Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/323

Rh partisans and abettors, set traps and played intrigues for mutual annoyance, and by separate channels of intercourse through rival parties at court did what was in their power to make mischief for each other. Self-dependence, independence of foreign oversight, authority, and aid were what was never for a moment meditated or desired by the French here, at any stage or period of their colonization. New France was not only as much a part of the empire as any portion of the realm, but it was to be, so far as circumstances would allow, administered as a home province, with a transfer of feudal institutions, seigniories, bishoprics, proprietary rights, noble and privileged orders, and stingy allotments for common people. As the event proved, these distinctive and primary characteristics of French dominion in America, so widely contrasted with the course and principles of the English colonists, could not be transferred from the Old World so that they would take root here. They were uncongenial with, disastrous to, any hopeful enterprise. And we are to find in this fundamental quality of French dominion, with all the zeal and heroism engaged in it, the reason for the fact that France has no heritage here.

By no means, however, is it to be inferred that the French were in all cases politic, humane, or just towards the Indians. On the contrary, there were tribes, the Iroquois especially, to whom the French were from the first and always a scourge, relentless and destructive. Raid after raid was made from Canada, beginning with Champlain, into the domains of the Five Nations; and when the savages fled from the armed hosts, their pleasant villages were wasted and their granaries and cornfields destroyed to bring them to starvation. One act of shameful atrocity, with dark treachery, was perpetrated by the French, in 1687, on some peaceful and confiding Iroquois at Cadarakui, the captives from which, La Potherie says, forty in number, were sent to France to work in the galleys. Charlevoix