le work. The Protestant offered the Gospel to the Indians
through intellectual teachings; the Romanist tried the experiment
through a symbolism which one might, at first thought, regard as
admirably adapted to the nature and circumstances of the savage. Success
of a certain sort seemed to have secured, in both experiments, the
promise of an ultimate reward for labor.

Happily, too, the Jesuit and the Protestant might alike find comfort in
referring the disastrous overthrow of their hopes, not to the failure of
their work, nor even to the inconstancy of their respective converts,
but to the fortunes of the ferocious warfare by which the native tribes
exterminated each other. Mr. Parkman first, or most lucidly and
emphatically among our historians, and without a particle of special
pleading, but simply by the fidelity of his narrative, makes it appear
that the common impression as to the prime or fatal agency of the white
man in visiting so ruthless a destiny on the Indians is exaggerated, if
not substantially false. The tragic element in his pages, deep and
plaintive as it is, comes in to show how Christian zeal and humane
effort were thwarted by animosities and passions working among the
Indian tribes before the continent was occupied by Europeans.

One of the most suggestive exercises to which the perusal of Mr.
Parkman's book will quicken the minds of many of his readers, and for
the more intelligent pursuit of which his pages will be found to afford
the most helpful material, will be a comparison or contrast, not only of
the genius of the Catholic and the Protestant religions in the work of
missions among barbarians, but of the less spiritual and more homely
qualities of the French and English proclivities, as exhibited in their
respective relations with the savages. The French came more closely and
familiarly into sympathy and intercourse with them. The English never
could fraternize with them. If an Englishman of the lowest grade took a
squaw for his partner, he sank to the level of barbarism himself. It was
quite otherwise with the Frenchman. After the permanent occupation of
Canada was secured, a race of half-breeds constituted, so to speak, a
very respectable, as well as the most efficient, element in its
population. It was enough if the squaw of the Frenchman had been the
subject of Christian baptism. But that ordinance, however effective for
the life to come, did not qualify a native woman for English wedlock.