ART. V.-THE CONFLICT FOR A CONTINENT.* THIS is the theme of Francis Parkman's noble series of volumes on the French and English in North America. The great work on which the author has spent forty-five years of labor is just completed by the issue of the volumes entitled A Half Century of Conflict. No grander historical monument has been completed by any American writer. On none has such an exhaustive study, continued for so long a series of years, been bestowed. None is of greater interest to the Englishspeaking people both of the United States and Canada. None abounds more with picturesque incidents, with stirring deeds by flood and field, with scenes of heroic valor, of deepest pathos, and of grimmest tragedy. The theater of the story is broad as the continent-from the storm-swept coast of Cape Breton to the farthest Occident,

Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save its own dashings;

from the ice-bound arctic wastes of Hudson's Bay to the silver strand of Biloxi in the Gulf of Mexico.

There is a unique dramatic unity about this story of a century and a half of conflict. The struggle began with the earliest settlements of the French and English on this continent. When the first colonists at Port Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, and at Jamestown, in Virginia, could scarce hold the Indians at bay outside of their stockaded forts, while behind them in its inimitable vastness stretched the trackless forests, they yet in cruel reprisal harried each other's settlements. Each colony, though occupying only a few acres of an almost boundless dominion, was insanely jealous of the possession of a single foot of it by the other.

Deeper and deeper grew the imbittered strife-not only in the New World but in the Old the deadly conflict waged-on the banks of the Ganges, on the shores of the Gold Coast, as well

*Pioneers of France in the New World; The Jesuits in North America; La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West; The Old Régime in Canada; Count Frontenac and the New France under Louis XIV; A Half Century of Conflict (two vols.); Montcalm and Wolfe (two vols.). By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., publishers.

as on the banks of the Ohio and the St. Lawrence.

More and

more closely the coils of fate were wound round the French colony, till at last on the Plains of Abraham the battle was fought which snatched forever the dominion of this continent from the French and gave it to the English-speaking race.

This was a conflict not merely between hostile peoples, but between Democracy and Feudalism, between Catholic superstition and Protestant liberty. The issue at stake was whether mediæval institutions, the principles of military absolutism, and the teachings of Gallican clericalism should dominate, or whether the evolution of civil and religious liberty, of free thought, free speech, a free press, and the universal genius of free institutions should find a field for their development as wide as the continent. The problem was whether on the banks of the Hudson and the Mississippi, on the shores of the great lakes, and amid the vast prairies of the far West should grow up a number of free commonwealths, or whether an intellectual atrophy and religious superstition such as we behold to-day on either side of the lower St. Lawrence should characterize also the whole, or greater part, of what is now the American Union and the Canadian Dominion.

No American writer-we think no historic writer of any country has more carefully collected his facts, has more thoroughly sought out and weighed the evidence, has more honestly and candidly evolved his conclusions, than Francis Parkman. In the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in seventy manuscript volumes, most of them folios, a great portion of this evidence has been filed. But the range of reading, the exhaustive study, the extensive travel required for the production of this historic series cannot readily be estimated. In writing the history of the Dominion of Canada the present writer has largely consulted the same authorities as the distinguished American historian. We can, therefore, bear testimony, from personal examination of the contemporary writers cited, to the thoroughness of his research and the justice and candor of his conclusions. No American historian has surpassed in fascination of style and absorbing interest of narrative the author of the volumes under review. His literary style is admirably suited to the theme which he treats-a style now pure and limpid as a New England mountain brook, now

gorgeous with color like a forest stream reflecting the autumn foliage. With full volume, yet with many a local eddy and rippling affluent, sweeps on the steady current of this historic tale; now rushing, in scenes of turbulent struggle, like the rapids of St. Lawrence; now spreading, in expanses of peaceful truce, like its transparent lakes.

It is still another of the many intellectual ties between the people of the Canadian Dominion and those of the American republic that it was reserved for a gifted son of New England to paint this great historic masterpiece in colors which shall never fade and with a beauty which can never die. But this story belongs not less to New England than to Old England. The brave actions on the side of the British were shared by the hardy fishermen and farmers of Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, aided in part by New York and Pennsylvania, and by England's oldest colony, Virginia. On them fell the brunt of the struggle, and by their valor and fidelity its happy results were chiefly achieved.

