re such resiliency of
spirit, such abandon to adventure, as that they stand as typical
explorers. Who would not have been alongside Hennepin when he, on a
snowy winter day, first of all Europeans, saw thunder-voiced Niagara?
The English colonies seized, fortified, and held domain in small
compass, and guarded it against the world; but this was not the French
idea. They spread over a continent, as a sea might have done. The
light step of Mercury belonged to the French colonizer. He loved to
roam wherever untrod wastes beckoned. Englishmen in America did little
discovering; Frenchmen did much. They crossed the continent, and would
have done so had it been twice the breadth it was. I have already
shown how some of our commonest words in Western speech are of this
origin. While England hugged the Atlantic seaboard, Frenchmen had
navigated the Great Lakes, had sailed the Mississippi to the Gulf, had
set the seal of their names on the land they had traversed, had gone in
to the shoreless interior of the Far West; and to this day you can
track the old hunter to the Pacific Coast by the reminiscent names he
has left behind. The continent was his home. To him we owe much more
than we shall ever pay; but to recall the debt we owe him may serve to
make a wider margin to our own life at least. The vast extent of this
pioneer work of France may be seen by recalling that the battle of
Quebec gave England undisputed sway over what is now known as British
America, and what in the history of the United States was known as "the
Territory of the Northwest." This came from those by a single treaty.
One defeat cost them an empire. Nor was this all their territory.
This treaty of 1763 gave England only French acquisitions east of the
Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes, but left French America, west
of that river and south of the lakes, intact, which shows how the
common consent of nations accorded to French valor in exploration the
bulk of the North American continent. Essentially chivalrous, the
French explorer proved the knight-errant among American discoverers.
By the treaty of 1803, Napoleon ceded 1,171,931 square miles to the
United States, a tract eight times as large as France itself. France,
by rights acquired by discoveries, owned about two-thirds of the
continent of North America, and to-day owns not so much as would supply
burial room for a child! Saxon as I am, I confess I can not go to
Montreal or Quebec, no