Quebec And Boston
At the end of the seventeenth century it must have seemed a far cry from Versailles to Quebec.The ocean was crossed only by small sailing vessels haunted by both tempest and pestilence, the one likely to prolong the voyage by many weeks, the other to involve the sacrifice of scores of lives through scurvy and other maladies.Yet, remote as the colony seemed, Quebec was the child of Versailles, protected and nourished by Louis XIV and directed by him in its minutest affairs.The King spent laborious hours over papers relating to the cherished colony across the sea.He sent wise counsel to his officials in Canada and with tactful patience rebuked their faults.He did everything for the colonists--gave them not merely land, but muskets, farm implements, even chickens, pigs, and sometimes wives.The defect of his government was that it tended to be too paternal.The vital needs of a colony struggling with the problems of barbarism could hardly be read correctly and provided for at Versailles.
Colonies, like men, are strong only when they learn to take care of themselves.
The English colonies present a vivid contrast.London did not direct and control Boston.In London the will, indeed, was not wanting, for the Stuart kings, Charles II and James H, were not less despotic in spirit than Louis XIV.But while in France there was a vast organism which moved only as the King willed, in England power was more widely distributed.It may be claimed with truth that English national liberties are a growth from the local freedom which has existed from time immemorial.When British colonists left the motherland to found a new society, their first instinct was to create institutions which involved local control.
The solemn covenant by which in 1620 the worn company of the Mayflower, after a long and painful voyage, pledged themselves to create a self-governing society, was the inevitable expression of the English political spirit.Do what it would, London could never control Boston as Versailles controlled Quebec.
The English colonist kept his eyes fixed on his own fortunes.
>From the state he expected little; from himself, everything.He had no great sense of unity with neighboring colonists under the same crown.Only when he realized some peril to his interests, some menace which would master him if he did not fight, was he stirred to warlike energy.French leaders, on the other hand, were thinking of world politics.The voyage of Verrazano, the Italian sailor who had been sent out by Francis I of France in 1524, and who had sailed along a great stretch of the Atlantic coast, was deemed by Frenchmen a sufficient title to the whole of North America.They flouted England's claim based upon the voyages of the Cabots nearly thirty years earlier.Spain, indeed, might claim Florida, but the English had no real right to any footing in the New World.As late as in 1720, when the fortunes of France were already on the wane in the New World, Father Bobe, a priest of the Congregation of Missions, presented to the French court a document which sets forth in uncompromising terms the rights of France to all the land between the thirtieth and the fiftieth parallels of latitude.True, he says, others occupy much of this territory, but France must drive out intruders and in particular the English.Boston rightly belongs to France and so also do New York and Philadelphia.The only regions to which England has any just claim are Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay, ceded by France under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.This weak cession all true Frenchmen regret and England must hand the territories back.She owes France compensation for her long occupation of lands not really hers.If she makes immediate restitution, the King of France, generous and kind, will forego some of his rights and allow England to retain a strip some fifty miles wide extending from Maine to Florida.France has the right to the whole of the interior.In the mind of the reverend memorialist, no doubt, there was the conviction that England would soon lose the meager strip, fifty miles wide, which France might yield.
These dreams of power had a certain substance.It seems to us now that, from the first, the French were dreaming of the impossible.
We know what has happened, and after the event it is an easy task to measure political forces.The ambitions of France were not, however, empty fancies.More than once she has seemed on the point of mastering the nations of the West.Just before the year 1690 she had a great opportunity.In England, in 1660, the fall of the system created by Oliver Cromwell brought back to the English throne the House of Stuart, for centuries the ally and usually the pupil of France.Stuart kings of Scotland, allied with France, had fought the Tudor kings of England.Stuarts in misfortune had been the pensioners of France.Charles II, a Stuart, alien in religion to the convictions of his people, looked to Catholic France to give him security on his throne.
Before the first half of the reign of Louis XIV had ended, it was the boast of the French that the King of England was vassal to their King, that the states of continental Europe had become mere pawns in the game of their Grand Monarch, and that France could be master of as much of the world as was really worth mastering.
In 1679 the Canadian Intendant, Duchesneau, writing from Quebec to complain of the despotic conduct of the Governor, Frontenac, paid a tribute to "the King our master, of whom the whole world stands in awe, who has just given law to all Europe."To men thus obsessed by the greatness of their own ruler it seemed no impossible task to overthrow a few English colonies in America of whose King their own was the patron and the paymaster.
