o the missions the highest ability in administration and direction,
ample resources of various sorts, and a force of missionaries whose
personal virtues have won for them unstinted eulogy even from unfriendly
sources--men the ardor of whose zeal was rigorously controlled by a more
than martial severity of religious discipline. But it would be uncandid
in us to refuse attention to those grave charges against the society
brought by Catholic authorities and Catholic orders, and so enforced as,
after long and acrimonious controversy, to result in the expulsion of
the society from almost every nation of Catholic Europe, in its being
stigmatized by Pope Benedict XIV., in 1741, as made up of "disobedient,
contumacious, captious, and reprobate persons," and at last in its being
suppressed and abolished by Pope Clement XIV., in 1773, as a nuisance to
Christendom. We need, indeed, to make allowance for the intense
animosity of sectarian strife among the various Catholic orders in which
the charges against the society were engendered and unrelentingly
prosecuted; but after all deductions it is not credible that the almost
universal odium in which it was held was provoked solely by its virtues.
Among the accusations against the society which seem most clearly
substantiated these two are likely to be concerned in that "brand of
ultimate failure which has invariably been stamped on all its most
promising schemes and efforts":[26:1] first, a disposition to compromise
the essential principles of Christianity by politic concessions to
heathenism, so that the successes of the Jesuit missions are magnified
by reports of alleged conversions that are conversions only in name and
outward form; second, a constantly besetting propensity to political
intrigue.[27:1] It is hardly to be doubted that both had their part in
the prodigious failure of the French Catholic missions and settlements
within the present boundaries of the United States.

4. The conditions which favored the swift and magnificent expansion of
the French occupation were unfavorable to the healthy natural growth of
permanent settlements. A post of soldiers, a group of cabins of trappers
and fur-traders, and a mission of nuns and celibate priests, all
together give small promise of rapid increase of population. It is
rather to the fact that the French settlements, except at the seaboard,
were constituted so largely of these elements, than to any alleged
sterility of the French st