and the lakes afforded an easy approach to the
interior, while farther south the forest-clad ranges of the Alleghanies
constituted a very serious barrier, this does not diminish the French
pre-eminence in exploration. Nor can anything in the history of
European colonisation surpass the heroism of the French missionaries
among the Indians, who faced and endured incredible tortures in order
to bring Christianity to the barbarians. No serious missionary
enterprise was ever undertaken by the English colonists; this
difference was in part due to the fact that the missionary aim was
definitely encouraged by the home government in France. From the
outset, then, poverty, paucity of numbers, gallantry, and missionary
zeal formed marked features of the French North American colonies.

In other respects they very clearly reproduced some of the features of
the motherland. Their organisation was strictly feudal in character.
The real unit of settlement and government was the seigneurie, an
estate owned by a Frenchman of birth, and cultivated by his vassals,
who found refuge from an Indian raid, or other danger, in the stockaded
house which took the place of a chateau, much as their remote ancestors
had taken refuge from the raids of the Northmen in the castles of their
seigneur's ancestors. And over this feudal society was set, as in
France, a highly centralised government wielding despotic power, and in
its turn absolutely subject to the mandate of the Crown at home. This
despotic government had the right to require the services of all its
subjects in case of need; and it was only the centralised government of
the colony, and the warlike and adventurous character of its small
feudalised society, which enabled it to hold its own for so long
against the superior numbers but laxer organisation of its English
neighbours. A despotic central power, a feudal organisation, and an
entire dependence upon the will of the King of France and upon his
support, form, therefore, the second group of characteristics which
marked the French colonies. They were colonies in the strictest sense,
all the more because they reproduced the main features of the home
system.

Nothing could have differed more profoundly from this system than the
methods which the English were contemporaneously applying, without plan
or clearly defined aim, and guided only by immediate practical needs,
and by the rooted traditions of a self-governing people. Their
enterprises