re the sword, decked itself with
badges of nobility, aspired to forest seigniories and hordes of savage
retainers.

Along the borders of the sea an adverse power was strengthening and
widening, with slow but steadfast growth, full of blood and muscle,--a
body without a head. Each had its strength, each its weakness, each its
own modes of vigorous life: but the one was fruitful, the other barren;
the one instinct with hope, the other darkening with shadows of despair.

By name, local position, and character, one of these communities of
freemen stands forth as the most conspicuous representative of this
antagonism,--Liberty and Absolutism, New England and New France. The one
was the offspring of a triumphant government; the other, of an oppressed
and fugitive people: the one, an unflinching champion of the Roman
Catholic reaction; the other, a vanguard of the Reform. Each followed
its natural laws of growth, and each came to its natural result.
Vitalized by the principles of its foundation, the Puritan commonwealth
grew apace. New England was preeminently the land of material progress.
Here the prize was within every man's reach: patient industry need never
doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in
pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and
godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. Politically she was free;
socially she suffered from that subtle and searching oppression which
the dominant opinion of a free community may exercise over the members
who compose it. As a whole, she grew upon the gaze of the world, a
signal example of expansive energy; but she has not been fruitful
in those salient and striking forms of character which often give a
dramatic life to the annals of nations far less prosperous.

We turn to New France, and all is reversed. Here was a bold attempt to
crush under the exactions of a grasping hierarchy, to stifle under
the curbs and trappings of a feudal monarchy, a people compassed by
influences of the wildest freedom,--whose schools were the forest and
the sea, whose trade was an armed barter with savages, and whose daily
life a lesson of lawless independence. But this fierce spirit had its
vent. The story of New France is from the first a story of war: of
war--for so her founders believed--with the adversary of mankind
himself; war with savage tribes and potent forest commonwealths;
war with the encroaching powers of Heresy and of England. Her br