re not that all movements work but one way, like the
backward and forward of a machine--towards _advancement_, these things
would make a man despond."

"What then, sir," Chrysler asked, "are your ideas?"

"Hear me, like a different messenger from the same battle. The motto,
'God has made Law to Every Man to Labour,' means that the slaves of
priestcraft are to be contented with their servitude. 'To Make the
People Better,' means to blind the second eye of their obedience."

"To--?"

"Stop my dear friend," Chamilly interrupted with emotion, "that motto's
words are sacred to me and will ever justly be to all our people. Do not
disparage that motto?"

"I will never disparage making the people truly better. It is to the
tone of those who usurp the aim, you should apply my critique. The men
who lip these terms are none other than the evil geniuses of history. It
is the _Jesuits_ who would make us poor and miserable,--who have wrecked
French America, past and future. Without them we should have welcomed to
our dominions from the first, an immigration twice larger than
England's: we should have held the continent north, south and centre;
our people would have been vitalized by education instead of so ignorant
that no commoner but one ever wrote a book; they would have built and
flourished and extended; and in place of a poor and helpless people they
would have been rich, powerful, and self-reliant, like the Bostonians;
Bigot and his nest of horse-leeches would never have sucked our blood
and left us to ruin!"

He paused, but as if not yet quite finished. His hearers listened.

"And _since_--," he suddenly and energetically added, with a stern look
around and a bitter suggestiveness on the word as if it were enough to
pronounce it; and in truth, it silenced both De La Lande and Chamilly,
and appeared to make a completely effective ending.

In the evening, walking out on the road before retiring, Chamilly and
Chrysler commented on the discussion, and Chrysler said, "I must say I
was unprepared for this debate. I was a poor helpless Briton, caught
like Braddock in Mr. De La Lande's ambush. Tell me what you think
yourself of these things."

"It is a sad thing to belong to a disappearing order," Haviland replied,
"Sympathising with my people, I am grieved in a sense to believe their
present aspirations dreams. It is sad to behold any race, and deeply so
if it is your own, blind in the presence of unalterable forces which