to have a great influence on the future of French America. This was the
occupation by France of the mouth of the Mississippi, and the
vindication of her claim to the vast and undefined regions which La
Salle had called Louisiana. La Salle's schemes had come to nought, but
they were revived, seven years after his death, by his lieutenant, the
gallant and faithful Henri de Tonty, who urged the seizure of Louisiana
for three reasons,--first, as a base of attack upon Mexico; secondly, as
a depot for the furs and lead ore of the interior; and thirdly, as the
only means of preventing the English from becoming masters of the
West.[287]

Three years later, the Sieur de Remonville, a friend of La Salle,
proposed the formation of a company for the settlement of Louisiana, and
called for immediate action as indispensable to anticipate the
English.[288] The English were, in fact, on the point of taking
possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, and were prevented only by
the prompt intervention of the rival nation.

If they had succeeded, colonies would have grown up on the Gulf of
Mexico after the type of those already planted along the Atlantic:
voluntary immigrants would have brought to a new home their old
inheritance of English freedom; would have ruled themselves by laws of
their own making, through magistrates of their own choice; would have
depended on their own efforts, and not on government help, in the
invigorating consciousness that their destinies were in their own hands,
and that they themselves, and not others, were to gather the fruits of
their toils. Out of conditions like these would have sprung communities,
not brilliant, but healthy, orderly, well rooted in the soil, and of
hardy and vigorous growth.

But the principles of absolutism, and not those of a regulated liberty,
were to rule in Louisiana. The new French colony was to be the child of
the Crown. Cargoes of emigrants, willing or unwilling, were to be
shipped by authority to the fever-stricken banks of the
Mississippi,--cargoes made up in part of those whom fortune and their
own defects had sunk to dependence; to whom labor was strange and
odious, but who dreamed of gold mines and pearl fisheries, and wealth to
be won in the New World and spent in the Old; who wore the shackles of a
paternal despotism which they were told to regard as of divine
institution; who were at the mercy of military rulers set over them by
the King, and agreeing in nothing ex