Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/283

Rh The scope of this volume makes us concerned with but a single element in the comprehensive purpose of Mr. Parkman's brilliant and most instructive volumes. Every one of their pages, either in the character or incident which fills it, or in the graphic style or the rich and beautiful rhetoric of the writer, adds to our national literature some of the characteristic qualities to which the most discriminating criticism will assign a high encomium. In those pages men of foreign birth are naturalized to our soil and history; they become Americans because their energies, toils, and sacrifices, which might have been latent in their veins, would never in the Old World have been developed, even to the consciousness of their possessors. Champlain, Frontenac, La Salle, Marquette, — their peers, associates, and brethren, — have their baptismal records in the Old World, but their life-record is here.

I have made this reference to the results of nearly forty years of diversified and concentrated literary toil and intellectual power of the historian of New France in America, because in all his volumes the theme of this chapter of the present work is more or less distinctly recognized. I must limit my own rehearsal strictly to the relations of the French with our native tribes, in what was common or distinctive in its bearing upon their fortunes as resulting from their intercourse with Europeans.

What would have been the later and the long results of the exclusive or predominant sway of the Spanish power had it extended and rooted itself over our whole continent may be inferred from the history, the experiences, and the present condition of those portions of it which have from the first conquest remained under the crown of Spain, or have had entailed upon them Spanish influence and institutions.

The poet Cowper, in his moralizing strains, nearly a century ago, gave voice to the triumph which one of the Mexican or Peruvian chieftains in the realm of shades