y saying quite so literally and terrifically demonstrable
as this which you have chanced to select for attack. For, in the first
place, of all the calamities which in their apparently merciless
infliction paralyzed the wavering faith of mediaeval Christendom, the
"boil breaking forth into blains," in the black plagues of Florence and
London, was the fatalest messenger of the fiends: and, in the second
place, the broad result of the Missionary labors of the cities of
Madrid, Paris, and London, for the salvation of the wild tribes of the
New World, since the vaunted discovery of it, may be summed in the stem
sentence--Death, by drunkenness and smallpox.

The beneficent influence of recent commercial enterprise in the
communication of such divine grace, and divine blessing (not to speak of
other more dreadful and shameful conditions of disease), may be studied
to best advantage in the history of the two great French and English
Companies, who have enjoyed the monopoly of clothing the nakedness of
the Old World with coats of skins from the New.

The charter of the English one, obtained from the Crown in 1670, was in
the language of modern Liberalism--" wonderfully liberal,"[130]
comprising not only the grant of the exclusive trade, but also of full
territorial possession, to all perpetuity, of the vast lands within the
watershed of Hudson's Bay. The Company at once established some forts
along the shores of the great inland sea from which it derived its name,
and opened a very lucrative trade with the Indians, _so that it never
ceased paying rich dividends_ to the fortunate shareholders, until
towards the close of the last century.

Up to this time, with the exception of the voyage of discovery which
Herne (1770-71) made under its auspices to the mouth of the Coppermine
River, it had done but little for the promotion of geographical
discovery in its vast territory.

169. Meanwhile, the Canadian (French) fur traders had become so hateful
to the Indians, that these savages formed a conspiracy for their total
extirpation. _Fortunately for the white men_, the smallpox broke out
about this time among the redskins, and swept them away as the fire
consumes the parched grass of the prairies. Their unburied corpses were
torn by the wolves and wild dogs, and the survivors were too weak and
dispirited to be able to undertake anything against the foreign
intruders. The Canadian fur traders now also saw the necessity of
combining th