It is a strange blending of the civilized and savage that enters into this stirring story. Scenes in the court of Versailles and Fontainebleau, and of St. Stephen's and St. James, alternate with dusky groups around the council fires of the immemorial forests. The peruked and powdered Louis XV and his bepatched and bediamoned court dames, and the sturdy Protestant hero, William III, and the gracious sovereign of letters, Queen Anne, by turns appear. The roar of cannon from the mediaval heights of Quebec follows the pageant of mighty navies in the harbors of Boston and Louisburg. The crusading knighterrant, Champlain; the stern, feudal Baron Frontenac; the gallant general, Montcalm; the intrepid martyr missionaries, Lalemant, Jogues, and Brébeuf; colonial magnates, as Governor Shirley of Massachusetts and Colonel Pepperell of Maine; gallant Lord Howe and General Wolfe, dying in the arms of victory; William Pitt, the great Commoner, who made true his proud boast that "England should molt no feather of her crest; and George Washington, whose word "kindled the continent into a flame,” are some of the actors in this great drama.

It may repay the time and trouble to glance briefly at some of the more salient features of this long conflict, and to notice some of its far-reaching results.

The character of Champlain, we have said, was more like that of the knight-errant of the medieval romance than that of a soldier of the practical seventeenth century in which he lived. He had greater virtues and fewer faults than most men of the age. In a time of universal license his life was pure. With singular magnanimity he devoted himself to the interests of his patrons. Although traffic with the natives was very lucrative he carefully refrained from engaging in it. His sense of justice was stern, yet his conduct was tempered with mercy. He won the unfaltering confidence of the Indian tribes; suspicious of others, in him they had boundless trust. His zeal for the spread of Christianity was intense. The salvation of one soul, he was wont to declare, was of more importance than the founding of an empire. His summary of Christian doctrine, written for the native tribes, is a touching monument of his piety.

That subtle and sinister system which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had belted the world with its missions and won renown and execration in almost every land gained some of its grandest triumphs and exhibited its most heroic spirit in the wilderness of Canada. The Jesuits had numbered as converts hundreds of thousands of baptized pagans in India and the Moluccas, in China and Japan, in Brazil and Paraguay. They almost entirely controlled the religious education of youth in Europe, and kept the consciences of kings, nobles, and great ladies, who sought at their feet spiritual guidance and counsel. They had won well-merited fame for attainments in ancient learning, for modern science, for pulpit eloquence, and for subtle statecraft.

But nowhere did the Jesuit missionaries exhibit grander heroism and self-sacrifice; nowhere did they encounter sterner sufferings with greater fortitude or meet with a more tragical fate than in the wilderness missions of New France. They were the pioneers of civilization, the pathfinders of empire on this continent. With breviary and crucifix, at the command of the superior of the order at Quebec they wandered all over the vast country stretching from the rocky shores of Nova Scotia to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, from the regions around Hudson's Bay to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Paddling all day in their bark canoes; sleeping at night on

the naked rock; toiling over rugged portages or through pathless forests; pinched by hunger, chilled to the bone by cold, often dependent for subsistence on acorns, the bark of trees, or the bitter moss to which they have given their name; lodging in Indian wigwams, whose acrid smoke blinded their eyes, and whose obscene riot was unutterably loathsome to every sense; braving peril and persecution and death itself, they persevered in their path of self-sacrifice for the glory of God,* as they understood it, for the salvation of souls, the advancement of their order, and the extension of New France. "Not a cape was turned, not a river was entered," writes Bancroft, "but a Jesuit led the way."

For forty years-from 1632 to 1672-the Jesuit missionaries sent home to the superior of the order in France annual "Relations" of the progress of their Indian missions. They are written in the old French and quaint spelling of two hundred years ago. These volumes are a perfect mine of information on early Canadian history. They contain a minute and graphic account, by men of scholastic training, keen insight, and powers of observation, of the daily life, the wars and conflicts, the social, and especially the religious, condition of the Indian tribes. The missionaries toiled and preached and prayed and fasted without any apparent reward of their labor; the ramparts of error seemed impregnable; the hosts of hell seemed leagued against them. The Indian "sorcerers," as the Jesuits called the "medicine men," whom they believed to be the imps of Satan, if not, indeed, his human impersonation, stirred up the passions of their tribes against the mystic medicine men of the palefaces. These were the cause, they alleged, of the fearful drought that parched the land, of the dread pestilence that consumed the people. The malign spell of their presence neutralized the skill of the hunter and the valor of the bravest warrior. The chanting of their sacred litanies was mistaken for a magic incantation, and the mysterious ceremonies of the mass for a malignant conjury. The cross was a charm of evil potency, blasting the crops and affrighting the thunder-bird that brought the refreshing rain.

Yet the hearts of the missionaries quailed not; they were sustained by an enthusiasm that courted danger as a condition * Ad majorem gloriam Dei, was the motto of their order.