velopment
and a fairer career in the western world. The French emigrants took with
them only what belonged to the past, and nothing that represented
modern freedom. The English emigrants retained what they called English
privileges, but left behind in the parent country English inequalities,
the monarch, and nobility, and prelacy. French America was closed
against even a gleam of intellectual independence; nor did it contain so
much as one dissenter from the Roman Church; English America had English
liberties in greater purity and with far more of the power of the people
than England. Its inhabitants were self-organized bodies of freeholders,
pressing upon the receding forests, winning their way farther and
farther forward every year, and never going back. They had schools, so
that in several of the colonies there was no one to be found beyond
childhood, who could not read and write; they had the printing press
scattering among them books, and pamphlets, and many newspapers; they
had a ministry chiefly composed of men of their own election. In private
life they were accustomed to take care of themselves; in public affairs
they had local legislatures, and municipal self-direction. And now this
continent from the Gulf of Mexico to where civilized life is stayed by
barriers of frost, was become their dwelling-place and their heritage.

* * * * *

From "The History of the United States."

=_131._= DEATH OF MONTCALM.

But already the hope of New France was gone. Born and educated in camps,
Montcalm had been carefully instructed, and was skilled in the language
of Homer as well as in the art of war. Greatly laborious, just,
disinterested, hopeful even to rashness, sagacious in council, swift in
action, his mind was a well-spring of bold designs; his career in Canada
a wonderful struggle against inexorable destiny. Sustaining hunger and
cold, vigils and incessant toil, anxious for his soldiers, unmindful
of himself, he set, even to the forest-trained red men, an example of
self-denial and endurance, and in the midst of corruption made the
public good his aim. Struck by a musket ball, as he fought opposite
Monckton, he continued in the engagement, till, in attempting to rally
a body of fugitive Canadians in a copse near St. John's gate, he was
mortally wounded.

On hearing from the surgeon that death was certain, "I am glad of it,"
he cried; "how long shall I survive?" "Ten or twelve hours, p