individuals in their efforts and success, but members of a commonwealth for mutual help and security. The king, the noble, and the priest combined to make New France a realm of reconstructed and revivified feudalism. There was but a single class or caste of men and women in New England. Every one belonged to it; it included the whole; it was called The People. It did not look to a foreign monarch for commissions to office or power; it sent back no report to king or minister; asked for no foreign soldiery, no cargoes of supplies, even when in dire extremity. It rooted itself independently of patronage, and transferred to the soil the muscle by which it was afterwards held. As Mr. Parkman draws the contrast, France in the New World was all head, without a body; New England was all body, without a head.