onists.
Now, as Le Jeune tells us, with evident contentment, he chose him, the
Jesuit, as director of his conscience. In truth, there were none but
Jesuits to confess and absolve him; for the Recollets, prevented, to
their deep chagrin, from returning to the missions they had founded,
were seen no more in Canada, and the followers of Loyola were sole
masters of the field. The manly heart of the commandant, earnest,
zealous, and direct, was seldom chary of its confidence, or apt to stand
too warily on its guard in presence of a profound art mingled with a no
less profound sincerity.

A stranger visiting the fort of Quebec would have been astonished at its
air of conventual decorum. Black Jesuits and scarfed officers mingled
at Champlain's table. There was little conversation, but, in its place,
histories and the lives of saints were read aloud, as in a monastic
refectory. Prayers, masses, and confessions followed one another with
an edifying regularity, and the bell of the adjacent chapel, built by
Champlain, rang morning, noon, and night. Godless soldiers caught the
infection, and whipped themselves in penance for their sins. Debauched
artisans outdid each other in the fury of their contrition. Quebec
was become a mission. Indians gathered thither as of old, not from the
baneful lure of brandy, for the traffic in it was no longer tolerated,
but from the less pernicious attractions of gifts, kind words, and
politic blandishments. To the vital principle of propagandism both the
commercial and the military character were subordinated; or, to speak
more justly, trade, policy, and military power leaned on the missions
as their main support, the grand instrument of their extension. The
missions were to explore the interior; the missions were to win over
the savage hordes at once to Heaven and to France. Peaceful, benign,
beneficent, were the weapons of this conquest. France aimed to subdue,
not by the sword, but by the cross; not to overwhelm and crush the
nations she invaded, but to convert, civilize, and embrace them among
her children.

And who were the instruments and the promoters of this proselytism, at
once so devout and so politic? Who can answer? Who can trace out the
crossing and mingling currents of wisdom and folly, ignorance and
knowledge, truth and falsehood, weakness and force, the noble and the
base, can analyze a systematized contradiction, and follow through its
secret wheels, springs, and levers a phenome