rsailles in respect to
political rights.

Canada, in spite of its scanty population, was better equipped for war
than was any of the English colonies. The French were largely explorers
and hunters, familiar with hardship and danger and led by men with a
love of adventure. The English, on the other hand, were chiefly traders
and farmers who disliked and dreaded the horrors of war. There was not
to be found in all the English colonies a family of the type of the
Canadian family of Le Moyne. Charles Le Moyne, of Montreal, a member of
the Canadian noblesse, had ten sons, every one of whom showed the spirit
and capacity of the adventurous soldier. They all served in the time of
Frontenac. The most famous of them, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, shines
in varied roles. He was a frontier leader who made his name a terror
in the English settlements; a sailor who seized and ravaged the English
settlements in Newfoundland, who led a French squadron to the remote and
chill waters of Hudson Bay, and captured there the English strongholds
of the fur trade; and a leader in the more peaceful task of founding,
at the mouth of the Mississippi, the colony of Louisiana. Canada had the
advantage over the English colonies in bold pioneers of this type.

Canada was never doubtful of the English peril or divided in the desire
to destroy it. Nearly always, a soldier or a naval officer ruled in the
Chateau St. Louis, at Quebec, with eyes alert to see and arms ready to
avert military danger. England sometimes sent to her colonies in America
governors who were disreputable and inefficient, needy hangers-on,
too well-known at home to make it wise there to give them office, but
thought good enough for the colonies. It would not have been easy to
find a governor less fitted to maintain the dignity and culture of high
office than Sir William Phips, Governor of Massachusetts in the time
of Frontenac. Phips, however, though a rough brawler, was reasonably
efficient, but Lord Cornbury, who became Earl of Clarendon, owed his
appointment as Governor of New Jersey and New York in 1701, only to his
necessities and to the desire of his powerful connections to provide for
him. Queen Anne was his cousin. He was a profligate, feeble in mind
but arrogant in spirit, with no burden of honesty and a great burden
of debt, and he made no change in his scandalous mode of life when he
represented his sovereign at New York. There were other governors only
slightly better.