§ 16]

THE FAILURE OF FRANCE

13

of a government three thousand miles away. Aid was constantly asked from the King. "Send us money to build storehouses,” ran the begging letters of Canadian officials; "Send us a teacher to make sailors"; "We want a surgeon"; and so, at various times, requests for brickmakers, ironworkers, pilots, and other skilled workers. Such requests were usually granted; but New France did not learn to walk alone. The rulers did much; but the people did little.

Political life was lacking. In the seventeenth century France itself was a centralized despotism;1 and in New France (to use the phrase of Tocqueville) "this deformity was seen magnified as through a microscope." No public meetings were permitted without a special license; and such meetings, when held, could do nothing worth while. All sorts of matters, even the regulation of inns and of pew rent, the order in which people should sit in church, the keeping of dogs and of cattle, the pay of chimney sweeps, were dealt with not by local legislatures or village councils, but by ordinances of the governors at Quebec, who were sent over by the French King. "It is of the greatest importance," wrote one official, "that the people should not be at liberty to speak their minds."

Worse even than that - the people had no minds to speak. In 1672, Frontenac, the greatest governor of New France, tried to introduce the elements of self-government. He provided a system of "estates " to advise with him,- a gathering of clergy, nobles, and commons (citizens and merchants); and he ordered that Quebec should have a sort of town meeting twice a year to elect aldermen and to discuss public business. But the home government sternly disapproved all this, directing Frontenac to remember that it was "proper that each should speak for himself, and no one for the whole." The plan fell to pieces; the people cared so little for it that they made no effort to save it. FOR FURTHER READING. - The plan of this volume forbids extended class work upon the topics touched in chapters i and ii; but the books named below may be explored by the student who desires to read further.

1 Modern Progress, pp. 19, 258, or Modern World, §§ 25, 516.

ON THE DISCOVERY AND ITS PERIOD. Payne, "Age of Discovery in Cambridge Modern History, I (an admirable treatment in thirty pages); Fiske, Discovery of America; Cheyney, European Background of American History; Becker, Beginnings of the American People, 1-36.

ON ENGLAND'S RIVALS.-Moses, Spanish Rule in America; Bourne, Spain in America; Thwaites, France in America; Parkman's Histories, especially, Montcalm and Wolfe, Half Century of Conflict, and The Old Régime in Canada. Gilbert Parker's earlier stories, particularly The Trail of the Sword and parts of Pierre and His People, picture vividly the Canadian colonial type.

EXERCISE. Brief, rapid answers (oral or written) on the following topics, the answers to be given concisely and, as a rule, in single words or phrases, rather than in sentences.

1. Two contrasts between the Atlantic coast of Europe' and that of North America which affected colonization materially? 2. How did each of these factors work? 3. Two advantages from physical geography to English colonization, as compared with French or Spanish colonization? (Two words suffice for this answer.) 4. Three distinct advantages possessed by the French in their attempt to occupy America? 5. Three causes of French failure? 6. Three distinct ways in which the Iroquois hindered French success?

(Let each student present four or five more questions.)

CHAPTER III

THE MOTIVES OF EARLY ENGLISH COLONIZATION

Virginia was founded by a great liberal movement aiming at the spread of English freedom and of English empire. - HENRY ADAMS.

17. The first impulse to English colonization came from English patriotism. When Elizabeth's reign was half completed, little England entered upon a daring rivalry with the overshadowing might of Spain.

Out of that rivalry, English America was born. Reckless and picturesque freebooters, like Drake and Hawkins, sought profit and honor for themselves, and injury to the foe, by raiding rich provinces of Spanish America. More far-sighted statesmen, like Raleigh, saw that English colonies in America would be "a great bridle to the Indies of the Kinge of Spaine," and began to try so to "put a byt in the anchent enymys mouth."

SIR WALTER RALEIGH AT THIRTY-FOUR. From a portrait ascribed to Zuccaro, now in the National Gallery, London.

