geux. La Galissoniere etoit de petite taille
et bossu. Lorsque les sauvages vinrent le saluer a son arrivee au
Canada, frappes de son peu d'apparence, ils lui parlerent en ces termes,
'Il faut que tu aies une bien belle ame, puisqu' avec un si vilain
corps, le grand chef notre pere t'a envoye ici pour nous commander.' Ils
ne tarderent pas a reconnaitre la justice de leur opinion, et
entourerent de leur amour et de leur veneration, en l'appellant du nom
de pere, l'homme qui ne se servit du pouvoir que pour ameliorer leur
sort."--_Biographie Universelle_, art. Galissoniere.]

[Footnote 434: "In observing on old maps the extent of the ancient
French colonies in America, I was haunted by one painful idea. I asked
myself how the government of my country could have left colonies to
perish which would now be to us a source of inexhaustible prosperity.
From Acadia and Canada to Louisiana, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence
to that of the Mississippi, the territories of New France surrounded
what originally formed the confederation of the thirteen United States.
The eleven other states, the district of Columbia, the Michigan,
Northwest, Missouri, Oregon, and Arkansas territories, belonged, or
would have belonged to us, as they now belong to the United States, by
the cession of the English and Spaniards, our first heirs in Canada and
in Louisiana. More than two thirds of North America would acknowledge
the sovereignty of France.... We possessed here vast countries which
might have offered a home to the excess of our population, an important
market to our commerce, a nursery to our navy. Now we are forced to
confine in our prisons culprits condemned by the tribunals, for want of
a spot of ground whereon to place these wretched creatures. We are
excluded from the New World, where the human race is recommencing. The
English and Spanish languages serve to express the thoughts of many
millions of men in Africa, in Asia, in the South Sea Islands, on the
continent of the two Americas; and we, disinherited of the conquests of
our courage and our genius, hear the language of Racine, of Colbert, and
of Louis XIV. spoken merely in a few hamlets of Louisiana and Canada,
under a foreign sway. There it remains, as though but for an evidence of
the reverses of our fortune and the errors of our policy. Thus, then,
has France disappeared from North America, like those Indian tribes with
which she sympathized, and some of the wrecks of which I have