e French settlements in Canada were administered very much upon the
same happy-go-lucky system as that which prevailed in France at home
under the beneficent influence of the Old Order, and which at home was
slowly and surely preparing the way for the French Revolution. The
ministers in Paris governed the colonies through governors who were
supreme in their own districts, but who possessed no power whatever of
initiating any laws for the people they swayed.

{284}

The English colonies were very different from those of the French.
Founded in the early days of religious persecution by men too
strong-minded to accept tyranny or to make composition with their
consciences, the new colonies of Englishmen in America had thriven in
accordance with the antique spirit of independence which had called
them into existence. The colonists were a hardy, a stubborn, and a
high-minded people, well fitted to battle with the elements and the
Indians, and to preserve, under new conditions, the austere standard of
morality which led them to look for liberty across the sea. The creed
which they professed endowed them with a capacity for self-government,
and taught them the arts of administration and the polity of free
States. The English colonies, as they throve and extended, were not
without their faults. The faith which their founders professed was a
gloomy faith, and left its mark in gloom upon the characters of the
people and the tenor of their laws. The Ironside quality of their
creed showed itself in the cruelties with which they visited the
Indians; the severity of their tenets was felt by all who could not
readily adapt themselves to the adamantine ethics of men of the type of
Endicott and Mather. There was not wanting, too, a spirit of
lawlessness in the English America, curiously in contrast with the
law-abiding character of the Non-conformist colonizations. Along the
seaboard wild pirates nestled, skimmers of the seas of the most daring
type, worthy brethren of the Kidds, the Blackbeards, and the Teaches,
terrors of the merchantman and the well-disposed emigrant. But in
spite of the sternness of the law-abiding, and the savageness of the
lawless portions of the English settlements, they contrasted favorably
in every way with the settlements which were nominally French and the
centres of colonization which hoisted the French flag.

[Sidenote: 1754--Young Mr. Washington]

After a long stretch of threatened hostilities,