THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 295 



few women, and few children are born. ISTot out of such beginnings 

 will a sound colony grow; not out of such materials can a normal so- 

 ciety be built up. Commerce alone can not generate a true colony. 



The traders desert the coast, and the more daring become hunters 

 and trappers like the natives. This pioneer form of colonization is 

 best seen in the coureurs de hois of old Canada — bold, adventurous 

 men who had broken away from the restraints of civilization and 

 plunged into the free life of the forest. They intermarried with 

 Indian women, and their half-breed sons formed the personnel of the 

 companies which controlled the fur trade for two centuries. Their 

 meeting places with the Indian trappers were scenes of drunkenness 

 and debauchery which threw the missionaries into despair. They 

 jealously guarded their game preserves against the approaches of 

 settlement. It was a degraded type of civilization, and, though it 

 was the base, it was never the root of Canadian society. Not out of 

 it could a true colony spring. 



The big-game hunters of old days were men of a similar type, 

 and were at least the beginners of the French colony of Louisiana. 

 The big-game hunter of to-day is an Englishman or a Frenchman 

 in whom the instincts of the savage periodically break out under a 

 polished surface. One of the best specimens of the race, Mr Selous, 

 claims that such men rank with missionaries as pioneers. The big- 

 game hunters, he contends, opened up lihodesia. The hunters of 

 gorillas in the south and of lions in the north of Africa have been 

 the precursors of settlement. But they have seldom themselves set- 

 tled in the country they roamed over, and left few descendants to 

 inherit their strength and courage. 



Often associating with the hunters and trappers and merchants, 

 and sometimes (like Joliet, the discoverer of the Mississippi) differ- 

 entiating from them, are the explorers. An adventurous race, 

 who traverse continents while the hunters scour kingdoms, the Iber- 

 villcs and La Salles, the Stanleys and the host of African and other 

 travelers are the indispensable forerunners of annexation. Baker 

 and Speke and Grant almost compelled the English occupation of 

 Egypt. European travelers of many nationalities led inevitably to 

 the wholesale partition of the Dark Continent. Missionaries some- 

 times accompany them, as Marquette did Joliet, or they sacrifice, 

 like Livingstone, their own high calling to the broader vocation of the 

 explorer; or they follow in his track, as three hundred missionaries 

 arrived in the wake of Stanley's explorations; or, themselves the 

 first explorers, they found villages, as the Jesuits did all over Can- 

 ada and in Illinois and Michigan, some of them to become centers 

 of colonization or great cities like Montreal; or they occupy and 

 administer wide territories like Paraguay; or they pioneer civilized 



