ot only permitted, but encouraged by bounties
and exemption from duties; and instead of paying to the Company two
hundred per cent of profit on indispensable supplies, the colonists now
got them at a reasonable price.

Perier was removed, and again Bienville was made governor. Diron
d'Artaguette, who came with him as intendant, reported that the
colonists were flying the country to escape starvation, and Bienville
adds that during the past year they had subsisted for three months on
the seed of reeds and wild grasses.[317] The white population had rather
diminished than increased during the last twelve years, while the
blacks, who had lately conspired to massacre all the French along the
Mississippi, had multiplied to two thousand.[318] A French writer says:
"There must have been a worm gnawing the root of the tree that had been
transplanted into so rich a soil, to make it wither instead of growing.
What it needed was the air of liberty." But the air of liberty is
malaria to those who have not learned to breathe it. The English
colonists throve in it because they and their forefathers had been
trained in a school of self-control and self-dependence; and what would
have been intoxication for others, was vital force to them.

Bienville found the colony again threatened with a general rising, or,
as he calls it, a revolt, of the Indian tribes. The Carolina traders,
having no advantage of water-ways, had journeyed by land with
pack-horses through a thousand miles of wilderness, and with the aid of
gifts had instigated the tribes to attack the French. The Chickasaws
especially, friends of the English and arch-enemies of Louisiana, became
so threatening that a crushing blow against them was thought
indispensable. The forces of the colony were mustered to attempt it; the
enterprise was mismanaged, and failed completely.[319] Bienville tried
to explain the disaster, but his explanation was ill received at court;
he was severely rebuked, reproved at the same time for permitting two
families to emigrate to St. Domingo, and sharply ordered to suffer
nobody to leave Louisiana without express license from Versailles.
Deeply wounded, he offered his resignation, and it was accepted.
Whatever his failings, he had faithfully served the colony, and gained
from posterity the title of Father of Louisiana.

With the help of industrious nursing,--or, one might almost say, in
spite of it,--Louisiana began at last to strike roots into the so