ldest of colonizers and civilizers,
alone capable of bringing the natives under assimilation by assimilating
with them, by adopting their customs and by marrying their women,
mixing bloods, and forming new and intermediary races, like Dumas de La
Pailleterie, whose descendants have furnished original and superior men
for the past three generations, and like the Canada half-breeds by which
the aboriginal race succeeds in transforming itself and in surviving.
They were the first explorers of the great lakes, the first to trace the
Mississippi to its mouth, and found colonial empires with Champlain
and Lasalle in North America and with Dupleix and La Bourdonnais in
Hindustan. Such was the outlet for daring, uncontrollable spirits,
restive temperaments under constraint and subject to the routine of an
old civilization, souls astray and unclassed from their birth, in which
the primitive instincts of the nomad and barbarian sprouted afresh, in
which insubordination was innate, and in which energy and capacity to
take the initiative remained intact.--Mirabeau, having compromised his
family by scandals, was on the point of being dispatched by his father
to the Dutch Indies, where deaths were common; it might happen that he
would be hanged or become governor of some large district in Java or
Sumatra, the venerated and adored sovereign of five hundred thousand
Malays, both ends being within the compass of his merits. Had Danton
been well advised, instead of borrowing the money with which to buy an
advocate's place in the Council at about seventy thousand livres, which
brought him only three cases in four years and obliged him to hang on to
the skirts of his father-in-law, he would have gone to Pondicherry or
to the palace of some indigenous rajah or king as agent, councilor
or companion of his pleasures; he might have become prime-minister to
Tippoo Sahib, or other potentate, lived in a palace, kept a harem and
had lacs of rupees; undoubtedly, he would have filled his prisons and
occasionally emptied them by a massacre, as at Paris in September, but
it would have been according to local custom, and operating only on
the lives of Sheikhs and Mahrattas. Bonaparte, after the fall of his
protectors, the two Robespierres, finding his career arrested, wanted
to enter the Sultan's service; accompanied by Junot, Muiron, Marmont
and other comrades, he could have carried to Constantinople rarer
commodities, much better compensated in the Ori