THE FALL OF NEW FRANCE 73 
a single rood of land in the whole of North America; 
and except for a few months at the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, they have never since held any 
territory here. Moreover, the fall of the French 
power was at once admitted to be as irretrievable as 
it was sudden; and since the first fatal catastrophe it 
has never shown even so much vitality as would have 
been implied in a serious attempt to recover its lost 
prestige. The causes of this striking phenomenon are 
worthy of consideration. 
It has often been observed that of all the modern 
nations which have sought to reproduce and perpet- 
uate their social and political institutions by coloniz- 
ing the savage regions of the earth, England is the 
only one which has achieved signal and lasting suc- 
cess. For this remarkable fact various causes may be 
assigned ; but I think we shall find the principal cause 
to lie in the circumstance that in England alone, 
among the great European nations, both individual 
liberty and local self-government have always been 
preserved; whereas elsewhere—and notably in the 
France of the Old Régime, with which our compari- 
son is here chiefly concerned — these indispensable 
elements of national vitality had been, by the seven- 
teenth century, almost completely lost. To under- 
stand this point fully, we must go back far into the 
past, and inquire for a moment into the origin of 
despotic government. 
The great problem of civilization is how to secure 
sufficient uniformity of belief and action among men 
without going so far as to destroy variety of belief and 
action. A world peopled with savages and barba- 
rians like ancient North America is incapable of much 