1 This phrase heads a chapter in a pamphlet on Western Planting written in 1584, at Raleigh's request, by Richard Hakluyt, a clergyman of the Church of England. The text urges :-"If you touch him [Spain] in the Indies, you touch him in the apple of his eye. For, take away his treasure, - which he has almost wholly out of his West Indies, - his olde bandes of souldiers will soon be dissolved, his purposes defeated, his power diminished, his pride abated, and his tyranie utterly suppressed" (Source Book, No. 3).

SO

18. But to found a colony in those days was harder than we can well comprehend. The mere outlay of money was enormous for that time. Ships had little storage room; freights were high, and the best accommodations were poorer than modern steerage. To carry a man from England to America cost from £10 to £12, or about $300 in our values.1 To provide his outfit and to support him until he could raise a crop, cost as much more. Thus to establish a family in

America took some thousands of dollars.

Moreover, there were no ships ready for the business, and no supplies. The directors of the early colonizing movements met all sorts of costly delays and vexations. They had to buy ships, or build them; and, in Channing's phrase, they had to buy food for the voyages "on the hoof or in the shock,” and clothing" on the sheep's back." They had also to provide government, medicines, fortifications, military supplies, and food to meet a possible crop failure. Much money, too, was sure to be lost in experimenting with unfit industries under untried conditions-as in the futile attempts to produce silk and make glass in Virginia.

19. The English crown founded no colonies, nor did it give money toward founding any. It did give charters to those men who were willing to risk their fortunes in the attempt. These charters were grants of territory and of authority over future settlers. Thus the English colonies (with a few accidental exceptions, which will be noticed) were at first proprietary. The proprietor might be an individual or an English corporation. In either case, the proprietor owned the land and ruled the settlers. 20. The first colonial charter was granted by Elizabeth, in 1578, to Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Gilbert made two attempts at a colony, starting out the first time with eleven ships and nearly 600 colonists, and the second time with 260 picked settlers. Spanish hostility kept the first expedition from reaching America. The second, in the spring of 1583, entered St. John's Harbor on the New Foundland coast. Gilbert's

1 In 1600, money was worth five or six times as much as now.

§ 22]

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

"The

way

17

to

claims were recognized readily by the captains of the "thirtysix ships of all nations" present there for the fisheries; but desertion and disaster weakened the colonists, and in August the survivors sailed for England. Gilbert had sunk his for tune, and he himself perished on the return. Song and story dwell fondly on the Christian knight's last words, shouted cheerily through the storm-wrack from his sinking little ship to comfort friends on the larger consort, heaven is as near by sea as by land." Gilbert's enterprise was taken up at once by his half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, the most gallant figure of that daring age. In 1584, Raleigh received a charter copied from Gil. bert's. In the next three years he sent three expeditions to Roanoke Island on the Carolina coast, each time in considerable fleets. His first explorers declared the new land "the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful, and wholesome of all the world," and the natives were affirmed to be "such as live after the manner of the golden age." But supplies and reinforcements were delayed by the struggle with the Spanish Armada; and when the next supply ships did arrive, the colonists had vanished without trace.

21. Raleigh had spent a vast fortune (a million dollars in our values); and, though he sent ships from time to time to search for the lost colonists, he could make no further attempt at settlement. Still, despite their failures, Gilbert and Raleigh are the fathers of American colonization. The tremendous and unforeseen difficulties of the enterprise overmatched even the indomitable will of these Elizabethan heroes; but their efforts had aroused their countrymen and made success certain in the near future. With pathetic courage, when in prison and near his death, Raleigh wrote, "I shall yet see it [America] an English nation."

22. For twenty-five years, attempts at colonization haa failed, largely because the life-and-death struggle with Spain in Europe drained England's energies. Worse was to come. James I (1603) sought Spanish friendship; and then indeed Englishmen began to feel their chance for empire slipping through their fingers.