820 PRIEST AND PURITAN. [1644-45. 



taken place wherever Indian tribes were in close 

 relations with any respectable community of white 

 men. Thus Philip's war in New England, cruel as 

 it was, was less ferocious, judging from Canadian 

 experience, than it would have been, if a genera- 

 tion of civilized intercourse had not worn down 

 the sharpest asperities of barbarism. Yet it was to 

 French priests and colonists, mingled as they were 

 soon to be among the tribes of the vast interior, 

 that the change is chiefly to be ascribed. In this 

 softening of manners, such as it was, and in the 

 obedient Catholicity of a few hundred tamed savages 

 gathered at stationary missions in various parts of 

 Canada, we find, after a century had elapsed, all 

 the results of the heroic toil of the Jesuits. The 

 missions had failed, because the Indians had ceased 

 to exist. Of the great tribes on whom rested the 

 hopes of the early Canadian Fathers, nearly all were 

 virtually extinct. The missionaries built labori- 

 ously and well, but they were doomed to build on 

 a failing foundation. The Indians melted away, 

 not because civilization destroyed them, but be- 

 cause their own ferocity and intractable indolence 

 made it impossible that they should exist in its 

 presence. Either the plastic energies of a higher 

 race or the servile pliancy of a lower one would, 

 each in its way, have preserved them: as it was, 

 their extinction was a foregone conclusion. As for 

 the religion which the Jesuits taught them, however 

 Protestants may carp at it, it was the only form of 

 Christianity likely to take root in their crude and 

 barbarous nature. 



