ily have guessed, even if the correspondence of the
time had set it forth less distinctly than it does, with what deep
concern and mortification the French of that day saw the white flag and
its lilies driven for ever from the banks of the St. Lawrence in the
west, and the coast of Coromandel in the east. Raynal himself tells us
with what zealous impatience the government attempted to make the nation
forget its calamities, by stirring the hope of a better fortune in the
region to which they gave the magnificent name of Equinoctial France.
The establishment of a free and national population among the scented
forests and teeming swamps of Guiana, was to bring rich compensation for
the icy tracts of Canada. This utopia of a brilliant settlement in
Guiana has steadily invested the minds of French statesmen from Choiseul
down to Louis Napoleon, and its history is a striking monument of
perversity and folly. But from 1763 to 1770, while Raynal was writing
his book, men's minds were full of the heroic design, and this augmented
their interest in the general themes which Raynal handled--colonisation,
commerce, and the overthrow and settlement of new worlds by the old.

However much all these things may have quickened the popularity of
Raynal's _History_, yet the true source of it lay deeper; lay in the
fuel which the book supplied to the two master emotions of the hour--the
hatred and contempt for religion, and the passion for justice and
freedom. The subject easily lent itself to these two strong currents. Or
we may say that hatred of religion, and passion for justice and freedom,
were in fact the subjects, and that the commercial establishments and
political relations of the new worlds in the east and west were only the
setting and framework. Raynal was perhaps the first person to see that
the surest way of discrediting Catholicism was to write some chapters of
its history. Gibbon resorted to the same device shortly afterwards, and
found in the contemptuous analysis of heresies, and the selfish and
violent motives of councils and prelates, as good an occasion of
piercing the Church as Raynal found in painting the abominable fraud and
cruelty that made the presence of Christians so dire a curse to the
helpless inhabitants of the new lands. And the same reproachful
background which Gibbon so artistically introduced, in the humane,
intelligent, and happy epoch of the pagan Antonines, Raynal invented for
the same purpose of making