Vlll PREFACE. 



English colonies. It was he who made that 

 scheme possible. 



In "The Old Regime in Canada," I tried to 

 show from what inherent causes this wilderness 

 empire of the Great Monarch fell at last before 

 a foe, superior indeed in numbers, but lacking all 

 the forces that belong to a system of civil and 

 military centralization. The present volume will 

 show how valiantly, and for a time how success- 

 fully, New France battled against a fate which 

 her own organic fault made inevitable. Her 

 history is a great and significant drama, enacted 

 among untamed forests, with a distant gleam of 

 courtly splendors and the regal pomp of Ver- 

 sailles. 



The authorities on which the book rests are 

 drawn chiefly from the manuscript collections of 

 the French government in the Archives Nation- 

 ales, the Bibliotheque Nationale, and, above all, 

 the vast repositories of the Archives of the 

 Marine and Colonies. Others are from Cana- 

 dian and American sources. I have, besides, 

 availed myself of the collection of French, Eng- 

 lish, and Dutch documents published by the 

 State of New York, under the excellent editor- 

 ship of Dr. O'Callaghan, and of the manuscript 

 collections made in France by the governments 

 of Canada and of Massachusetts. A considerable 

 number of books, contemporary or nearly so with 



