Crusaders of New France | Page 4

astounding ignorance of New World conditions, must have been a severe trial to the patience of those hard-working officials who were never without great practical difficulties immediately before their eyes.
Not enough heed was paid, moreover, to the advice of men who were on the spot. It is true that the recommendations sent home to France by the Governor and by the Intendant were often contradictory, but even where the two officials were agreed there was no certainty that their counsel would be taken. With greater freedom and discretion the colonial government could have accomplished much more in the way of developing trade and industry; but for every step the acquiescence of the home authorities had first to be secured. To obtain this consent always entailed a great loss of time, and when the approval arrived the opportunity too often had passed. From November until May there was absolutely no communication between Quebec and Paris save that in a great emergency, if France and England happened to be at peace, a dispatch might be sent by dint of great hardship to Boston with a precarious chance that it would get across to the French ambassador in London. Ordinarily the officials sent their requests for instructions by the home-going vessels from Quebec in the autumn and received their answers by the ships which came in the following spring. If any plans were formulated after the last ship sailed in October, it ordinarily took eighteen months before the royal approval could be had for putting them into effect. The routine machinery of paternalism thus ran with exasperating slowness.
There was, however, one mitigating feature in the situation. The hand of home authority was rigid and its beckonings were precise; but as a practical matter it could be, and sometimes was, disregarded altogether. Not that the colonial officials ever defied the King or his ministers, or ever failed to profess their intent to follow the royal instructions loyally and to the letter. They had a much safer plan. When the provisions of a royal decree seemed impractical or unwise, it was easy enough to let them stand unenforced. Such decrees were duly registered in the records of the Sovereign Council at Quebec and were then promptly pigeonholed so that no one outside the little circle of officials at the Chateau de St. Louis ever heard of them. In one case a new intendant on coming to the colony unearthed a royal mandate of great importance which had been kept from public knowledge for twenty years.
Absolutism, paternalism, and religious solidarity were characteristic of both France and her colonies in the great century of overseas expansion. There was no self-government, no freedom of individual initiative, and very little heresy either at home or abroad. The factors which made France strong in Europe, her unity, her subordination of all other things to the military needs of the nation, her fostering of the sense of nationalism--these appeared prominently in Canada and helped to make the colony strong as well. Historians of New France have been at pains to explain why the colony ultimately succumbed to the combined attacks of New England by land and of Old England by sea. For a full century New France had as its next-door neighbor a group of English colonies whose combined populations outnumbered her own at a ratio of about fifteen to one. The relative numbers and resources of the two areas were about the same, proportionately, as those of the United States and Canada at the present day. The marvel is not that French dominion in America finally came to an end but that it managed to endure so long.

CHAPTER II
A VOYAGEUR OF BRITTANY
The closing quarter of the fifteenth century in Europe has usually been regarded by historians as marking the end of the Middle Ages. The era of feudal chaos had drawn to a close and states were being welded together under the leadership of strong dynasties. With this consolidation came the desire for expansion, for acquiring new lands, and for opening up new channels of influence. Spain, Portugal, and England were first in the field of active exploration, searching for stores of precious metals and for new routes to the coasts of Ormuz and of India. In this quest for a short route to the half-fabulous empires of Asia they had literally stumbled upon a new continent which they had made haste to exploit. France, meanwhile, was dissipating her energies on Spanish and Italian battlefields. It was not until the peace of Cambrai in 1529 ended the struggle with Spain that France gave any attention to the work of gaining some foothold in the New World. By that time Spain had become firmly entrenched in the lands which border the Caribbean Sea; her galleons were already bearing home their rich