Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/307

Rh the issues of battles, have extinguished upon this vast continent every territorial right of the Frenchman. There is in existence a map of New France, engraved by the French king's cartographer, on which a very considerable portion of our present national domain is included under that complacent title, while the English colonies are crowded into a narrow seaboard strip. The more than complete inversion of those inscribed titles which appear on every map engraved for more than a century past, presents a theme over which we can but deeply moralize. We call up the image of the dauntless and generous-hearted Champlain, planning for an empire for his beloved France over these unmeasured ranges of lands, rivers, and inland seas. We note how in his journals and on his maps he attaches a name from his mother tongue to every natural object and phenomenon in his course, — bay, island, promontory, creek, or inlet, cascade, carrying-place, or camping-ground, level or swell of land, — and sometimes a word or phrase drawn from the quiet or the conflict of his experience for the moment. Happily many of these names are retained to secure fragments of history by their associations. We follow the weariful but ever-patient trampings of the missionary with only red companions, learning from them their own names of places, and entering them with a French alias in his memory or his notes. We accompany in thought those intrepid and agile coureurs de bois, penetrating the deepest wilds, in absences of years from their own kin and fellows. They bore with them remembrances of their village life and sports in their ever dear old home, and left many of its words and phrases as their own epitaphs or legacies. These French names and epithets keep watch only over the shadows of the past.

On three grounds, each of them obvious and strong in reason and validity, France might advance claims for permanent and representative rule on this continent, beyond those of English nationality now in possession.