phasized by Mr. Bancroft: "Such was
Louisiana more than a half-century after the first attempt at
colonization by La Salle. Its population may have been five thousand
whites and half that number of blacks. Louis XIV. had fostered it with
pride and liberal expenditures; an opulent merchant, famed for his
successful enterprise, assumed its direction; the Company of the
Mississippi, aided by boundless but transient credit, had made it the
foundation of their hopes; and, again, Fleury and Louis XV. had sought
to advance its fortunes. Priests and friars, dispersed through nations
from Biloxi to the Dahcotas, propitiated the favor of the savages; but
still the valley of the Mississippi was nearly a wilderness. All its
patrons--though among them it counted kings and ministers of state--had
not accomplished for it in half a century a tithe of the prosperity
which within the same period sprang naturally from the benevolence of
William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware" (vol. iii., p.
369).

[28:1] "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. xiii., p. 654.

[28:2] Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 137-142.

[29:1] Bancroft, vol. iii., pp. 187, 188.

CHAPTER IV.

ANTECEDENTS OF PERMANENT CHRISTIAN COLONIZATION--THE DISINTEGRATION OF
CHRISTENDOM--CONTROVERSIES--PERSECUTIONS.

We have briefly reviewed the history of two magnificent schemes of
secular and spiritual empire, which, conceived in the minds of great
statesmen and churchmen, sustained by the resources of the mightiest
kingdoms of that age, inaugurated by soldiers of admirable prowess,
explorers of unsurpassed boldness and persistence, and missionaries
whose heroic faith has canonized them in the veneration of Christendom,
have nevertheless come to naught.

We turn now to observe the beginnings, coinciding in time with those of
the French enterprise, of a series of disconnected plantations along the
Atlantic seaboard, established as if at haphazard, without plan or
mutual preconcert, of different languages and widely diverse Christian
creeds, depending on scanty private resources, unsustained by
governmental arms or treasuries, but destined, in a course of events
which no human foresight could have calculated, to come under the
plastic influence of a single European power, to be molded according to
the general type of English polity, and to become heir to English
traditions, literature, and language. These mutually alien and even
antagonistic communities were to be con